Foreword

• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12359
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Author: Clifford W. Cobb

Foreword

By Clifford W. Cobb, Editor-in-ChiEf

I will confess that I never gave much thought to the philosophy of

work or its relation to economic theory before reading the articles

in this issue. My thanks to Charles Clark for bringing this diverse

set of authors together and for raising important questions based on

Catholic social thought.

Economic theory has tended to treat production as an end in it-

self, which leaves people and nature as means to that end. The term

“labor” in economic theory classifies people from the perspective of

management: how they can be most productively used in a process

that creates value. The discipline of economics is thus permeated by

a class bias before it offers a single proposition about productive re-

lations. Even the vast subdiscipline of “labor economics” shares that

bias. In the language of Catholic social thought, economic theory pre-

sumes the priority of capital over labor.

The Contribution of Catholic Social Thought on Work

Catholic social thought has played an admirable role for over a cen-

tury in reminding us implicitly of the bias that is built into economic

reasoning. The Catholic insistence that work has both an objective

and a subjective side necessarily subverts the one-dimensional anthro-

pology of economics. In this way, Catholic social thought highlights

the “original sin” of economics: the tendency to become so enmeshed

in abstract reasoning that it masks the full range of social practices by

which humans create value in collaboration with the rest of nature.

On the question of work and the creation of a more humane econ-

omy, Catholic social teachings provide a balanced perspective that is

in danger of being lost. Those teachings consider work as an essential

part of the process of human development, but in order to play that

role, work is defined far more broadly than paid employment. In

addition, Catholic tradition has opposed work that is repetitive and

mind numbing. This does not rule out all manual labor, which the

Church has generally supported, only the sort of industrial work that

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 4 (September, 2020).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12359

© 2020 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc