Economy and Society: Selected Writings by Polanyi Karl; Thomasberger Claus; Cangiani Michele

Author:Polanyi, Karl; Thomasberger, Claus; Cangiani, Michele
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2018-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Note

* The Auxiliary Movement, Notes from Christian Left Training Week-ends, cyclostyled sheet, 1937, KPA 21–2.

11

Christianity and Economic Life*

Community and society

Christianity is concerned with the relationship of man to God as revealed to us in Jesus. Economic life, roughly, covers that sphere of social existence, in which man's needs are satisfied with the help of material goods. What is the relevance of Christianity to this or, for that matter, to any other sphere of man's social existence?

The answer which we can deduce from the Gospels is peculiar to Christianity. It is also the key to the predominance of ethics in its social philosophy.

The Christian axiom about the essence of society is of the utmost boldness and paradox. It can be put in the simple phrase that society is a personal relationship of individuals. Now, to regard society thus means to disregard altogether the share of institutional life and of other impersonal forces in social existence. In a sense it is the complete denial of the objective existence of society. A tension is created between the phenomenal and the essential aspect of man's social existence – a metaphysical hiatus which in Christianity is bridged by a definite ethical urge. It is our task to make society conform to its essence. Christian social philosophy becomes the elaboration of an ethical axiom.

This position is the outcome of the Jewish inheritance of Christianity. Jewish society was a theocracy. Down to the most minute detail of its structure and functioning it was supposed to conform to the revealed will of God. Jesus accepted this reference of the will of God to society as self-evident. But his vision of society was different from the Jewish. For him society consisted essentially of individual human beings and the will of God was concerned with the relation of these individuals to one another.

The teachings of Jesus as well as the doctrines of the Church are, in this respect, merely reassertions and clarifications of a basic relationship between human individuals. The doctrine of love, of brotherhood, of the fatherhood of God, are parts of a definition of this kind of relationship between human beings which belongs to the essence of society.

No word in the English language seems to designate unambiguously this aspect of social existence. The nearest approach to it is community in the sense of an affirmative personal relationship of human individuals, i.e. of a relationship which is direct, unmediated, significant for its own sake, “a personal response to a demand of persons”. Community is, therefore, for us, not synonymous with society. Indeed, the dialectic of the relation in which they stand to one another is the key to the social ethics of Christianity.

Two negative assertions seem to follow from this position.

1) Society as such, as an aggregate of functional institutions conditioned by geophysical, technological and other environmental factors is no concern of the Christian. His concern is with the individual in community, not with society.

2) Neither is history as such his concern. The wars of races and nations, the

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