Chapter 4. Ethical Socialism, Especially That of the New Criticism
2. The Duty of Work as a Foundation for Socialism
‘If any will not work, neither let him eat’, says the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, which was ascribed to the Apostle Paul.1 This admonition to work is directed to those who want to live on their Christianity at the expense of the working members of the congregation; they are to support themselves without burdening their fellows.
3. The Equality of Incomes as an Ethical Postulate
Against the assertion that all men should have equal incomes, as little can be said scientifically as can be said in support of it. Here is an ethical postulate which can only be evaluated subjectively. All science can do is to show what this aim would cost us, what other aims we should have to forego in striving to attain this one.
4. The Ethical-Aesthetic Condemnation of the Profit-Motive
Another reproach which philosophers level against the capitalist economic order is that it encourages rank over-development of the acquisitive instinct. Man, they say, is no longer lord of the economic process, but its slave. That economic activity exists merely to satisfy wants and is a means, not an end in itself, has been forgotten. Life wears itself out in the perpetual hurry and scurry to get rich, and men have no time left for inner composure and real enjoyment. They lay waste their best powers in the exhausting daily struggle of free competition.
5. The Cultural Achievements of Capitalism
The inexactness and untruthfulness of ethical Socialism, its logical inconsistencies and its lack of scientific criticism, characterize it as the philosophic product of a period of decay. It is the spiritual expression of the decline of European civilization at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under its sway the German people and with them the whole of humanity were swept from the height of their culture to their deepest degradation. It created the mental premises for the World War and for Bolshevism.
1. The Categorical Imperative as a Foundation for Socialism
Engels called the German Labour Movement the heir to the German classical philosophy.1 It would be more correct to say that German (not only Marxian) Socialism represents the decadence of the school of idealist philosophy.
Janet Yellen made headlines this week, assuring the global economy that there’s no reason to fear a super bubble, she doesn’t expect to see another financial crisis “within our lifetimes.” Of course, Ms. Yellen is not the first Federal Reserve chairman to express such confidence about the future — unfortunately, however, such boasts rarely age well.
Chapter 3. Christianity and Socialism
1. Religion and Social Ethics
Religion, not merely as a church but as a philosophy too, is like any other fact of spiritual life, a product of men’s social cooperation. Our thinking is by no means an individual phenomenon independent of all social relations and traditions; it has a social character by reason of the very fact that it follows methods of thought formed during millennia of co-operation between innumerable groups. And we, again, are able to take over these methods of thought only because we are members of society. Now, for exactly the same reasons, we cannot imagine religion as an isolated phenomenon.
2. The Gospels as a Source of Christian Ethics
To the believer Holy Writ is the deposit of divine revelation, God’s word to humanity, which must for ever be the unshakable foundation of all religion and all conduct controlled by it. This is true not only of the Protestant, who accepts the teaching of the pulpit only in so far as it can be reconciled with Holy Writ; it is true also of the Catholics who, on the one hand, derive the authority of Holy Writ from the Church, but, on the other, ascribe Holy Writ itself to divine origin by teaching that it came into being with the help of the Holy Ghost.
