Twenty Articles From
The Newspaper:
The Threefold Social Order
Law and Economics
Among
the various objections that can
be made to the threefold social order is one that can be phrased somewhat
as follows: The efforts of political thinkers in recent years have been
directed in part towards creating legal provisions appropriate to the
existing conditions of economic production. It might be said that
the idea of the threefold order totally disregards all the work done
in this direction and wants merely to detach the legal sphere from the
economic altogether.
Those
who raise this objection imagine that thereby they can dismiss the idea
of the threefold order as something that throws practical experience
to the winds and claims a role in the reconstruction of society without
this experience. How-ever, the reverse is true. The opponents of the
threefold social order say: “One should reflect on the difficulties
that have attended every attempt to arrive at a legal system adapted
to modern conditions of production. One should consider the obstacles
met by all who have made such at-tempts.” However, the adherents
of the threefold order must answer: These very difficulties are proof
that people were taking the wrong road. They persisted in trying to
contrive a social form in which certain demands of modern times were
to be satisfied through a single combined economic and legal sytem.
They ought, however, to recognize that economic life, when conducted
expediently, promotes conditions that necessarily tend to counter the
sense of right and justice, unless this tendency is deliberately counteracted
from outside the economy. It is to the advantage of economic
life that individuals or groups who have special qualifications for
a particular business of production are able to accumulate capital for
their business. Presently, the best services can be rendered to the
community as a whole only by qualified persons through the control of
large sums of capital. However, the nature of economics dictates that
such services can only consist of the most efficient production of the
goods that the community needs. A certain amount of economic power flows
into the hands of the people who pro-duce such goods. It cannot
be otherwise, and the threefold social order recognizes this. Accordingly,
it aims to bring about a society in which this economic power will still
arise, but out of which no social evils can grow. The threefold idea
does not propose to hinder the accumulation of large sums of capital
in individual hands; it recognizes that to do so would be to lose the
possibility of employing socially the abilities of these private individuals
in the service of the general public. It proposes, however, that the
moment an individual can no longer attend to the management of the means
of production within his sphere of power, these means of production
should be transferred to another capable person. The latter will not
be able to obtain these means of production through any economic power
he may possess, but solely because he is the most capable person. In
practice, however, this can only be realized when the transfer is directed
according to principles that have nothing to do with the means of economic
power; such principles become possible only when the people themselves,
with their interests, are engaged in spheres of life other than the
economic. If men are joined together on a legal foundation which produces
interests other than economic ones, these other interests will then
be able to assert themselves. If the human being is absorbed by economic
interests alone, those other interests never develop. If the
person who possesses the means of production is to have any feeling
whatever that the best and most efficient person in any economic position
is one who obtains it by ability and not by economic power, such a feeling
must grow in a sphere established apart from the economic. In and of
itself, the economic life can call forth a sense for economic power
but not, simultaneously, a sense for social justice. Therefore, all
attempts to conjure out of economic thought itself a code of social
justice were bound to fail.
Such matters
are based upon the actual realities of life; these are the things taken
into account by the idea of the threefold social order. It is guided
by the practical experiences met by those who attempted to create legal
structures for the modern economic forms; but it will not be led by
these experiences to add a new attempt that resembles the many that
have already failed. Its aim is not to try to produce social laws in
a field of life where they cannot grow, but to bring about that life
itself from which such laws can grow. In modern times this life
has been absorbed into the economy; the first step is to restore its
independence. To perceive clearly the idea of the threefold order, one
must be willing to understand that the economic life needs to have its
own forces continually corrected from outside, if it is not to call forth
out of itself obstacles to its own growth. This necessary corrective will
be supplied when there is an independent cultural life and corresponding
independent legal sphere to make provision for it. The unity
of social life is not thereby destroyed; in reality, it arises thereby
for the first time in its true sense. This unity cannot be brought about
by the ordinances of a central authority; it must be allowed to arise
out of the interaction of those forces that each need to exist separately
in order to live as a whole. Experiences met with in attempting to create
for modern economic life legal relations that are drawn from the economy
itself, should not therefore be regarded as arguments against the threefold
social order. On the contrary, these experiences should be seen to lead
directly to the recognition that the threefold organism is the idea
modern life demands.
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