Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Moller, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Benjamin M. Friedman is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy and former chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University. Professor Friedman received his PhD in economics from Harvard, and since 1972, he has served on Harvard’s faculty. He’s a widely sought after scholar in the field of economics and economic policy. He’s authored more than 150 academic articles. He’s the author or editor of 14 books. His book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, was the topic of a previous Thinking in Public conversation in 2021. It’s his most recent book, Religious Influences on Economic Thinking, that is the topic of our conversation today. Professor Friedman, I welcome you to Thinking in Public.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Thank you for having me.
Albert Mohler:
Professor Friedman, one of your particular interests is actually the intersection of religion. Your book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism has been succeeded by your lectures at the University of Zurich, or actually for the Swiss National Bank in Zurich entitled “Religious Influences on Economic Thinking.” So your work is at the intersection of these two powerful intellectual forces. And how did you arrive at the intersection of religion and economics in terms of your own academic work?
Benjamin M. Friedman:
To begin, as you correctly stated, I’m an economist. I am not a religious scholar. I’m an economist, but I’ve always been interested in the question of where ideas come from and why ideas emerge when and where they did. And we know a lot historically about the origins of modern western economics. We know that took place in Scotland. We know it was in the latter half of the 18th century. We know about Adam Smith, but I wanted to learn more about how Smith ,and, to a lesser extent, his contemporaries came to their ideas. So I approached it not at all from the religious end. I started from the end of economics, but the more I read and thought about it, the more I persuaded myself that the religious thinking of that period, in particular new and hotly contended lines of thought within the English speaking Protestant world within which people like David Hume and Adam Smith lived, were powerful, powerful influences on their thinking. And that’s what led me to explore this intersection of economics and religious thinking. But it’s important to emphasize that I started from the endpoint of the economics looking for what explained how we got our economics, not starting from the endpoint of being a religious scholar because I’m not.
Albert Mohler:
No, but you really dive deeply into this, and frankly into a lot of controversy in terms of, well, I could just say the way the disciplines operate these days. And so as a Christian theologian and a historical theologian, I would say that at least one way to read the rise of the modern university is to read it as the orchestrated organized rationalization of a secular process and breaking apart the disciplines away from the control of the church. And so at one time, virtually everything was theological. And then even in the medieval university you had theology plus say a faculty of law and eventually a faculty of medicine. But the idea that you would’ve a faculty of economics is a lot more recent than most people would think.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
That’s right. We did not have anything recognizable as an economics department at Harvard University until the latter half of the 19th century. And my university is absolutely an example of what you cite. My university was founded in the 1630s by Puritans. Why did they do that? To use their famous phrase, they wanted to raise up a learned clergy. That’s what it was all about. And then of course, given the pattern with which religious thinking in New England evolved by sometime around the early 19th century, instead of being Puritans, that is to say congregationalists, then they became Unitarians. And it wasn’t until the latter half of the 19th century that they freed themselves from, I wouldn’t say controlled by the religious authorities, but a real centering of the university around the initial religious impulse.
Albert Mohler:
Well, along those lines, let me ask you a question. You really don’t address this in your most recent book, but it’s in the background. So the modern American research university is, in most respects, very much influenced by the German models that emerged in the 19th century. But it seems to me that the field of economics is overwhelmingly weighted towards the English speaking world, the English sphere. Am I misreading that?
Benjamin M. Friedman:
No, I agree with that. First, your take on the modern research university is exactly correct. The inspiration was the German, and as I explained, not in my most recent lecture that you have sitting in front of you, but in the bigger book that you also have there, many people in lots of fields including what became economics, did graduate work at German universities in the 19th century. So there were historians, there were people who became sociologists, there were big people who became political scientists, and there were people who became economists. And of course we know about physicists and chemists and people like that. So it was not just that the model they had in mind for our modern research university was the German model. These individuals in the 19th century had mostly studied in Germany.
Now you then make the correct point that this could have been some tension with economics because modern western economics did not originate in Germany. We are not all products of Carl Menger. We are products of Adam Smith and David Hume and people later, Ricardo, who wasn’t Scottish, he was English, and then Mill and the whole rest of the great figures in England and Scotland in the 19th century. So that’s an interesting question you raise there. I would say the main German influence is the role of institutions and human arrangements. Many of these figures in the 19th century studied in Germany at Heidelberg, at Halle, at other German universities, including with a man named Karl Knies, who was the driving force behind what was called the German Institutional School, and I think is very pertinent to refer to that right now because, as you may be aware, the most recent Nobel Prize in my discipline, namely to Daron Acemoglu right down the river from me at MIT and two of his co-authors, is precisely for work on the role of institutions. In that case institutions in determining what kind of economies do well, what kind of societies are able to evolve democracies. Now, I’ve never asked Daron whether he thinks he got his inspiration directly from Karl Knies and the German Institutional School, but at least indirectly he certainly did.
Albert Mohler:
In thinking about this, it causes me to want to ask you a question that I thought of when reading your most recent lecture published as a book, which by the way, there would be very few lectures like this that would get reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. So congratulations on that. It has to be one powerful lecture to be published by MIT and then reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, thank you for that. Although I must say somebody pointed out the Wall Street Journal review and I started to read it and I got about two paragraphs in and I noticed that the author of the review, whom I did not know, referred to my view of Calvin as preposterous, and I simply stopped reading. I thought, well, I’ve talked to you about the theology. I’ve talked to many of my colleagues and other people about the theology and well, I figure if whoever wrote the review thinks that my view of Calvin is propo-, one can argue views are right, views are wrong, all views are questionable. But I concluded that if this fellow thinks my view of Calvin is preposterous, well, I stopped, what can I say? I stopped reading.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I did not intend to hit this landmine, but I can tell you that the author that reviewed Barton Swaim is a friend and he is a very kind and respectful man. He has a pretty sharp pen, otherwise you don’t get hired at the Wall Street Journal.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, he’s welcome to it. It’s a free country.
Albert Mohler:
Well, but I think it does speak to the stature of the arguments you’re making here. That’s why we’re having this conversation. I was invigorated to want to have the conversation. And I too differ with you and your understanding of Calvin, but in a friendly way I look forward to kind of talking about. Because I mean, first of all, I’m a theologian and I just want to say I think it is very helpful that an economist of your stature in the academic world and in the economic world is willing to acknowledge and to give such incredible research into the religious background, even the theological background, explicitly, of capitalism and of modern economics and even of the field of economics. I find that a very happy thing. It made me invigorated for the conversation
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well good.
Albert Mohler:
What I was starting to ask is, and it was my segue there, I opened the door, but I want to come back to what I wanted to ask. I want to go to Edinburgh and I want to ask you just in terms of intellectual history, why Edinburgh and why Scotland? I have a theory, but I want to hear what you would say. Why did so much of this emerge, not so much just in the English speaking world, not just in the British Isles, but in Scotland?
Benjamin M. Friedman:
I would point to several factors Dr. Mohler, To begin the Scots were much better educated than the English. The Scots had more universities, they had Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and others. The English had only Oxford and Cambridge. Second, we know if we can take Adam Smith’s word for it, that at least one of the English universities, namely Oxford, was a pretty dull place at that period. Smith spent six dreary years at Oxford and in The Wealth of Nation. he talks about it and he says, I think the way he puts it is that at Oxford, most of the professors have given up even the barest pretense of teaching. The whole place he found just intellectually dull. Third, I would say that the Scots not only had better education, but a much livelier intellectual life. Social life among the educated elites in Edinburgh and Glasgow was organized around these clubs.
Smith and Hume were famously in the most prestigious one called the Select Society, but there were endless of these clubs. There was the Political Economy Club, there was the Poker Club and it wasn’t a reference to playing cards, it was a reference to the idea of stirring things up with public debate, and throughout Scotland, but especially Edinburgh and Glasgow, that’s how these guys spent their time. Whereas in Britain, and maybe because Britain by this time had freed itself from in England had freed itself from the Calvinist influence. What did they do? They mostly went to the theater and went to clubs and gambled. So it was just a different world. And then the final two things I would mention were one, these guys were all thoroughly educated in the thinking of Isaac Newton. And in the book, and again in the lecture, I go to some length to emphasize that Newtonian ideas of system and mechanism were really important for Smith. And then finally they all were trained in Stoic philosophy, and I think that was important too. Now, can I separate out and say one of those was the most important? No, I don’t think so. But that’s about a half a dozen influences that distinguished Scotland from England. And if you put them all together, I think they were very powerful.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and I would say even taking that argument a bit further, that Edinburgh is more important than London when you think about the Enlightenment. When we think about some of the major theorists of the Enlightenment, London’s not irrelevant, Britain or England’s not irrelevant, but Scotland and Edinburgh really are the shining stars.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well exactly so. But this is an aspect, a reflection of what I’m referring to as the much more lively and interesting intellectual climate in which these men lived. London just didn’t have anything like that, at least not until the 19th century.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. Okay. So I think a part of the value of the publication of your lecture, the Karl Brunner lecture, I believe given for the Bank of Zurich, which by the way will come up later in our conversation for another reason. But part of the virtue is that your major book, which we had the privilege of talking about on a previous edition of this program, it’s a very extensive, indeed, I would say magisterial work on the subject, a lecture or a lectureship like this forces concision. And I noted two things in reading this. Number one, it’s not only a more concise form of your thesis in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, but there’s also, at least as I read it, something new. And so forgive me for suggesting, but it seems to me, and I want to ask you to make the thesis, but it seems to me that the something new is where you’re really clear about the idea, your argument that much of modern economics is a secularized form of the continuing influence, not just of say the reformation, but in particular the Calvinist tradition.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
I would say that a large part of what is going on in modern economics, and I think in modern political science too, but I’m an economist, is precisely the secularizing of the ideas that these religious thinkers had in part going back to, well, you mentioned the Reformation, but a long way before that and even coming down since then. There’s a part of the book that I can’t remember if we talked about when we spoke before, having to do with eschatology and the ending of the world and whether the world is going to lead to a better set of outcomes within the lifetimes of human beings such as you and me. And I think a large part of economics is about that. If you scratch any economist, you get a kind of devotion to the idea of progress, which had to come from someplace. And I argue in the book that it comes from this kind of post-millennial thinking in which so many of them grew up.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. Well, I am not a post-millennialist, but I think you’re right.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
I think I knew that.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. No, I think you’re right. And there are some post-millennialists very much active today in writing today in Christian theological circles. And it does, your eschatology does have a great effect on your understanding of the present. And if you are an ardent, say dispensational, pre millennialist, you don’t hang on to your 401k too dearly. You’re kind of praying you never use it. I am a classical pre-millennialist for whatever that matters. And so I am with Augustine in the fourth and fifth century in believing that Christ will come to establish his millennium. But I am not expecting that I can read the signs of the times to believe that I can have a calendar to predict when that should happen. So I have to plan for a long time, if that makes sense.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
It absolutely does.
Albert Mohler:
I want to ask you to do something, and that is even as you reduced your thesis from a multi-hundred page book to these lectures, I want to ask you to just summarize your thesis so that listeners have a good idea of how you, in your own words, would describe the thesis of your work.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, I’ll be glad to do that. To repeat the question from which I start is, where did modern western economics come from intellectually, again, we know geographically, we know in terms of time where it came from, but the question is intellectually, what were the driving forces that gave us this powerful new line of thought? And to be very clear, so that your listeners, who I assume are not largely economists, will know what we’re talking about, what I take to be the centerpiece of modern western economics is what people like me refer to as the first fundamental welfare theorem. And that is the concept that individuals left to their own devices and with no thought of altruism or explicit caring about other people can, and under the right circumstances will, end up taking actions that make other people better off. That’s a very powerful thought because it runs against thousands of years, going back as far as the Hebrew Bible, of people stewing about the consequences of people acting in their own self-interest.
But the idea of modern western economics is that under the right circumstances which we know to be competition in markets, if you leave people alone to act in their self-interest, then in most cases they will wind up making decisions and taking actions that make other people better off. Now, my argument in the book is that the motivating, I shouldn’t say motivating, the enabling intellectual movement that made it possible for Smith and his contemporaries to come to this insight was the movement away from Predestinarian Calvinism. So they were moving away from the view that the human character is one of total depravity, they were moving away from the notion that each of us has a spiritual destiny that is predetermined before, well, in the Westminster Confession, not only before we’re born but before the world was created so that nothing that I can do or no choice or action, I take and influence it.And then also the third element of this movement away from Predestinarian Calvinism that I emphasize is the question of why we are here and whether human happiness is a, or perhaps even the, divinely intended end.
And my argument is that in each of these three elements, the movement toward a more benign view of the human character, the movement toward a world in which our actions can determine our outcomes to the good, and a world in which human happiness is part of what the deity is aiming for for us, I argue that all three of these were very powerfully enabling Smith to reach his insights, even though importantly, he personally was not a religious man, nor was Hume. And so this is not an argument about self-conscious intent. It’s an argument about what’s in the atmosphere, what’s in the intellectual air, what are they imbibing every time they go to one of these dinners. So that’s the central argument.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I appreciate you expressing it so concisely, and that’s exactly the argument as I received it, both in your first book, which is the topic of our first conversation, but also in the lectures, the topic of this conversation. And I wouldn’t have a conversation if I’d have deep appreciation for you and your work. And I want to say that, and by the way, I want to tell you that your first book, we mentioned here, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, has actually received a good deal of conversation in some very conservative Christian circles. and both Protestant and Catholic. So I was reading a work just the other night in which you are cited by some, I’ll just say some of what’s called the New Catholic Conservative thought and even associated with some things like integralism, et cetera. And so I just thought you might find that interesting.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, I do, I’m glad. I’m glad people are paying attention, but I have to confess my ignorance, I don’t know a lot about new lines of thought in Roman Catholicism, and I don’t even know the meaning of the word you just used.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, well, I understand that. I just fell into theological jargon. But I will tell you just to connect dots, this is a part of the conversation even about the presidential campaign in 2024, in a figure such as J.D. Vance. I’ll just say in terms of the influences behind him, it is some of the same thing. I just thought you might be interested that in some of that work, your work is cited and also among conservative Protestants as well.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, good. I mean, I don’t write these books with an intent to weigh in on current political issues, and I don’t write them self-consciously from either a liberal capital L or conservative capital P political view. So frankly…
Albert Mohler:
I didn’t mean to insinuate that you did. I just am saying I find it interesting once you write a book, you release it to the world. And I think it’s always interesting to know who finds it interesting. And I think a part of, again, what makes your work such a matter of interest to so many in my world, is that you are engaging some of the very same people, of course, that are our daily conversation. And so as a Calvinist, I’ll go to Calvin, as you do. I had a couple of thoughts I just want to share with you about your reading of Calvin, and I just want to kind of check this with you. So this is in the spirit a friendly conversation. And one of the things I want to say is that as a historical theologian, I have to continually understand the relationship between Calvin and Calvinism and sometimes more pressingly between Calvin and the Calvinist. But what I’m talking about are going to be two issues, very, very central to the Calvinist thought of which I’m aware. And the first is that the doctrine of total depravity does not mean for Calvinists and did not mean in Geneva that no one can do anything that from a human perspective is genuinely good.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, I hope not. I hope it wouldn’t have meant that.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, well, it would be disaster as you know. But rather that we can do nothing which is genuinely good in God’s sight simply because of our sinfulness. And the one thing we especially cannot do is turn ourselves godward, only he can do that. And so total depravity means that all of our faculty, this is a direct answer to the Catholic theology, that some of human capacities are less affected by the fall than others, and that’s the totus in total depravity. And so I just think a lot of people when they see that term, assume that that means that human beings are as bad as they possibly could be. I can guarantee you that Calvin did not want to live among people who were as bad as they could be.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Yes. Although it was interesting, and I’m sure you know this, although maybe some of your listeners don’t, there was a great debate in the period precisely about which I’m writing in England in the letter half of the 17th century and then in Scotland in the first part of the 18th century, in which people argued about how bad the human character was and whether it was as bad as the Calvinists portrayed it. So for example, I think I quote in my larger book from Reverend Tillotson, who was the first Archbishop of Canterbury appointed in the Church of England under William and Mary, who says, the human character is not as bad as it has been portrayed. And he thought of himself as objecting to what had been said before. Now, he wasn’t, to my knowledge, he wasn’t explicit about saying Calvin got it wrong. And so now we’re in the phrase that you, I thought usefully introduced, and one that’s very apt for economists. You talk about the difference between Calvin and the Calvinists. Many years ago, but during my lifetime as a professional economist, there was a great literature and discussion on Keynes and the Keynesians.
Albert Mohler:
Yes, I can imagine so.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
And the whole idea was whether the Keynesians had Keynes right or not. So the notion of dispute between Calvin and the Calvinists absolutely rings a bell with me.
Albert Mohler:
Yes. Well, that makes perfect sense. I will say that in the main, I think the Calvinists get Calvin right. It’s just that Calvin’s such a massive figure it’s very hard to take him whole. And that leads me to one other thing that I would just suggest for your future reflection. Another part of Calvin’s thought that is central to Calvinism, especially you look at the Dutch variants, the Princetonians here in the United States, it was a tremendous affirmation of what we might call common grace. And the affirmation that the Lord has given to, even surviving the fall, the Lord has given to human beings a common grace which produces virtues, including industriousness, which produces fruits including many good works, and that should be encouraged. The way I put it is that Calvin’s understanding is that a pagan father, rightly loving his son, is reflecting the glory of God, whether he knows it or not. And so we should wish for every Pagan father to cherish his son. And by God’s grace, we understand by common grace that occurs.
And so I think I would make the argument, and I’m happy for you to correct me, but I would make the argument that it’s not accidental that you gave this lecture in Zurich. It’s not accidental that Geneva and Switzerland become in so many ways, the other incubator of what we might call kind of an investment capitalism. And I’m not trying to speak as an economist. You correct me when I perhaps missed the right vocabulary. But I do think that there’s a reason why so much of this emerged more in say, Switzerland than even in Lutheran, Germany. Am I onto something or am I completely off?
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Oh, no, absolutely. I think you’re quite right. I was very delighted to give this lecture in Switzerland. I was delighted to give the lecture for several reasons. First, I was simply flattered that the Swiss National Bank, that’s, that’s not a private bank, incidentally, that’s the Swiss equivalent of our Federal Reserve System, that’s their central bank. They have this large public lecture every year, and normally it’s on things like banking and finance and so forth. But they asked me to give that year’s lecture, it was two years ago on my thoughts and The Religion and the Rise of Capitalism book, so I was simply delighted about that. And secondly, you mentioned earlier that the lecture is in memory of Karl Brunner, and Brunner was a kind of mentor of mine. Karl Brunner, if he were living now, would probably be about 110, though I’m not a young man, but even at that, Karl was a good generation older. He was a well established figure when, he was Swiss, and he was a well established figure when I was just coming into economics as a young man. And he was very, very kind to me, and I learned a lot from Karl. And so being able to give a lecture that was named in his memory meant a lot to me.
But now turning to the substance in the same way that we think of Calvin in Geneva, we think of Zwingli in Zurich. In fact, on the morning of the lecture, I went from my hotel and I went over and I stood there and looked at this, you’ve probably seen it, this enormous, maybe twice life size, maybe three times a statue of Zwingli, which is really insightful because as I’m sure you know Zwingli was not merely a theologian, he was a soldier.
Albert Mohler:
And he died that way.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
He died in battle in the Second Kappel War, and the statue portrays him as standing there with two things in his hands. One is a book, presumably the Bible, and the second is a sword. And I didn’t put it in the lecture, but I speculated a little bit about what would have happened to the course of Protestantism if Zwingli had not died in that war.
Albert Mohler:
Very interesting,
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Because Zwingli was well established in Zurich before Calvin ever moved from France to Geneva. And so you could have imagined Calvin just being in Geneva and ignoring the fact that 40 miles down the road there is this other guy named Zwingli. But I suspect the world doesn’t work that way. And I think it was Zwingli’s getting killed that in part opened the way, created, in effect created a vacuum, which Calvin then filled. It was very interesting speculation because the two men had differing ideas, including on predestination.
Albert Mohler:
And the Lord’s Supper, by the way. And that’s one of the issues that I find fascinating. And when I take people to Switzerland, Germany, not to mention the British Isles, and tell the story of the Reformation, I point out that economics is very much a part of this. And that’s true for Luther. I mean, Luther is really a very, very young representative of the Junker class as it’s emerged, this middle class, as his father, his father’s first generation having any money at all, and is quite ambitious for his son to become a lawyer, to go to the university and become a lawyer because it is this idea of ascending the social ladder, which is possible in that culture for the first time. Luther, as you well know, in a thunderstorm, decides to become a priest instead, which his father found quite unforgivable until he figured out his son was also becoming famous.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, Luther was, Luther was an interesting character in a variety of ways. But incidentally, there’s also, and I’m not saying in any way that money motivated Luther, but as I’m sure you know, part of the background of what Luther was doing was the dissatisfaction of these prosperous Germans believing that they were being continually ripped off by the Italian church.
Albert Mohler:
Which they were, by the way,
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Yes. But the Italian, they felt that here was this country to the south, less industrious than they were, less successful than they were. I mean, there was a time when Italy was very prosperous, but now here we were a couple of hundred years later, and the Germans felt that through the church, the Italians had created a mechanism of sucking all of this money out of Germany. And surprise, surprise, they didn’t like it.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And you had the rise. You had also the political ambitions of the electors, which also played into it. So a bit of early nationalism emerging as well. But the reason I raised Luther is to say Luther was less systematic in his thinking than Calvin. And so there are other differences, but Calvin in The Institutes of the Christian Religion provides this expansive understanding that quite frankly is only paralleled looking backwards by say Aquinas or Augustine. And he saw himself as a son of Augustine. Augustine is quoted more in The Institutes than anyone other not in scripture.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Right. And Luther, of course, was an Augustinian monk.
Albert Mohler:
Not by accident. Yes. And I was going to raise Augustine because I would argue that modern economics ought to acknowledge Augustine as well, because it’s Augustine in the late fourth and early fifth centuries who is facing real theological challenges within the church, especially there in North Africa with the fall of the Roman Empire and with, also, you mentioned eschatology, the understanding of some that Jesus is immediately coming, therefore, we should have nothing to do with this world. And just as in the Old Testament, the Lord told Jeremiah to go buy a lot and plant it, go buy a pot of land and plant it. So likewise, Augustine said, no, we should plant as many fields as possible. We should cultivate as many fields as possible. We should work as hard as possible in order to be found, I would say it’s very similar to Calvin’s common grace, in order to be found doing what God made us to do. Again, are there any economic sources that look back in terms as far as Augustine? Because I think Augustine is the towering figure of the age.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, I certainly agree that Augustine was a towering figure. I’m coming up short in an answer to your question about whether there’s economic literature that emphasizes Augustine, and I think not, and maybe there should be. But I think the usual view is that Luther and Calvin, in effect, intermediated Augustine for us. When you mentioned the idea of planting many fields, what to mind is the Talmudic dictum that if you are planting a sapling and somebody says, come, come, come the Messiah has arrived, what you are supposed to do is finish planting the sapling and only then go to greet the Messiah.
Albert Mohler:
I can understand the metaphor, and it’s very similar, very similar.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
It’s exactly what you’re saying.
Albert Mohler:
Because this is pleasing to the Messiah. It’s pleasing to the Messiah to be found doing what we’re ordered to do in the garden. The other interesting thing about Augustine, and Peter Brown at Princeton was really magisterial in this.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Yes. He has, I assume you know his book, it’s called, I think it’s called Through the Eye of a Needle.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. I did one of the first of these programs with him on that book, and I’m so glad that I did.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, and you might well have done one of these on his monumental biography of Augustine.
Albert Mohler:
Yes.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
But the more recent one is this Through the Eye of a Needle, which is all about the change in the attitude toward economics, money within the church at just the period that you’re talking about. It’s a wonderful book.
Albert Mohler:
Well, to be honest, professor, that’s one of the reasons why I raised the question is because I’ve just been curious as to whether anyone from the economic side had kind of seized upon the same transitional moment, because I think Peter Brown’s really onto something.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, and the answer, I don’t want to pretend to know more than I know, and so there may well be somebody who works on that, but if so, I don’t know who it is.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation because I have a conversation with every book, but a conversation with the author is better even than the conversation with the book. And so my thoughts about reading your lecture, I did want to defend Calvin a bit on depravity and what it means and doesn’t mean, and then the common grace thing, because I do think that’s just so powerful, and frankly, it’s so important to my thinking. I don’t know how to be a neighbor unless I grant the fact that God has granted to all these capacities, even implanting what Calvin called a sensus divinitatis, a seed of divinity, and a moral sense, a sense of virtue that allows us to work together in common good. That’s the reason why we can work together believers and unbelievers, to build great cities, to do great works, even the reason, one of the reasons that the Calvinists were so amenable to work in the government and in the military with others, is that it’s this idea of common grace, and it leans over into Patria and understanding of Fatherland, which is I think another inheritance, not that this is completely unique, but the Protestant sense of a Fatherland, of a Patria, of a community. I think that’s very important to the order of the world, especially the American order as we know it.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Yes. And this is also very much part of Smith’s education, to bring it back to him, Smith’s great teacher at Glasgow was a man named Francis Hutcheson and Hutcheson was known for, among other things, the view that corresponds very closely to what you’re just describing, Hutcheson’s view, was that we have not five senses, but six, that the sixth one is the moral sense. That in the same way I can touch something and determine whether it’s smooth or rough, I can know, because all humans know, whether something is morally good or not. And Smith didn’t take this over whole, but it was a large part of his thinking, and it comes directly from his mentor and then the person he succeeded. When Hutcheson resigned, then Smith was not the first incumbent, but then soon thereafter moved into Hutcheson’s chair as the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. So a version of what you are describing is absolutely part of Smith’s intellectual makeup.
Albert Mohler:
Well, professor Friedman, it pleases me in this conversation, and I mentioned this in our previous conversation as well. It pleases me that I sit in a position, I occupy an office that was held by a man whose collegiate influence and boyhood influence was Francis Wayland, and that is James Pedigree Boce, who had studied at Brown with Francis Wayland. And as you point out, he wrote the most commonly used book on economics. He was a churchman, a Baptist churchman, by the way, I’ll claim him. And he wrote the most influential and commonly used work and economics of his time.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Yes, yes, yes.
Albert Mohler:
I find that very satisfying to think of that lineage.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, in the first place it was a tremendous book, Wayland, in case you are unaware, although perhaps when I speak about Wayland, most people don’t know who he is. Maybe in the context of the Baptist seminary, all of your listeners know.
Albert Mohler:
I would say slightly more will know than perhaps, point well taken.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Francis Wayland, who was one of the very early economists in the United States, but he was also a Baptist minister. And in the same way that to be the president of Harvard for a while, you had to be a Puritan, and for a while you had to be a Unitarian, given the founding of Brown in Providence, Rhode Island of all places home of Roger Williams, it’s up on the same hill on that side of the river in Brown, in Providence. The college is just a couple of blocks away from the Williams’s, what’s replaced the Williams’s Church. And so in those days, you had to be a Baptist clergyman to be the president of Brown. But Wayland also was both a philosopher and an economist, and he wrote a very fine philosophy textbook, which sold a hundred thousand copies. Just think about that in the context of the smaller country and the small share of the people who went to college in those days, to sell a book that in the philosophy book came out in 1835, sold a hundred thousand copies, and the economics textbook, which came out in 1837, sold 50,000 copies, and it was the most widely used economics textbook in the United States right up until the Civil War. Now, Wayland must’ve been quite a remarkable man.
Albert Mohler:
Well, he had an institutional vision as well for Brown and, professor, that was directly channeled into this institution, that vision that Francis Wayland and other Baptists had of the need for a very substantial academic institution and the rise of them. So in the South, the emergence of this institution was seen as an extension of that Wayland tradition, even though frankly, the theology that formed this institution was far more characteristic of Princeton. And so we stand at the confluence of a couple of pretty significant rivers there.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
I see. Well, it’s interesting, at least among the major American secular, what are now secular universities, almost each one of them had some great transformative figure in the 19th century. At my university. the great figure was President Elliott, who was the president of Harvard for 40 years and really transformed the place from what had been a small provincial New England academy into a world-class university. And the great transformative figure at Brown was Francis Wayland. So it must’ve been a very interesting figure. His initial pulpit, incidentally, was here in Boston before he was called to be president of Brown. He was a clergyman at one of the downtown Baptist churches here in Boston.
Albert Mohler:
Professor, I think one of the interesting points you make so well in both of your works here is that there’s a moral dimension to economics that goes back to the very beginning. And so the people we’re talking about here, like Francis Wayland, he wrote the bestselling book on I guess what you could call ethics, moral philosophy at the time and in economics, and I want to tell you as a non economist, looking at the field and reading as pervasively as I can, I see more attention to moral issues among economists now than I do among many other disciplines. And is that an accident? And do you perceive the same thing? But I mean, even in philosophy, I don’t see much attention to moral philosophy and moral readings of history are considered, or even much treatment of these issues is considered quite, well, it brings an allergic reaction. But when I look at some of the recent works, not just your work, which is explicit, but other works, there’s still a connection there.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, I certainly agree with you that there is a moral stripe that runs right down through the center of economics. And part of what I was after was figuring out where it came from. Whether this is missing in other disciplines is not for me to say. The philosopher whom I knew best in my life, I would say was certainly present in his, that was John Rawls. Rawls was a great figure at Harvard when I first arrived as a faculty, young faculty member. And I got to know him quite by accident because I was put on some committee that Jack was on, and of course, he was a world famous figure, and I was some new assistant professor who just walked in the door. He could not have been kinder to me. He was a wonderful, wonderful man. So I read a lot of Rawls’s work, and there is a very strong moral strand in there. You’re probably aware that Rawls initially had planned to go into the Episcopal priesthood. He wasn’t going to be a Baptist, but he was going to be a clergyman. So I guess it came naturally for him, but it is strongly there. But I have to confess, I don’t read a lot of works by philosophers these days. So I don’t really know.
Albert Mohler:
I don’t know that you’re missing much. But let me tell you, I realize we’re coming to the end of our conversation, but to find out you knew John Rawls, it makes me want to have another conversation yet again. And by the way, I gave a lecture not too long ago in which I mentioned that John Rawls represents kind of the process of Western secularization, not in one century, but in one lifetime. Because he was so attentive to so many of these issues, and he did intend to become a clergyman. And that basically, I would argue that his understanding of justice, I find myself saying this now, talking to you as we’ve been talking about matters, economic, his understanding of justice, it seems to me comes down to the question in a non-Christian frame, which he moved to, how do you frame the issue of justice? And to me, that just points out, by the way, common grace and the fact that God made us in his image in such a way that we thirst for justice regardless of our intellectual tradition. We thirst for justice for a reason. But I digress. I apologize.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, no, my only suggestion is to add the adverb explicitly because I think Jack would not have been pleased at the notion that his framework of thinking was non-Christian. He would’ve said it wasn’t explicitly Christian, but Jack would’ve thought that what he was doing was Christian to the core.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you are in a place of incredible intellectual conversation, and I want to thank you for this conversation today. Professor, I have to tell you, I appreciate your work. I want to ask you, what are you working on now? What should we look for next?
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, it might perhaps be a surprise to you, I’m currently working on a book on Adam Smith and David Hume, which might not surprise you, but what might surprise you is that I’m doing it as a novel.
Albert Mohler:
I didn’t see that coming.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Yes, I said it might surprise you. I’ve had this idea for some time that I think I have something to say about the relationship between Smith and Hume, not the personal relationship, that again you know but maybe your listeners don’t. They were very, very close friends, close enough that throughout their adult lifetimes, Hume always maintained in his lodgings a dedicated room for Smith to stay in anytime Smith was in Edinburgh. Imagine having in your house a room that your friend just has available to him anytime he comes and not used for anything else. So they were very, very close friends. But I don’t have anything to add to the personal dimension. I’m not a biographical scholar or anything like that, but I do think I have something to say about the intellectual relation between the two men and their thinking. And as I plotted out the book, it occurred to me that I could do it best in a fictional form. And I like taking on new writing challenges. And so I’ve never written a novel before, so I thought I’d try it. So that’s what I’m doing at the moment.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I appreciate you sharing that, and I will certainly look forward to it. And you are one of the most accomplished and well-published economic figures in America today, and it’s the stature of your work that made me eager to want to have the first conversation with you, and it was the publication of this lecture that made me want to have a second conversation with you, and perhaps we could have a third conversation once I’ve read your novel.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, alas, I have to finish writing it first.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I fully understand that. So at least you know that in this program, your intention is a matter now of public record, so we’ll be looking forward to it.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Well, I would enjoy the conversation very much so. Thank you for being so generous about it.
Albert Mohler:
Well, appreciate you joining me for this conversation, professor Benjamin M. Friedman, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Benjamin M. Friedman:
Thank you for Inviting me. I’ve enjoyed it.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Benjamin M. Friedman for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.