Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic is out today in paperback; xx + 331 pages, 42 chapters, four appendices. A Kindle edition is in the works. The following paragraphs should answer basic questions like, “What’s this about?”
From my Introduction:
From March 8, 2011 to September 10, 2012, nineteen months in all, I blogged my criticism of The Church and the Libertarian, Christopher A. Ferrara’s slanderous and ignorant attack on the Austrian School of Economics. He argued that no faithful Catholic could be a sincere libertarian of the ASE persuasion. One day I had promised Mr. Ferrara that if he published a book to that effect, I’d answer it. Across almost ninety posts I fulfilled that promise, and this book reincarnates them.
After a year and a half, however, I decided that life was too short to sacrifice other projects on the altar of this polemic. The issues were (and are) important, and I found researching and writing about them congenial, but I could no longer sustain the effort. . . .
This book is the record of an effort in pro-market apologetics (in the classic sense of “defense against intellectual attack”). All interference in market exchange, not only outright state control of the “means of production,” but also violent robbery, involves a degree of “socialization” of the costs of acquiring a good or service. To impose costs on individuals who have not chosen to bear them, be they contemporaries or later generations, is to “socialize” those costs. Calculating these (usually hidden) costs falls to the economist. “Socialism” and “communism” are but frank labels for the systematic, territory-wide state interference with the market exchanges of individuals. That is, it differs in degree, not of kind, from the predations of garden-variety gangsters.
From Gerard Casey’s Foreword:
Anthony Flood’s Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic is a spirited and detailed defence of the fundamental compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism. . . .
Flood is critical not only of Ferrara’s conclusion, but also of the argumentative methods that Ferrara employs. “Several thorough readings,” writes Flood, “have convinced me that it is such a bad book, morally as well as stylistically, that it arguably ought to be ignored rather than critically reviewed. Its tone is continuously inflammatory, its arrangement of material lopsided . . . and his use of sources tendentious. The last-mentioned trait includes either unawareness or evasion of evidence relevant to his topic but inconvenient to his purpose.” Flood is especially critical of Ferrara’s epistemically uncharitable failure to employ responsible internal criticism of his opponents’ positions and also of his inadequate grasp of various historical controversies. . . .
Tony’s book will be of interest to many people, but perhaps especially (but not only) to those who are Catholic and who are also attracted to the intellectual coherence of Austro-Libertarianism, but are concerned that the two systems of thought may be irreconcilable. Polemical writing is not everybody’s favourite form of reading, but the multiple, mostly short, chapters of Christ, Capital and Liberty provide so many insights, engage the perspectives of so many thinkers and attack the central topic of the compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism from so many angles that no reader can fail to achieve a greater insight into the matter after reading it than he had before he began.
Gerard N. Casey MA, LLM, PhD, DLitt.
Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin
Associated Scholar, The Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama
Fellow, Mises UK
And finally, at least for this post, the table of contents:
Part One: Setting the Table
Chapter 1 A Question of Tone
Chapter 2 In Few Things, Charity?
Chapter 3 A Question of Competency
Chapter 4 Sound Bites, Panic Buttons, Scare Quotes
Chapter 5 An Inconvenient Jesuit
Chapter 6 An Overview of an Overview
Chapter 7 Demonize and Delete the Austrians
Chapter 8 Value-Laden and Value-Free
Chapter 9 Adventures in Meta-Ethics
Chapter 10 Aquinas’s Proto-Liberal Concerns
Chapter 11 An Inconvenient Anarcho-Catholic
Chapter 12 Doctorates, “Dummies,” and Defamation
Chapter 13 On Not Seeing the Forest for the Woods
Part Two: Main Course
Chapter 14 Capitalism: a Post-Christian Structure?
Chapter 15 Conflating Science and Ethics
Chapter 16 Disparaging Imaginary Constructions as Illusions
Chapter 17 “Statism” versus “Greed”
Chapter 18 Confusion or Calumny?
Chapter 19 The Kevin Carson (Side-)Show
Chapter 20 What Do We Mean by “The Free Market”?
Chapter 21 If I Had a Hammer: Hayek on Tool-Ownership
Chapter 22 Rothbard on Enclosure
Chapter 23 The Hammonds, T. S. Ashton, and Emily Litella
Chapter 24 Grand Theft Monastery
Chapter 25 Dismissive of the New, Evasive of the Old
Chapter 26 Lie, Rinse, Repeat
Chapter 27 Sudha Shenoy on Enclosures
Chapter 28 The Gnat of Enclosure, the Camel of Slavery
Chapter 29 Lock(e), Stock, and Jesuit
Chapter 30 Slavery, Real and Bogus
Chapter 31 If This Is Infallibility . . . .
Part Three: Dessert and Leftovers
Chapter 32 Save Money, Live Better, Just Do It
Chapter 33 Corporations as “Psychopaths”
Chapter 34 Enclosing Debate
Chapter 35 Rothbard Shaves Ferrara’s Quasi-Marxist “Beard”
Chapter 36 Shall We Prefer Government by Naked Coercion?
Chapter 37 Slavery for the Corporation?
Chapter 38 The Corporation as “Sociopath”
Chapter 39 Railroading the Free Market
Chapter 40 (Fan)Fanning the Embers of Fascism
Chapter 41 Scrooge on Externalization
Chapter 42 Ferrara’s Reserve of False Notes
Appendices
Appendix A Murray Rothbard on Abortion
Appendix B A Profound Philosophical Commonality
Appendix C Lord Acton: Libertarian Hero
Appendix D Is Anarchy a Cause of War?
Murray’s passing in 2019. After a few months’ correspondence, I asked if he would read the manuscript of, and perhaps write a foreword for, Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic. He graciously agreed, and the book appeared that July with his generous commendation.
I certainly couldn’t hoped for a better review!
admiration for Thomas is great, but does not inhibit his criticism. Aquinas’s thought on the subject of liberty is, as I shall show in my own way, a mixed bag, but one whose contents every lover of liberty and reason is better off for having explored.
I’m taking this opportunity to thank again LCI’s Chief Executive Officer Doug Stuart for interviewing me about 