Polanyi in the Vatican: Pope Francis and the critique of market liberalism

Since he was elected to the head of the Catholic Church in February 2013, Pope Francis has often been praised (or criticized) for his progressive views on social issues. However, less attention has been paid to a recurrent feature of his papacy: the critique of market liberalism. In 2013, The Atlantic published a piece arguing that the intellectual influence behind the Pope’s economic views was to be found in the work of Karl Polanyi. Along the same line, Gregory Baum – a preeminent theologian and historian of Christian social thought – explored the Wahlverwandtschaft (i.e., the elective affinity) between Pope Francis and Polanyi. In this article, I draw upon Baum’s analysis to further explore the similarities between Polanyi and the Pope’s criticisms of market liberalism and liberal ontology.

Polanyi and Christianity

To trace the influence of Polanyi on Pope Francis’ social thought we need to briefly look at how Polanyi’s writings were at first influenced by Christian philosophy. As his biographer Gareth Dale narrates, Polanyi grew interested in the Christian Socialist movement during his London years. His friend the historian Richard Tawney, was one of the leading figures of Christian socialism. Polanyi notably embraced Christian philosophy as a bulwark against totalitarian politics that was taking hold of Europe in the 1930s. He developed this vision in 'The Essence of Fascism' a text published in a 1935 volume entitled Christianity and the Social Revolution. In 1937, Polanyi gave a lecture entitled ‘The Christian criticism of our social order’ during one of the Christian Left movement’s training weekends, a text in which he highlighted the contradictions between Christianity and capitalism. Although Polanyi’s was never a staunch believer, let alone a practising Christian, his work became clearly impregnated of Christian philosophy. As Gareth Dale puts it: 

‘Like Tolstoy, he neither became an observant Christian, nor believed in the divinity or the resurrection of Jesus but did perceive religion to be an indispensable social construction. Defined broadly as a total conception of the universe and man’s place within it such as to warrant the belief that life itself has meaning, religion furnishes a framework essential to the individual’s sense of moral purpose.’

The limits of the market

A first evidence of the Wahlverwandtschaft between Jorge Bergoglio and Polanyi is their rejection of the ‘market society’, a concept developed by Polanyi to describe a society in which virtually all aspects of human life are subjected to the law of the market. Echoing this narrative, the Pope writes in Fratelli Tutti about a society ‘governed primarily by the criteria of market freedom and efficiency’. ‘The aim’, he said in another text, ‘is to save man in the sense that he may return to the centre: to the centre of society, to the centre of thought, the centre of reflection’. This idea of putting back man at the centre of the economy is reminiscent of Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness which, in Fred Block’s words, ‘expresses the idea that the economy is not autonomous, as it must be in economic theory, but subordinated to politics, religion, and social relations.’ 

Another common line of critique concerns the amoral ethics of the market. The lack of information that the price mechanism provides about the social and moral implications of individual action is, in their opinion, a fatal weakness of the market system. As the Pope declared to a panel of anti-money laundering experts: ‘Sometimes, in the effort to amass wealth there is little concern for where it comes from, the more or less legitimate activities that may have produced it, and the mechanisms of exploitation that may be behind it. Thus, situations can occur where, in touching money, we get blood on our hands, the blood of our brothers and sisters.’ This critique of the market on moral grounds is also a crucial feature of Polanyi’s work. In The Great Transformation, he blames classical political economists like Adam Smith for failing to understand - or acknowledge - the moral implications of the economic system they were designing. The extensive use of the market as an intermediation system in human relations, he observed, precludes moral behaviour by blurring the line of individual responsibility and masking the consequences of individual actions. Thus, both the Pope and Polanyi stress that although the market certainly grants a great amount of freedom and prosperity to some of its participants it often does so at the cost of others’ sufferings.  

Lastly, the Pope also makes implicit reference to the notion of commodification, one of Polanyi’s key conceptual innovation. In his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, the Pope talks about human beings who are ‘considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded’. This underlying Polanyian influence is even more noticeable in one of the Pope’s speeches in which he denounces not only the commodification of labour but also of food and housing. This commodification of human life, Polanyi understood, is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian principle of the primacy of human life. Thus, in a series of lectures entitled Conflicting Philosophies in Modern Society, he asked: ‘could our civilization accept the principle of human sacrifice as an integral part of its methods of producing material goods?’ The answer was ‘Not if it wished to continue as a Christian society.’ 

In search of a new ontology

The affinity between the Pope and Polanyi runs deeper than their common rejection of market liberalism. Their critique is indeed supported by a questioning of the liberal ontology that underpins the market system. The idea that individuals are motivated primarily – if not solely – by economic motives is, to them, a deeply flawed and dangerous assumption. In the Joy of Gospel, the Pope explicitly criticizes a system in which ‘man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption’.  Similar questions about the nature of human motives are at the heart of Polanyi’s work, most notably in Our Obsolete Market Mentality and The Essence of Fascism. In Polanyi’s view, modern economists’ depiction of man as a Homo Economicus is a typical example of what he calls ‘the economist fallacy’, that is a tendency in economic thought to analyse human behaviour only through the lens of material rational. The direct consequence of this ‘economist fallacy’ is the emergence of an economic sphere that is separated from other aspects of human life (religious, political, social, etc.). Overcoming this dichotomy, he predicted, ‘may require no less than a reform of our consciousness’.  

The alternative economic system envisioned by Polanyi and the Pope needs thus to be built on completely new assumptions about human nature. These new foundations are mainly to be found in personalist philosophy. Given its complexity, it would be impossible to give an exhaustive account of what personalism is in just a few lines. I will however try to outline some of its main features and explain how it relates to Pope Francis and Polanyi’s economic thought. Personalist philosophy, as promoted by the likes of Emmanuel Mounier and John Macmurray, rejected the sterile individualism of capitalism and the totalizing ontology of Marxism. In this regard, personalism can be thought of as a middle-way or an alternative to both Marxism and Liberalism, in its conception of human nature. It reaffirms the primacy of individual life but also recognizes that true individual fulfilment, that is personality, can only be realized within the realm of society. According to Polanyi, only such a conception of human life creates the conditions for a reconciliation between freedom and equality. 

Conclusion

I have tried to provide a brief overview of the similarities between Polanyi and Pope Francis’s conception of the economy and society as a whole. There are, of course, other major sources of influence in the Pope’s social thought, one of them being liberation theory. Also, the Wahlverwandtschaft between the two if far from a perfect symbiosis. As Gregory Baum rightly notes, their critique is informed by different historical and geographical backgrounds. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi is mainly taking aim at 19th and early 20th-century industrial capitalism whereas the Pope’s critique is more directed at contemporary financial capitalism. Nonetheless, this article highlights the modern-day relevance of Polanyi’s work and the influence he had – directly or indirectly – on critics of market capitalism like Pope Francis. Throughout his whole life, Polanyi has grappled with the question of freedom in a complex society (the title of The Great Transformation's last chapter). More than fifty years have passed since the death of Polanyi, almost a century since the publication of The Essence of Fascism, and yet, Pope Francis demonstrates, the same issue is at stake: the search for a balance between individual freedom and a sense of collective purpose.