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PAR.TISAN R.EVIEW
tionary norms of conduct and more socially concerned religiosity are
prevailing and often leave a void in human experience.
Centesimus Annus,
on the contrary, implies that culture as value and
project interrelates but is not inseparably bound up with specific artifacts
of political or economic character. These artifacts remain relatively open
to cultural modifiability even as they tend to affect the culture which
adopts and adapts th em. Still more, the political and economic artifacts
of modernity - democracy and the market economy - by their own de–
velopment, which reveals both their strengths and their limitations, may
very well call for a cultural environment complementing and in signifi–
cant ways transforming the original liberal, historical, cultural environ–
ment from which they sprang.
This perspective gives rise to the double intention of the encyclical.
First, it intends to "actualize," that is, to modernize, Catholic social
thought by the explicit recognition of the validity of a market economy
within a democratic polity , both as "the most effective instrument of
allocation of resources and of effective satisfaction of needs," and because
it gives "primacy to the will and the preferences" of persons. At the same
time, it intends to point out the limitations of the market economy, in–
cluding the danger of market "idolatry," and to contribute to overcom–
ing them through a renovated ethical-cultural context of Judeo–
Christian inspiration.
" ... Western countries," advises the encyclical in this latter respect,
"run the danger of seeing in the downfall of real socialism the unilateral
victory of their own system, and for this reason may not worry to intro–
duce due changes into it." [s there not inherent in this danger the con–
comitant danger of seeing in democracy, market economy and liberal
culture, as they presently are, a kind of definitive product of history, an
"end of history and the last man" as Fukuyama puts it in neo-Hegelian
teons?
While in
Centesimus Annus,
the primacy of culture with regard to
economics remains open and flexible, for Veliz it borders on cultural–
economic determinism. An astounding expression of this is to be found
in his last chapter, as a footnote to the fundamental thesis that for Latin
American centralists "One is good, many - diversity - is bad, since truth
is one, and only error is multiple."
In
the footnote, Veliz states: " ...
one wonders whether th e mixture of Kantian moral autonomy, roman–
ticism, and nationalism would have proved so explosive and influential in
the absence of those dark Satanic mills in the English Midlands . ..."
Such is for Veliz the prevalence of economic artifact within the primacy
of modern culture. But there is surprisingly little economic analysis in the
