Sometimes it seems like discussions in this country are taking place in two isolated camps. Every now and then, that suspicion seems like a certainty.
As an example, I offer you Benjamin Friedman’s new book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.
Friedman, a Harvard economics professor, was faced with a seemingly incomprehensible phenomenon: “the puzzling behavior of many of our fellow citizens whose attitudes toward questions of economic policy seem sharply at odds with what would seem to be their own economic benefit.” The puzzle is why people oppose things like higher tax rates and inheritance taxes. Even more unsettling is that those with this aberrant voting behavior “disproportionately belong to the nation’s increasingly influential evangelical churches.”
Shocked to discover this link between economic conservatism and religious belief, Friedman sets off to explain. His research led him far and wide. The bibliography in this book runs to thirty-four pages. Yet, somehow Friedman missed George Nash’s book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, which has a detailed explanation of how the unification of these two groups occurred. Nash should not feel slighted, however. There is also no mention of Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Russell Kirk is missing. So is Richard John Neuhaus. We could make a game of this, but it gets old pretty fast.
Instead of reading all those books, Friedman spins a historical tale showing how thinking about economics has always been heavily influenced by religious thought. Once again, that is a deeply interesting question. How did the Greek thought emerging from Athens and the religious thought emerging from Jerusalem combine to create Western Civilization? Many books have been written on this subject. Those books are also not in Friedman’s bibliography.
Read the rest at The University Bookman.
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