The Routledge Handbook of Economic Theology

Stefan Schwarzkopf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351973618
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Business General

This Handbook introduces and systematically explores the thesis that the economy, economic practices and economic thought are of a profoundly theological nature. Containing more than 40 chapters, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art reference work that offers students, researchers and policymakers an introduction to current scholarship, significant debates and emerging research themes in the study of the theological significance of economic concepts and the religious underpinnings of economic practices in a world that is increasingly dominated by financiers, managers, forecasters, market-makers and entrepreneurs.

This Handbook brings together scholars from different parts of the world, representing various disciplines and intellectual traditions. It covers the development of economic thought and practices from antiquity to neoliberalism, and it provides insight into the economic–theological teachings of major religious movements. The list of contributors combines well-established scholars and younger academic talents.

The chapters in this Handbook cover a wide array of conceptual, historical, theoretical and methodological issues and perspectives, such as the economic meaning of theological concepts (e.g. providence and faith); the theological underpinnings of economic concepts (e.g. credit and property); the religious significance of socio-economic practices in various organizational fields (e.g. accounting and work); and finally the genealogy of the theological–economic interface in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and in the discipline of economics itself (e.g. Marx, Keynes and Hayek).

The Routledge Handbook of Economic Theology is organized in four parts:

• Theological concepts and their economic meaning

• Economic concepts and their theological anchoring

• Society, management and organization

• Genealogy of economic theology

1

An introduction to economic theology

Stefan Schwarzkopf

The gods, likening themselves to all kinds of strangers, go in various disguises from city to city …

Homer, The Odyssey

Economic theology as an academic field

Despite widespread assumptions about an increasing trend towards secularization in Western societies, there are lingering suspicions about the fervour with which markets and “economic freedom” have become elevated to the status of a belief system. This fervour raises doubts as to whether liberal Enlightenment ever managed to banish religion from the sphere of political economy and economic organization. The doubters and heretics who reject the idea of a global victory of secular democracy – Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” – have rallied under the banner of a “theological turn” in social theory (Fukuyama 1992; Harrington 2007; Juergensmeier 2013). This term comprises an as yet loosely structured intellectual movement within the social sciences, social philosophy and the humanities that reconsiders the relevance of theological reasoning. This movement takes seriously the impact of people’s expressed and unexpressed notions of what is sacred in the way societies are shaped.

Economics and business administration, too, have recently been exposed to a theological turn of their own. Among the many ways to conceptualize this exposure, the term “economic theology” suggests itself as a way to reconfigure theorizing the economy around the role that theology played in shaping economic concepts and the social presence of the sacred in economic life. Economic theology, although a relatively new term, can be considered a research field with intellectual roots stretching all the way back to Karl Marx, Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Ernst Troeltsch and Walter Benjamin. It comprises a methodological and a theoretical component. The first component provides the tools to investigate the relationship between theology and economic concepts and practices. The second component claims that particular economic practices, behaviours, concepts and institutions are in fact not just grounded in theological concerns over justice and personal transformation, but that this grounding actually renders economic practices, institutions and economic thought as such a part of the realm of the sacred.

Although economic theology as a term is of relatively recent origin, it needs to be kept in mind that the theological underpinnings of modern and secular economic thought have been studied for decades by, amongst others, economists and economic historians such as Jacob Viner, A. M. C. Waterman, John Milbank, Robert Nelson and Deirdre McCloskey (McCloskey 1999; Milbank 1990; Nelson 1993; Viner 1972; Waterman 1983, 1991). In 1991, Nelson used the term economic theology to describe the viewpoint that economics as a science has a theological dimension (1991: 16). For Nelson, this dimension expressed itself as the kind of secular religion at the roots of American progressivism, which in turn structured the growth of economics as a positivist science and which, arguably, replaced traditional Christian visions of a society shaped by a belief in God. Other signs of this theological dimension of economics, according to Nelson, were the messianic character of some leading economists like Milton Friedman and the relentless pursuit by economists of enforcing the new commandments of efficiency and prosperity (Nelson 2004).

A somewhat different notion of economic theology has recently been developed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. His conceptualization of the theological dimension of all things economic is based on a genealogical inquiry into the way early Christian theologians used the Greek term οικονομία (oikonomia) in their strategies of elaborating the doctrine of the Trinity. According to Agamben, two paradigms derived from early Christian theology. First, the juridical paradigm of political theology, leading to a transcendent notion of sovereign power; and second, the immanent order of the economy, which in turn led to the dominance of economic–managerial thinking over all aspects of social life (Agamben 2011). While Nelson travels from contemporary economics back in time to theology (archaeological move), Agamben works his way from late antique theology towards modern economy and the “mysteries” of economic order as a key form that power takes today (genealogical move). Nelson and Agamben are today perhaps the foremost representatives of two forms of economic theology. The former perceives the subject from an intellectual history perspective and situates modern economics as a science within Western progressivist–liberal thought as a kind of secular religion. The latter takes the form of a genealogical study of the economy as an order and derives its conceptual apparatus much more from thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson.

Both “schools”, however, have so far failed to create common ground on which a dialogue is possible. The theoretical assumptions, methodological tools and ontological parameters of both perspectives are so far apart that a genuine conversation might be difficult to achieve. This situation of course makes it even more necessary that students of the subject find a handbook that may guide them through the various issues, theories, concepts and debates that make up the increasingly diverse field of economic theology. This Handbook attempts to serve as a guide which delineates the subject area of economic theology as the study of that which is hidden, namely the clandestine theological underpinnings of both economics as a social science and of the economic order the way we “moderns” have come to accept it. In the following sections, readers will be introduced in more detail to the rationale for this Handbook and will be provided with a more detailed outline of economic theology as an academic field in its own right.

Theology, the stranger

Academic scholars often have an innate aversion to theology. Most of them confuse theology with religion and do not differentiate between theological inquiry and religious ex cathedra teachings. But there is no need to be afraid of theology. Like its (slightly older) sister, political theology, economic theology is a mode of inquiry that understands the modern world as incompletely secularized and – more importantly perhaps – incompletely desacralized. This incompleteness has been made intelligible through the notion of a return. Variously labelled as the “return of religion”, the “return of God” or the “return of theology”, these returns are presented by some as dangerous and by others as harbingers of messianic deliverance. At any rate, the idea of a return links both economic and political theology to a foundational European myth, namely that of the heroic homecoming (νόστος) of Odysseus to Ithaca. The alleged return of religion, theology and of God has become one of the most central tropes of our times (Flanagan 2003; Hyman 2004). Yet, it is also a problematic one since this trope was in itself a reaction to highly visible political events, namely the attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 and later the rise of the Islamic State during the civil war in Syria and Iraq in 2014.

The underlying danger in representing theological inquiry as a “homecomer” is that it gives the impression of a sudden return of political sacrality into a world that understood itself as modernized and secular (Habermas 2008; critical: Flood 2019; Tambar 2016; Taylor 2007). Anyone with a hint of historical knowledge will remember that this modern, secular world has been at the same junction before. In 1979, the Iranian shah fell and made way for politicized Islam at the state level; the mujahideen formed in Afghanistan in response to the Soviet invasion; and in the United States, the Baptist minister Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a pressure group that helped establish the Christian Right as the dominant force in American politics today. The year 1979 is thus seen today as one of the most important watershed moments of the twentieth century (Sloterdijk 2010: 217). Some historically more aware philosophers and sociologists of religions have therefore wondered whether religion ever “left” in the first place (Sloterdijk 2013: 1–3). Most prominently perhaps, the British sociologist of religion David Martin already rejected the universalizing elements of the secularization thesis in the late 1960s (Martin 1969). More recently, the German sociologist Hans Joas similarly argued that the notion of a disenchanted modernity itself needed disenchantment (Joas forthcoming).

These debates are of tremendous importance for economic theologians who often research the mundane as opposed to the glorious. Where political theology investigates matters of statecraft, sovereignty, office, dictatorship, genocide, revolutions, warfare and terrorism, economic theology focuses much more on organizational-, work-, managerial-, consumption- and finance-related issues. Economic theology springs into action when it makes things visible that remain invisible to others, such as the case of the American media entrepreneur Casey Neistat, who tattooed the commands “Work Harder” and “Do More” on the skin of his wrists and arms (Sawa 2019). Such tattoos are an embodiment – literally – of the Protestant work ethic as it was described most famously by Max Weber in 1905 (Weber 2002). The command to “work harder” is theologically significant since it does not simply call on followers to get rich quick. Rather, working harder means to live more intensively the realization that one is “in the world but not of the world”. This specifically theological concept underpins all modern work ethics and as such has never disappeared or “returned”.

Whatever the differences between political and economic theology might be, both forms of inquiry start with the assumption that in a world that perceives itself as “obviously” secularized, theology will always be a stranger, a xenos. This stranger is decidedly not an Odyssean homecomer. For Homer, the gods were strangers; they never went away, but instead appeared in various disguises in venues as they pleased. As Alfred Schütz argued, the stranger cannot simply “recur to the memories of his past”. This impossibility renders the stranger more open-eyed on his journeys and more objective than the homecomer (Schütz 1944, 1945: 369).

What is economic theology – a definition

Methodologically speaking, economic theology often begins with an investigation of the historical emergence of modern forms of economic theorizing and economic organizing. It then progresses to the empirical study of social modes in which the sacred is activated within the seemingly profane realms of management, production, consumption, finance and entrepreneurship in the contemporary world. Comprising historical and contemporary, and theoretical and empirical elements, economic theology can thus be defined as follows:

It is the study of the forms of interaction between theological imaginaries on the one hand, and economic thought and economic–managerial practices on the other, both past and present. It identifies explicit and implicit theologies inherent in economic concepts, institutions and practices as well as the role of economic terminology within theological thought, both past and present.

Economic theology is thus not merely the study of religious teachings “about” economic problems. Economic theology understands the economic/economy and the theological as intimately connected rather than as separate subjects. Genealogically, as the chapters in this Handbook show, economics and theology emerged out of the same matters of concern. Following Figure 1.1,¹ I argue that economic theology does not only study how theological concerns influenced economic thinking, but also how political-economic concepts shaped core theological institutions and concepts over time. Devin Singh, for instance, has shown how practices of coinage influenced late antique theological discussions of man “being made in the image of God” and, specifically, the ransom theory of atonement (Singh 2018). A similar move was employed by Jan Assmann, who showed how Jewish and later Christian notions of God’s covenant emerged from Egyptian and Babylonian (commercial) contract law and the law covering the treatment and sale of slaves (2018: 204–52). Thus, Assmann turns Carl Schmitt’s dictum on its head: before theological concepts became political–constitutional concepts in the process of secularization, these very theological concepts were themselves crafted out of political–economic practices that prevailed in ancient Assyria and Egypt (Assmann 2000).

Figure 1.1The process of economic-theological research

The shape of these continuous interactions – the secularization of theological concepts and the theological elevation of political–economic and juridical concepts – can be described in terms of analogy, homology and resonance. The analogy between political–economic and theological concepts, that is, their often striking family resemblances, can be used as a methodological entry point...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 An introduction to economic theology
• PART I Theological concepts and their economic meaning
• PART II Economic concepts and their theological anchoring
• PART III Society, management and organization
• PART IV Genealogy of economic theology
• PART V Exit
• Index