The Crisis in Catholic Social Thought

I've provided the link to a lecture given by Prof. William Luckey regarding the influence of the German Historical School in Catholic social thought, economics in particular. The speech was delivered fairly recently at the Austrian Scholars Conference. The talk is about 45 minutes long but can be broken into segments. He's a good deal of fun to listen to so, what may sound like a very boring topic is, in fact, very relevant and insightful. He keeps your attention.

In the lecture, Luckey discusses the great impact this particular school of thought had, and in a certain sense continues to have, in Catholic circles regarding economic theory. Of particular interest is his explanation of the G.H.S.'s ties to Revolutionary France. Luckey defines romanticism as a "cult of the past" and he weaves together a long list of influential thinkers that includes Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Von Kettler, etc. His theory is that Catholic enthusiasm for what is now known as distributism emerged straight from the G.H.S's fallacious understanding of the market. To quote Luckey: "Many critics of the free market system were literary men who used strong similes and metaphors to attack it." These men, while wielding powerful pens and possessing a gift for language, had little knowledge of the rules of economics. They consequently stumbled into one economic folly after another. Luckey informed me that documents have recently been uncovered in Germany, yet to be translated into English, that reveal a concerted effort, on the part of heavy weights in the G.H.S. movement in the 19th century, to infuse Catholic social teaching with the School's ideologies. They achieved limited success and pyrrhic victories, but Pope John Paul II's Centesimus Annus proved a major blow to the movement's objectives. (I say "pyrrhic victory" because the distributist movement is completely marginalized in Catholic circles and is not taken seriously by any noted Catholic intellectual.) Luckey reveals how, in preparation for writting the document, the Holy Father spent an entire day discussing economic theory with Friedrich von Hayek. Luckey is currently writing a book on the subject, which no doubt will cast more light on this fascinating subject.

https://www.mises.org/studyguide.aspx?action=author&Id=755