The religious context of economics is now getting some serious attention after a long period of neglect. This upsurge of interest is connected with the greater attention historians of economic thought are paying to all kinds of contexts, and their greater willingness to interact with scholars outside economics.
In 2007 when the History of Political Economy conference was held, there were many papers at the annual History of Economics Society conference at George Mason University dealing with religious questions, including Brad Bateman’s presidential address. There were sessions at a number of other major conferences on religion and economics. A participant at the George Mason conference joked that she had got into academia to get away from religion, and that next year’s conference should be on atheist economics.
Bateman and Banzhaf helpfully describe in their introduction (pp. 4-6) the background of the History of Political Economy conference and the process that led to the set of papers. Their focus was the historical relationship between religious and economic thought, and consequently excluded papers on the economics of religion and economics as religion. As they point out, submissions covered some topics they felt deserved attention but left significant gaps. Particular gaps they mention are the relationship between Northern European Protestantism and economics; economists’ involvement with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Christian Democratic parties in the Netherlands and Germany; religious influences on the German historical school; effects of Marxism on the secularization of economics; the religious journeys of Alfred Marshall and Arthur Pigou; and the influence of American Catholicism on economics (pp. 7-8). This is quite a list, but by no means exhaustive. An obvious omission is the theological background and content of Adam Smith’s work. There is a fair bit of attention (provoked by Facarello and Waterman’s work) to the possible Jansenist theological influences on early economics, but almost no consideration of alternative channels through the continental natural law philosophers, and eighteenth-century British scientific natural theology, or indeed native Scottish Calvinism. Some discussion of the more recent history might have been interesting. There could for instance have been historical papers on the rise of a separatist Christian and Islamic Economics since the early 1970s, or the recent rise of the economics of religion.
The remainder of the introduction consists of summaries of the papers, and discussions of issues which arise in the papers. The issue examined is the tension between Christianity and utilitarianism (pp. 8-10). In Britain the situation is perhaps a little more complicated than Bateman and Banzhaf indicate. The existence of an older tradition of theological utilitarianism culminating in William Paley’s work suggests that the tension has more to with Jeremy Bentham and James Mill’s hostility to religion than any necessary opposition between Christianity and utilitarianism. As Waterman notes in his essay, J. S. Mill was happy to equate Jesus’ golden rule “Do unto others as you have them do to you” with utilitarianism. In Catholic Europe, as Bateman and Banzhaf point out, the association of the utilitarians with forces opposed to the ancient regime and the traditional natural law casuistry of the Church made Christian consideration of the philosophy difficult. In Britain and even more so in Europe, economics and utilitarianism, although quite separable conceptually, were lumped together and associated with atheism.
The second of the issues discussed in the introduction is secularization (pp. 10-13). Bateman and Banzhaf see the separation of economics from theology as part of the larger and longer story of secularization in the West, relying largely on Jose Casanova’s account of secularization in his 1994 book Public Religions in the Modern World. Casanova’s account emphasizes differentiation, so the rise of a specialized, professional economics in the mid–nineteenth-century England and early twentieth-century America fits nicely. Some of the developments in economics identified in the essays seem not to fit the story Casanova is telling for Western society as a whole. I would have liked to have seen more specific discussion of economics in comparison with the other sciences, drawing on the rich literatures in the history of science, and science and religion (works such as John Hedley Brooke’s Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991) and Peter Harrison’s The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (2007)). Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age was published just after the HOPE conference but would perhaps have offered a richer and broader map to locate what has gone on in economics over the last two hundred and fifty years.
I didn’t see how the discussion of experimental economics and behavioral economics (pp. 14-17) fits into the introduction. Is the idea here that these provide an opening for religious perspectives to come back into economics?
My major concern about the introduction is that it fails to place the volume in the context of previous work on historical relations between religion and economics. Jacob Viner, widely acknowledged as the greatest historian of economic thought, who spent most of the second half of his scholarly life investigating these relations, is not even mentioned (for instance the Religious Thought and Economic Society essays published posthumously in HOPE 1978). An excellent volume asking very similar questions (Brennan and Waterman’s Economics and Religion 1994) is similarly ignored. Others have struggled with these questions, although they have not been fashionable in the last few decades, and the reader would have benefited from a discussion of how the present project fits in with previous work.
Turning to the essays, the most valuable in my view are those of Facarello and Steiner on religion and political economy in nineteenth-century France; Almodovar and Teixeira on Catholic economic thought; Waterman’s survey of developments in Britain (which along with his previous work on British economics is the point of departure for most of the essays in the second part of the volume); Harro Maas on William Whewell and Jones’ disagreements with Richard Whately and others; Stewart Davenport on early American economic thought (reproducing a chapter of his superb 2008 book Friends of Unrighteous Mammon), and Ross Emmett’s fascinating and previously unknown description of Frank Knight’s religious activity in his Iowa years. Space does not permit detailed comments on each of the essays.
Many of the essays focus on a single figure, telling their religious story—their faith, sometimes loss of faith—and asking how this influenced their economics. This method has advantages, but I was left wondering at the end of the some of the essays about the significance for the development of economics as a discipline. This was especially so for essays on the minor figures. Disadvantages of this approach are that the non-random selection of economists makes it hard to draw general conclusions, and that the important parts of the context may never be considered if only economists are studied.
While a good and meticulously researched story is told in most of the essays they are not as strong in dealing with theological issues. An example is Harro Maas’ essay—he nicely contrasts Whewell and Richard Jones’ inductive method with Whately’s deductive method, drawing on relevant correspondence, but then the connection of this methodological difference to their theological commitments is left hanging. Maas suggests that Waterman’s account of Christian Political Economy needs to be modified to take account of Whewell. But there is plenty of evidence that Whewell shared the natural theological framework of the other political economists, and the difference was about how knowledge of the grand machine of nature is best attained. Theodicy seems to me to be as important to Whewell and Jones’s concerns about political economy, based on unpublished sermons in the Whewell papers. A deeper engagement with theology is needed to make further progress on these questions. Examples could be multiplied from the other essays.
The sense one gets from the essays is that religion is an important but random influence on the development of economics. In their conclusion Bateman and Banzhaf emphasize that the “disentanglement of economics from religious belief was neither quick nor linear,” and “may nor be complete or permanent,” yet “religion has a complex an important role to play in narrating the history of economic thought” (p. 339).
If religion is an important but random influence then a history of economics that ignores religion would get things right on average, with a large standard deviation. The challenge then for future work is to set out the causal linkages between religious thought and economic thought. Doing this will probably require the involvement of theologians and historians of theology who have a deeper understanding of the religious side of the linkages.
Overall, while I am glad that Bateman and Banzhaf undertook the project, and enjoyed reading most of the essays, I found the volume slightly disappointing. At the end they acknowledge “the history we have begun to tell in this volume must be much more fully developed” (p. 339). We look forward to their future contributions to this important area, especially Brad Bateman’s work on religion and American economics.
