ABSTRACT
Wh e t h e r power be economic, governmental, or informal or moral, how is it to be exercised? How far is society to be competitive, authoritarian, or based on consultation and co-operation? It is important not to be misled by turns of language. The literature of Christian Democracy abounds in statements to the effect that ‘the proper ordering of economic affairs cannot be left to free competition alone’ (Quadragesimo Anno), and that ‘the primacy of man over economics and finance must be re-established’ (P.S.C., Belgium). This disclaimer of competition, particularly in economics, has been typical for two generations of socially progressive movements all over the world, Christian and nonChristian alike. It represents their reaction from the exaggerated emphasis of the nineteenth century on business and the free market. From nine teenth-century laisser-faire arose in due course vast concentrations of private economic power, of which Quadragesimo Anno writes in a passage which Marx or Lenin would not have disdained:
In the first place, then, it is patent that in our days not only is wealth accumu lated, but immense power and despotic domination is concentrated in the hands of a few, and that those few are frequently not the owners, but only the trustees and directors of invested funds, who administer them at their good pleasure. This power becomes particularly irresistible when exercised by those who, because they hold and control money, are able to govern credit and determine its allotment, for that reason supplying, so to speak, the life blood to the entire economic body, and grasping, as it were, in their hands the very soul of production, so that no one dare breathe against their will. This accumulation of power, the characteristic note of the modem economic order, is a natural result of limitless free competition, which permits the survival of those only who are strongest, which often means those who fight most relent lessly, who pay least heed to the dictates of conscience. This concentration of power has led to a threefold struggle for domination. First, there is the struggle for dictatorship in the economic sphere itself; then the fierce battle to acquire control of the State, so that its resources and authority may be abused in the economic struggles; finally the clash between States themselves. This latter arises from two causes; because the nations apply their power and political influence, regardless of circumstances, to promote the economic advantage of their citizens; and because, vice versa, economic forces and economic
domination are used to decide political controversies between peoples. (CTS ed., pp. 46-7.)
But this w'as written in 1931, in the depths of the greatest depression of modern times, and at a moment when the two generations of agitation which led up to the Welfare State and the Keynesian revolution were about to reach their peak. Today the case for far-reaching control-particularly State control-of the economy is everywhere accepted, and not least among Christian Democrats. And with this change has come a double shift in the climate of opinion. On the one hand, it has become obvious that the reaction from competition to control and from economics to politics is in danger of leading from one extreme to another; as indeed over a large part of the world it has already done. Quadragesimo Anno's con demnation of nineteenth-century conditions and their consequences still stands, so far as those problems remain relevant. But the ‘immense power and despotic domination’ which people have in mind today is more likely to be Orwell’s version of 1984 than its milder ancestor of the eighteeneighties. Even twenty or thirty years ago, though Christian Democrats agreed with Socialists in their criticism of uncontrolled economic power, they did not at all share their enthusiasm for political power and planning. With the record of Fascism and Communism before them, they are even less inclined to do so now. In recent years Liberalism has regained much of the vitality and reputability which it seemed to be losing in the ’thirties. Christian Democrats are not neo-liberals, and would indeed indignantly repudiate any such suggestion. But neo-liberal leaders such as Wilhelm Ropke are quoted with respect in their publications,1 and when in 1949-50 the C.D.U. found its investment and employment policy under attack it called in Ropke in person to defend it.12 Such characteristically liberal ideas as that most business should be private and competitive, that politics should be competitive, and that it is even more important to limit and control State power than economic power, are very firmly rooted among Christian Democrats today, even in the workers’ movements. Socialist theses have been accepted only so far as is necessary to correct the exaggerations of liberalism, not on the ground that the liberal theses should be rejected outright.
