With the digital publication of my book, The Covenantal Structure of Christian Economics, I have reached what could be called the penultimate stage of my calling. It took 55 years.
The ultimate stage will be a multi-volume work on Christian economics. It will cover the actual economic operations that I describe in my recent book. I now have the structure; now I have to fill in the details. It took me 54 years to come up with the structure. I was still working on this in the summer of 2014. I still had not come up with all of the categories.
I expect to begin working on the larger project in 2016, when I finish my courses for the Ron Paul Curriculum. I think it will take at least three years.
SALVATION BY MATHEMATICS
My approach has never been attempted before. It is completely different from all previous discussions of economics. I would date the creation of economics as a separate discipline in the late 17th century. This is the argument found in William Letwin's book, The Origins of Scientific Economics, which was published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press in 1963.
Letwin offered an important argument. He said that scientific economics began in England after the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660. The major figures of this movement were associated with large, government-licensed companies involved in international trade. They promoted mercantilism: guided trade favoring exports over imports of goods other than gold. They did so by means of mathematics, logic, and historical data. They were persuaded, in the aftermath of the Civil War between the Puritans and the king's forces, that an appeal to morality or religion cannot solve intellectual problems. They were also reacting against the Thirty Years' War, which devastated Germany from 1618 until 1648. Then, in the next year, 1649, the Puritan Parliament beheaded Charles I.
The early economists were persuaded that science would be able to convince rational people of the logic of economics. That view still exists, but it does not exist with the same degree of commitment as it did in the late 17th century. Mathematics is used more today than it was then, but mathematics has not brought anything remotely resembling agreement to the economics profession. The old line remains true: "Where there are five economists, there will be six opinions." The invocation of mathematics has not brought anything like unanimity to the field, including unanimity regarding the legitimacy of the invocation of mathematics. Most Austrian School economists regard the appeal as not just unrealistic, but misleading.
A RECONSTRUCTION
What I propose, epistemologically speaking, is a restoration of the pre-Restoration era. I am a neo-Puritan. Yet I do not believe in the economic policies that the Puritans in New England attempted to legislate. That was a form of medievalism. I have written a little book on this: Puritan Economic Experiments (1973). I did the research in the late 1960's for my Ph.D. dissertation. The Puritan economic categories were not Puritan. They were Aristotelian. They were wrong.
I think the Puritans had their hearts in the right place, but not their heads. Epistemologically, they were scholastics: a mixture of Aristotelian philosophy and a moral structure officially tied to the Bible, but rarely exegetically tied to the Bible.
I recognized in the spring of 1960 that what was promoted in Christian Economics, a fortnightly tabloid funded by Calvinist J. Howard Pew, was not self-consciously Christian. By 1963, I figured out that there is a fundamental problem with the mixture of Aristotle and the Bible. Of course, modern economics is not tied to Aristotelian philosophy. It is tied to Kantian philosophy. It took me until 1964 to figure this out. What is wrong with Kant? This: a dualism between the realm of science and the realm of personality/freedom, or as we have come to know the terminology, the dualism between the phenomenal realm and the noumenal realm. This dualism undercuts all modern economic epistemology. Sometimes this is self-conscious; sometimes it isn't.
When I began to wonder about the relationship between the Bible and economics, I did not know what I was getting myself into. The old saying is correct: "Things are easier to get into than out of."
The turning point came in 1973. In that year, the Craig Press published a collection of my essays, many of which had been published in The Freeman. Its title was this: An Introduction to Christian Economics. It is here: http://bit.ly/gnintro.
The book was a well-meaning attempt, but it barely touched the fundamental epistemological issues. While the book was at the publishers, my wife gave me a suggestion: write a verse-by-verse commentary on the Bible, but focus on economics. I began that project in April 1973, and the first manifestation of it appeared in the Chalcedon Report (May 1973). It took me until January 2012 to finish that project. It is published in 31 volumes. Nothing like this had ever been attempted before. It is here:
THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
My latest book is an attempt to bring together my conclusions regarding the structure of economics, though not the applications. There is a difference. The structure provides a coherent framework for discussion. Without this, the discussion will be pulled in the direction of whatever epistemological principles are dominant in the mind of the person who is discussing them. If these are schizophrenic, the discussion will be schizophrenic.
The conclusions I reach about economics are not significantly different from those reached by Austrian School economists with respect to the market -- what Ludwig von Mises called "catallactics." He did not write much on the rest of the economy: state, family, church, non-profit foundations. But the structure of economics that I present is very different, and so is the epistemology.
The structure of economics has been developed since the late 17th century. As his doctoral dissertation written under Mises, Israel Kirzner went through the history of these approaches to economics. He summarized these approaches. He titled the book, The Economic Point of View (1960). It is available here.
Because I am breaking with the traditional approach to studying economics, I will find it very difficult to gain disciples. Economists are not used to thinking in terms of these categories. These categories are fundamental to all economic thought, but economists are not aware of this, and they are surely unfamiliar with any literature in the past that has been tied to these categories. Yet without them, we cannot hope to understand how the economy really works.
By the time Adam Smith sat down to write his needlessly gigantic Wealth of Nations (1776), the crucial presupposition he operated with had already been promoted widely by the Scottish Enlightenment, which in turn had been pioneered by Bernard Mandeville: the economy as the product of human action, but not human design. Smith did not have to preach on this topic. He did not explicitly direct his studies to this topic. He simply assumed it, and began writing. Yet it was a monumental transformation of human thought. It did not exist prior to Mandeville's Fable of the Bees (1714). This was Mandeville's main breakthrough. It restructured the English-speaking half of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was a battle between two rival views: the bottom-up view of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the top-down view of the French Enlightenment. That dualism went back to the division between Calvin and Loyola. In other words, it went back to the College of Montague at the University of Paris, beginning in the 1520's. This is not how the history of social thought is presented. Both of them were students at that school within half a decade of each other.
I think you will understand why I decided to write my poem responding to Mandeville. That was where the debate began. That was where the world of economic theory moved away from both the idea of providence and the justifications of mercantilism: strengthening the state. It moved toward the autonomous individual. That was not medieval. That was not mercantilistic. That was new.
I am showing up late in the game. I am saying that while this concept has a legitimate role to play, it does not have an exclusive rule to play. I am saying that apart from the concept of providence, it is not possible to defend Mandeville's position. This makes my approach very different.
I did not know in 1960 that my life's calling would be an attempt to refute Mandeville's poem. I'd never heard of Mandeville's poem. I wrote my poem primarily for students of the Ron Paul Curriculum. It was not for the students in my economics course; it was for the students in my English 3 course, which covers literature from 1493 until the present. I had them read Mandeville's poem; therefore, I wrote my poem is a way of showing how poetry can be used to promote foundational ideas. Mandeville did it; I did it.
CONCLUSIONS
This project has taken over five decades. I think when it is all over, it will have taken six decades. That does not count the YouTube videos necessary to present the case, because anyone who tries to present a case in three or four volumes, let alone 31 volumes of exegesis, is not going to gain a following. But if the background work were not available, people would be far less likely to accept the possibility that such a restructuring of economic thought is mandatory.
Early on, I recognized two facts. First, preachers are not interested in economics. Second, economists are not interested in theology. This leaves a very narrow market. Fortunately, because of the Internet, and because of YouTube, and because of search engines, there is at least an outside possibility that I will gain disciples who are intellectually capable of extending my insights.
I don't think this is likely until there is a worldwide economic crisis that can be traced back to central banking. I'm confident that this is coming. In the aftermath of the reaction against central banking, I expect that my reconstruction of economics will find a larger following. I will have to do some Sunday school lessons to explain this.
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