Quadragesimo Anno: neither left nor right

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StudentMI

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http://www.vatican.va/content/pius-...s/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno.html

In my opinion, this might be the mack daddy of the social encyclicals. It comes closest to concrete proposals, besides Populorum Progressio. It defined subsidiarity clearly.

And it was and is denounced as advocating a corporatist, even fascist state. Others have defended it as advocating a market order, a distributist order, something close to the Ordoliberal system that was practiced in postwar Germany.

What strikes me is how much it disagrees with both the left and right of today’s world. Virtually no party advocates what this encyclical does. If they do it’s only bits and pieces.

It’s a long, dense, very detailed encyclical. Would anyone care to discuss it?
 
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I plan on reading it but haven’t done so yet. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
 
arvo said:
Encyclicals are for servants.
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🤨
:roll_eyes:

So… does that put you in the “non serviam” crowd?
🤣
arvo said:
Those, who manage and direct the world (e.g. by creating technological breakthroughs)
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So, “management” and “direction” is a function of technology ?!? Umm… nah.

However, I think there’s a good point buried in there: those documents which presume that the basis for economies is purely the work of production of material goods might stand for a re-examination that asks the question “how do information economics change the equation, if at all?”
StudentMI said:
So does anyone care to discuss the encyclical?
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Questions of the form “would you like to discuss a 148-point document?” tend to overwhelm, in the context of an online forum.

Is there a particular point, or assertion, or context which you would like to suggest for discussion? That might bring a more robust response.
 
From the Catholic perspective, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with corporatism, which QA clearly favors. It is clearly anathema to liberal capitalism and socialism, however, which can both be ordered toward harmful conflict (unrestrained competition and class enmity respectively), rather than a common good. Corporatism envisions classes and industries working together for their and and society’s common good under the supervision of public authority (which exists to serve the common good), but unlike fascism, it embraces subsidiarity. However, it requires, as QA notes (in par 96 and 97) a reform of morality along Catholic lines, otherwise it can be made to serve political ends not oriented to the common good (not unlike most systems, really).

Here’s an interesting article on how QA’s kind of corporatism made it for a brief time into the US, through FDR’s NRA and how there are signs of a revival.

 
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