Religion and the Rise of Capitalism - Hardcover

Friedman, Benjamin M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059331798X ISBN 13: 9780593317983

Verlag: Knopf, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

From one of the nation's preeminent experts on economic policy, a major reassessment of the foundations of modern economic thinking that explores the profound influence of an until-now unrecognized force—religion.

"Friedman has given us an original and brilliant new perspective on the terrifying divisions of our own times. No book could be more important.” —George A. Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics
 
Critics of contemporary economics complain that belief in free markets—among economists as well as many ordinary citizens—is a form of religion. And, it turns out, that in a deeper, more historically grounded sense there is something to that idea.
 
Contrary to the conventional historical view of economics as an entirely secular product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin M. Friedman demonstrates that religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset. Friedman makes clear how the foundational transition in thinking about what we now call economics, beginning in the eighteenth century, was decisively shaped by the hotly contended lines of religious thought within the English-speaking Protestant world. Beliefs about God-given human character, about the after-life, and about the purpose of our existence, were all under scrutiny in the world in which Adam Smith and his contemporaries lived.
 
Friedman explores how those debates go far in explaining the puzzling behavior of so many of our fellow citizens whose views about economic policies—and whose voting behavior—seems sharply at odds with what would be to their own economic benefit. Illuminating the origins of the relationship between religious thinking and economic thinking, together with its ongoing consequences, Friedman provides invaluable insights into our current economic policy debates and demonstrates ways to shape more functional policies for all citizens.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

BENJAMIN M. FRIEDMAN is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy, and formerly chairman of the Department of Economics, at Harvard University, where he has now taught for nearly half a century. Mr. Friedman's two previous general interest books are Day of Reckoning: The Consequences of American Economic Policy Under Reagan and After, and The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. He has also written extensively on issues of economic policy, for both economists and economic policymakers, and he is a frequent contributor to national publications, especially The New York Review of Books. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Introduction 

Where do our ideas about how the economy works, and our views on economic policy, come from? Most people in the Western world, and especially in America, simply take for granted that we organize one of the most essential aspects of human activity—the economic sphere—primarily around private initiative channeled through markets. But where did that presumption come from? And why do so many people, again especially Americans, often see any challenge to our market-centered conduct of economic affairs as a fundamental threat to our way of life?

The economist John Maynard Keynes famously suggested that the thinking of even the most practically minded people, who believe they are exempt from any influence from the world of ideas, is nonetheless the product of what economists and other academic thinkers said some time before. This may be true, but if so it merely raises a further question: where did the economists’ ideas come from? The European historian Fritz Stern once reflected that why historians think as they do may be just as important as what they think. Why economists think as they do matters as well.

The central argument of this book is that our ideas about economics and economic policy have long-standing roots in religious thinking. Most of us are unaware of how religious ideas shape our economic thinking, and when such links are occasionally suggested they are mostly misunderstood. But religion—not just the daily or annual cycle of ritual observances, but the inner belief structure that forms an essential part of people’s view of the world in which they live—has shaped human thinking since before there were written words to record it. In this book I argue that the influence of religious beliefs on modern Western economics has been profound, and that it remains important today. Critics of today’s economics sometimes complain that belief in free markets, among economists and many ordinary citizens too, is itself a form of religion. It turns out that there is something to the idea: not in the way the critics mean, but in a deeper, more historically grounded sense.

But the point is more than just a matter of the history of ideas. The influence of religious thinking also bears on how Americans today, along with citizens of other Western countries, think about many of the most highly contested economic policy issues of our time. This connection between people’s economic views and religious beliefs— often including religious beliefs that they do not personally hold— stems from before the creation of the American republic, and it runs to the core of how economics came to be the line of thinking we know today. It also helps explain what we often view as the puzzling behavior of many of our fellow citizens whose attitudes toward questions of economic policy seem sharply at odds with what would be to their own economic benefit.

The foundational transition in thinking about what we now call economics—the transition that we rightly associate with Adam Smith and his contemporaries in the eighteenth century—was importantly shaped by what were then new and vigorously contended lines of religious thought within the English-speaking Protestant world. The resulting influence of religious thinking on modern economic thinking, right from its origins, established resonances that then persisted, albeit in evolving form as the economic context changed, the questions economists asked shifted, and the analytical tools at their disposal expanded, right through the twentieth century. Although for the most part we are not consciously aware of them—this is why their consequences seem puzzling whenever we stumble across them—especially in America these lasting resonances with religious thinking continue to shape our current-day discussion of economic issues and our public debate over questions of economic policy.

I am well aware that the idea of a central influence of religion on Adam Smith’s thinking, or on that of many of his contemporaries, will initially strike many knowledgeable readers as implausible on its face. Smith’s great friend David Hume, who also played a key role in the creation of modern economics, was an avowed skeptic and an outspoken opponent of organized religion; Hume notoriously referred to Church of England bishops as “Retainers to Superstition.” Smith, as far as we can tell, was at best a deist of the kind Americans identify with Thomas Jefferson. There is little evidence of Smith’s active religious participation, much less religious enthusiasm. My argument is most certainly not that these were religiously dedicated men who self-consciously brought their theological commitments to bear on their economic thinking.

Rather, the creators of modern economics lived at a time when religion was both more pervasive and more central than anything we know in today’s Western world. And, crucially, intellectual life was more integrated then. Not only were the sciences and humanities (to use today’s vocabulary) normally discussed in the same circles, and mostly by the same individuals, but theology too was part of the ongoing discussion. Part of what Smith taught, as a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, was natural theology. He and his colleagues and friends were continually exposed to what were then fresh debates about new lines of theological thinking. I argue that what they heard and read and discussed influenced the economics they produced, just as the ideas of today’s economists are visibly shaped by what we learn from physics, or biology, or demography.

This idea importantly changes our view of the historical process by which the Western world arrived at today’s economics. The conventional account is that the line of thinking we know today as economics was a product of the Enlightenment: more specifically, that the Smithian revolution and the subsequent development of economics as an intellectual discipline were part of the process of secular modernization in the sense of a historic turn from thinking in terms of a God-centered universe toward what we now broadly call humanism. Nicholas Phillipson, in his prize-winning biography of Adam Smith, referred to one statement of Smith’s as a reminder that not just The Wealth of Nations but Smith’s entire project for a modern science of man was “built on the foundations of the Enlightenment’s quintessential assault on religion.” Phillipson was merely stating the commonly accepted view. As a matter of what Smith and his contemporaries consciously intended, it is accurate enough. But explanations of important developments that rely simply on the conscious intentions of the actors involved are necessarily limited. As the American historian Gordon Wood put it, people are often not so much the manipulators but the victims of their ideas. Even cultural influences that seem obvious from the perspective of decades or, better yet, centuries later were often invisible to those whose ideas they crucially shaped.

Realizing that the Smithian revolution partly grew out of new ideas in theology, and that the religious debates of that day shaped it—not because that is what Smith and the other creators of modern economics intended, but because the theological debates of their time fundamentally altered how they thought about human nature and the underpinnings of everyday human interaction—puts a different gloss on the matter. So does understanding the ways in which the evolution of economic thinking during the two-plus centuries since has continued to reflect this initial religious influence. So too does recognizing the consequences of this deep intellectual connection for our current-day policy debate.
Taking account of this...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059331798X
• ISBN 13: 9780593317983
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 560
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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