The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science

6. Further Implications of the Neglect of Economic Thinking

chapter 6 Further Implications of the Neglect of Economic Thinking 1 The Zoological Approach to Human Problems Naturalism plans to deal with the problems of human action in the way zoology deals with all other living beings. Behaviorism wants to obliterate what distinguishes human action from the behavior of animals . In these schemes there is no room left for the specific human quality, man’s distinctive feature, viz., the conscious striving after ends chosen. They ignore the human mind. The concept of finality is foreign to them. Zoologically seen, man is an animal. But there prevails a fundamental difference between the conditions of all other animals and those of man. Every living being is naturally the implacable enemy of every other living being, especially of all other members of his own species. For the means of subsistence are scarce. They do not permit all specimens to survive and to consummate their existence up to the point at which their inborn vitality is fully spent. This irreconcilable conflict of essential interests prevails first of all among the members of the same species because they depend for their survival on the same foodstuffs. Nature is literally “red in tooth and claw.”1 Man too is an animal. But he differs from all other animals as, by dint of his reason, he has discovered the great cosmic law of the higher productivity of cooperation under the principle of the division of labor. Man is, as Aristotle formulated it, the ␨␻ ˆ ˛ ␱␯ ␶␱␭␫␶␫␬␱´␯ [“political animal ”], the social animal, but he is “social” not on account of his animal nature, but on account of his specifically human quality. Specimens of 1. Tennyson, In Memoriam, LVI, iv. the approach of the “social sciences”  95 his own zoological species are, for the human individual, not deadly enemiesopposedtohiminpitilessbiologicalcompetition ,butcooperators orpotentialcooperatorsinjointeffortstoimprovetheexternalcondition of his own welfare. An unbridgeable gulf separates man from all those beings that lack the ability to grasp the meaning of social cooperation. 2 The Approach of the “Social Sciences” It is customary to hypostatize social cooperation by employing the term “society.” Some mysterious superhuman agency, it is said, created society and peremptorily requires man to sacrifice the concerns of his petty egoism for the benefit of society. The scientific treatment of the problems involved starts with the radical rejection of this mythological approach. What the individual forgoes in order to cooperate with other individuals is not his personal interests opposed to that of the phantom society. He forsakes an immediate boon in order to reap at a later date a greater boon. His sacrifice is provisional . He chooses between his interests in the short run and his interests in the long run, those which the classical economists used to call his “rightly understood” interests. The utilitarian philosophy does not look upon the rules of morality as upon arbitrary laws imposed upon man by a tyrannical Deity with which man has to comply without asking any further questions. To behave in compliance with the rules that are required for the preservation of social cooperation is for man the only means to attain safely all those ends that he wants to attain. The attempts to reject this rationalistic interpretation of morality from the point of view of Christian teachings are futile. According to the fundamental doctrine of Christian theology and philosophy, God has created the human mind in endowing man with his faculty of thinking . As both revelation and human reason are manifestations of the Lord’s might, there cannot be ultimately any disagreement between them. God does not contradict himself. It is the object of philosophy and theology to demonstrate the concord between revelation and reason. Such was the problem the solution of which patristic and scholastic philosophy tried to achieve.2 Most of these thinkers doubted 2. L. Rougier, La scolastique et le Thomisme (Paris, 1925), pp. 36 ff., 84 ff., 102 ff. whether the human mind, unaided by revelation, would have been able to become aware of what the dogmas, especially those of the Incarnation and of the Trinity, taught. But they did not express serious doubts concerning the faculty of human reason in all other regards. The popular attacks upon the social philosophy of the Enlightenment and the utilitarian doctrine as taught by the classical economists did not originate from Christian theology, but from theistic, atheistic, and antitheistic reasoning. They take for granted the existence of some collectives...