“Where society is so organized as to reduce arbitrarily or even suppress the sphere in which freedom is legitimately exercised, the result is that the life of society becomes progressively disorganized and goes into decline.” So writes John Paul II in Centesimus Annus (1991) on socialism and social democracy. The Pope might have used the phrase of Mises’s: Planned Chaos.
The idea that imposed order leads to disorder, and freedom leads to genuine order, is not new; it is a claim that is at the very heart of the classical liberal tradition. What was new in 1991 was to see this insight recaste and reargued from the point of view of Catholic anthropology. The Pope understood that the totalist claims of socialist states were lies that were impoverishing people and souls, and he embraced the core institutions of the business economy—rooted in freedom, respectful of rights, directed toward truth—as the only viable and moral replacement.
This was the argument for a free society made in the years following the collapse of central planing in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and, really, most of the entire world. He pushed the argument further to denounce the social-assistance state of developed ‘capitalist’ economies for wasting resources, multiplying bureaucracies, and depriving society of human energies. This was a restatement and embrace of liberalism, a recapturing too of the tradition of thought that gave birth to economic science in the first place (a point fully demonstrated in Rothbard’s History of Economics Thought, which is out of print, but also Chafuen’s Faith and Liberty, and this summary piece by Jésus Huerto De Soto).
Many have speculated about the relationship of the personalism of John Paul II (see his overlooked treatise The Acting Person, written during the 2nd Vatican Council) and the Austrian School (Human Action). Centesimus Annus seemed to give every reason to believe there is a basis for that comparison. I wrote more on this encyclical here. More on the economics of JPII: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Also, this piece by Duncan Reekie, on Mises’s and Knight’s view of caritas in relationship to the Christian tradition, is very interesting. In any case, freedom has a lost a great modern champion with the death of John Paul II. May his legacy continue to inspire people to throw off the chains of tyranny.
