Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

they did not employ a single workman, (they) could generally live a year or two upon the
stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could
subsist a month, and scarcely any a year without employment.“ 16
In defiance of all optimistic expectations, unspeakable misery fell upon the working classes
precisely in the first half of the nineteenth century. „One of the ancient titans,“ wrote the Historisch-Politische
Blätter in l847, „has secretly arisen and, stepping softly, revisited the disarray
of this present time.., the proletarian.“ 17 An „early capitalism“ which forces man to conform
„to the whole complex of the material means of production“ and treats him „like an instrument“
contradicts, as Pope John Paul II says, the dignity of man. For this reason, the
„great burst of solidarity“ which arose in the nineteenth century „against the degradation of
man and against the unheard-of accompanying exploitation in the field of wages, working
conditions and social security for the worker“ was „justified from the point of view of social
morality“ (Laborem exercens, 7-8). A correct evaluation of the fate of the proletariat of that
time does not allow, however, a shifting of the blame to free competition alone, but must also
bring into consideration that, in view of the ceaselessly increasing population , the social
product did not suffice to allow everyone a commodity supply fit for a human being. At that
time Louis Auguste Blanqui thought: „Although the earth is quite large and still uncultivated
in many cases, we are nevertheless hurrying all too numerously to the banquet of life.“ 18
But it is precisely here that an alarming failure of the old economic liberalism becomes manifest:
although the demand for goods of all kinds was great, and although there was no lack of
hands willing to work, endogenously and not exogenously conditioned economic crises broke
out with almost fatal regularity and plunged millions of workers together with their families
into hardship. Since the beginning of the industrial age, three great economic waves can be
distinguished. The first long-wave cycle, which lasted from l787 to l842 and experienced the
rise of economic development, was shaken six times by economic crises. The second longwave
cycle, which was defined by the construction of railways and spreading industrial expansion,
lasted from l843 to l897 and was again interrupted by crises at intervals of eight to
ten years. The third long-wave cycle, of which, according to Schumpeter, electricity, motors,
and chemistry are characteristic, stretched from l898 to the great worldwide economic crisis
of the years l929-3l and was again disturbed by crises. Towards the end of the nineteentwenties,
the concentration and escalation of the economy as well as the ruinous competition
had assumed such proportions that the automatic competitive processes were no longer able to
establish equilibrium. Chronic mass unemployment reigned almost everywhere, and not for
exogenous political reasons, but for endogenous liberal-economic ones. The era of active state
economic policy began. At the same time, the worldwide economic crisis of the years l929-3l
marked the birth, in terms of the history of ideas, of neoliberalism, even if the erection of the
neoliberal system took place only in later years.
3. Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism openly recognizes the aberrations of the old liberalism and seeks to distance
itself from it more or less. Thus, for example, Alexander Rüstow speaks of the „serious pathological
degeneration“ of the market economy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which
was destroyed from within by the „overgrowth of domineering, monopolizing tendencies that
were foreign and inimical to the market economy.“ 19 In order to correct these deficiencies,
one must set out from four essential presuppositions in the reordering of economic life:
16
Op. cit., bk. 1, chap. 8.
17
19 (1987):522f.
18
A. Blanqui, Histoire de l’Economie Politique en Europe (1837), cited in P. Reichensperger, Die Agrarfrage
(Trier, 1847), 257.
19
A. Rüstow, „Zwischen Kapitalismus und Kommunismus,“ in Ordo 2 (1949):103, 154
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