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[Expositions 13.1 (2019) 67–80] Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

The Utopianism of the Obvious:  

A Response to Mary Hirschfeld’s Aquinas and the Market 

 

WILLIAM T. CAVANAUGH 

DePaul University 

 

 

I had heard about Mary Hirschfeld long before I had ever read anything by her. “There’s this 

theology grad student at Notre Dame who already has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard” went 

the rumor. We theologians were excited by the idea that someone with a respectable degree in a 

“real” discipline would come slumming in our field. I picked up Hirschfeld’s first book, then, with 

great anticipation. At last someone would be writing about theology and economics with bona 

fides in both fields. I was not disappointed. I was, however, somewhat nonplussed as I started 

reading the preface, where Hirschfeld describes her journey into theology and lays out some of her 

main findings: People are doing more than pursuing their own preferences when they make moral 

choices (x).1 Economic prosperity is not the same as happiness (xii). Our wants are not necessarily 

insatiable (xv). We engage in economic activity in order to pursue the goods we value, so 

economics requires an account of the good life (xv). For me, the money quote of the preface is 

this: “In retrospect, this should have been obvious all along” (xv). So many of Hirschfeld’s 

conclusions have the ring of common sense to them. Although she retains a clear affection for the 

field of economics, I could not help but marvel at how that field had trained her to ignore common 

sense to begin with. Rather than simply being impressed by Hirschfeld’s learning, which is 

considerable, I was equally impressed by the amount of unlearning that Hirschfeld has had to do 

in order to put forward an account of a sane economy. 

It is not economics as a whole that needs to be unlearned; Hirschfeld is adamant that economics 

provides useful tools for analyzing the empirical effects of policy decisions. The problem is that 

orthodox economics as currently practiced claims to be a purely descriptive science while in fact 

smuggling in metaphysical claims about the human person that have normative effects. 

“Mainstream economics is tacitly grounded in its own metaphysics” (xviii). The problem is not 

simply that economics ignores the question of happiness and gives no account of the good life, 

preferring to simply observe what people in fact prefer. The problem is rather that the pursuit of 



The Utopianism of the Obvious 68 

preference becomes an ersatz account of happiness and the good life, one which is detrimental to 

true happiness. 

Mainstream economics would prefer not to talk about happiness at all; rational choice theory is 

officially neutral with regard to the goals that people choose. Hirschfeld masterfully shows how 

rational choice theory models a peculiar kind of human being. Though it tries hard not to make 

judgments about what really fulfills human life, the goal of mainstream economics is to maximize 

the satisfaction of preferences, and economics is expected to maximize well-being, so the 

satisfaction of preferences is tacitly equated with well-being (48, 52). But people make mistakes 

about what choices will lead to their well-being, and some people make choices based on 

something other than their own well-being, narrowly defined, giving gifts or even their own lives 

to others. These apparently irrational choices can be fitted into rational choice theory by simply 

redefining whatever people choose as rational (46); self-seeking can be defined so broadly as to 

include giving one’s life away (61). In both cases, rational choice theory is merely tautologous. 

The more it tries to avoid giving a substantive account of human well-being, the more it simply 

equates well-being with the satisfaction of preferences, and thus tacitly promotes a normative 

account of human happiness. 

Hirschfeld brilliantly and clearly shows that, if we assume no objective goal for human desire 

to arrive at, then the human being is presented as a generator of unending desires. Although 

economists frequently object that rational choice does not require that desire be unbounded, 

Hirschfeld shows that economics is based on the twin ideas that scarcity is inevitable because 

desires are infinite and that economic growth is always a good. Economic growth allows for a 

continually expanding generation and satisfaction of preferences (62–63). Preference is an ever-

ascending scale of value, and all goods tend to be collapsed into one type of good—material goods 

(66). Because these goods are subjected to mathematical modeling, they are modeled in terms of 

money, which makes all kinds of goods interchangeable. Although money is intended as a means 

for the pursuit of one’s preferred goods, money inevitably becomes an end in itself. With no 

objective end to pursue, we are encouraged to pursue what we are told will allow us to pursue our 

preferences, whatever they are. Because money is the universal means, it becomes the end to which 

our lives become oriented. We work hard to get money which we think will bring us leisure, but it 

doesn’t, because we are too busy pursuing more money, which has become the end of our activities 

rather than the means (129–130). 



69  Cavanaugh 

What Hirschfeld has done is to show that economists, despite their protestations, are already 

operating on the territory ostensibly relegated to theologians, that is, the end or goal of human life. 

Despite their claims to the contrary, economists have a fully developed, if distorted, anthropology, 

and are making normative claims sotto voce about the ends that humans should pursue. Once she 

has located the economists on the theologians’ territory, Hirschfeld then puts them in conversation 

with a real theologian, Thomas Aquinas, and finds them overmatched. Hirschfeld is happy to 

recognize the economists’ preeminence within their own area of expertise. For example, she 

dismisses (too hastily, in my judgment) Aquinas’s ideas on the Just Price. For Aquinas, those who 

jack up the price of wood in the wake of a hurricane are unjustly taking advantage of people’s 

desperation, but economists recognize that the higher price sends a useful signal to distant wood 

producers to increase production (23). Aquinas may not have understood markets, but he 

understood human desire and the true end of human life. If economists are going to trespass 

surreptitiously in this territory, they will need an account with the sophistication of Aquinas. To 

restore sanity to economic analysis, Hirschfeld turns to Aquinas for an account of the human 

person as one whose well-being is not the satisfaction of an ever-expanding range of preferences, 

and an account of the good life that is not equated with a rising income. 

It is easy enough to simply declare that God is in fact the end that humans seek, but Hirschfeld 

gives a sophisticated account of how the notion of a creator God works in Aquinas’s thought. It is 

not as simple as opposing finite goods to the infinite good, who is God. Hirschfeld argues that both 

Aquinas and mainstream economists think we are oriented to an infinite good. For economists, 

however, that good is quantitative: there is always something better out there. For Aquinas, on the 

other hand, human desire is qualitative. We move toward perfection, toward completion, not 

toward the next desirable thing, whatever it might be. Although Augustine is not mentioned in the 

book, we could say that the consumer’s heart is as restless as Augustine’s, easily bored with the 

latest gadget and wanting something new and better. For Augustine, and for Aquinas, the human 

heart comes to rest in God. As Hirschfeld says, desire for Aquinas is analogous to reason, which 

does not want endless arguments, but wants to arrive at a conclusion to any given syllogism (80). 

Happiness—which is not an emotional state, but a comprehensive state of well-being or 

flourishing—is not merely subjective. What we desire can be evaluated against an objective 

standard of what is truly desirable, though in practice this takes careful discernment. Discernment 

of the truly good is not mere preference. All of this follows from Aquinas’s metaphysics, which 



The Utopianism of the Obvious 70 

posits a good Creator God in whom all being participates, including those who do not explicitly 

acknowledge God (82–93). 

In this turn to theology, Hirschfeld never loses sight of material goods and the proper role of 

economics in the study thereof. Hirschfeld deftly shows how Aquinas’s metaphysics allows for a 

fuller appreciation of the uniqueness of material goods, which are not reducible to a uniform 

monetary value (116), while simultaneously relegating them to their proper place as instrumental 

means to happiness, not ends in themselves (97). And she brilliantly uses Aquinas’s two-tiered 

account of human action to carve out a place for rational choice theory, which is useful for 

describing how people behave when they act out of their untutored passions. The incentives 

favored by economists do often work, because they appeal, as either carrots or sticks, to the lower 

passions. People are capable of more, however; the virtuous person has no need for such external 

motivations, but has internalized the pursuit of what is objectively good in her habits (104). 

There is much more to praise about Hirschfeld’s analysis, but my time is probably more 

efficiently spent in the remainder of this essay commenting on what aspects of her argument could 

benefit from further exploration. My first set of comments pertains to the empirical claims that 

rational choice theorists make. The problem with rational choice is not only that it is normative 

when it claims to be purely descriptive, but also that its descriptions of human behavior are not 

convincing. Here Hirschfeld and Aquinas could find an ally in work by psychologists who study 

human choosing. Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice, for 

example, argues on empirical grounds that the proliferation of choices that economists regard as 

the ideal in fact makes people less happy.2 Schwartz uses the term “maximizer” to describe those 

who try to live up to the economists’ ideal of one who surveys the range of options and makes the 

best choice. The maximizer does not stop when they find what they need; there is always one more 

website to check for a better deal. The “satisficer” stops when they find what they are looking for. 

Empirical studies show that satisficers are, on average, happier than maximizers, despite the fact 

that maximizers will often end up getting better deals, because the maximizer can never be 

completely happy with the choices they make. The maximizer/satisficer distinction maps onto 

Hirschfeld’s quantitative/qualitative distinction. Aquinas is a satisficer, recognizing that happiness 

requires the completion of desire. Schwartz’s work provides empirical support for Hirschfeld’s 

critique of rational choice theory. 



71  Cavanaugh 

“You know, the Stones said, ‘You can’t always get what you want,’” says Harvard psychologist 

Daniel Gilbert. “I don’t think that’s the problem. The problem is you can’t always know what you 

want.”3 Gilbert has shown that humans are prone to an “empathy gap” by which we forget how 

bad our decision making is in “hot” emotional states when we are in a “cold” state. The “empathy 

gap” is exacerbated by “impact bias,” whereby people base their choices disproportionately on 

how previous experiences have felt at their extremes, both high and low. We consistently 

overestimate how happy a new kitchen will make us and how devastating a social snub will be, 

but in both cases we adjust and start taking them for granted. And we are habitually forgetful of 

our ability to adapt.4 So we remain on a “hedonic treadmill,” whereby we pursue happiness in 

novel and better products and experiences, only to find them disappointing, and so we search for 

new products and experiences. The inevitable disappointment produces regret: “Why did I think 

moving to a big, isolated house would make me happy?” The solution to regret would seem to be 

to keep one’s options open, to make reversible decisions, but Schwartz finds that this makes the 

problem worse. If one commits to life choices like marriage and community and vocation, one can 

consider the matter settled and move on. Being constantly open to a new intimate partner or a 

move to a new city or a new job produces anxiety that one is not maximizing one’s choices. 

Schwartz finds that married people who consider their vows irreversible are happier than those 

who do not, and he concludes “what seems to contribute most to happiness binds us rather than 

liberates us.”5 

Binding can only be liberating if we are bound to something outside of ourselves that cures our 

bad decision making. Schwartz and Gilbert do not draw this conclusion explicitly, but if we are 

bad at knowing what we want, then the only solution is some non-subjective standard of good to 

guide our choices. The work of empirical psychology, in other words, not only questions the real 

existence of the subject constructed by rational choice theory, but also buttresses Hirschfeld’s 

claim, following Aquinas, that the true end of human life is not subjectively determined (82–84). 

There is an objective reality that is both “out there,” independent of our choices, and 

simultaneously, as Augustine says, interior intimo meo, closer to me than I am to myself.6 My 

deepest happiness is not simply available to me in whatever I happen to prefer; I don’t 

spontaneously know what I really want. My true happiness comes in searching and discerning and 

finding what is true about the universe, the love of God being the most basic truth. 



The Utopianism of the Obvious 72 

To a Christian, the love of God is basic in both the sense of “foundational” and in the sense of 

“obvious.” Discerning what is good and what particular shape happiness is meant to take in one’s 

life is complicated, but knowing that preference is not the same as happiness should be, to use 

Hirschfeld’s word, obvious (xv). Hirschfeld’s book does a masterful job of clearing away the 

distortions that mainstream economics has introduced to the way that we think about the basic 

mechanisms of human choice and recovering a richer, saner, and more common sense picture of 

human desire. Once this foundational work has been undertaken, once the obvious has been 

recovered, however, I wonder what more can be said. What does a specifically Christian view of 

happiness have to contribute to economic life? Beyond the belief in a Creator God who orders the 

world in love, and beyond the basic anthropology that comes with that view of God, what do 

Christian theological loci like Christology, soteriology, and eschatology have to contribute to 

economics? 

Perhaps raising these questions simply goes beyond the purpose of the book, which is to critique 

the distortions of rational choice theory in economics and to offer an alternative account of human 

desire that working economists can take seriously. What is needed is “finding a language that can 

bring moral concerns to bear on markets that obey the logic of profit seeking. Without a bridging 

language, ethical or theological critiques seem to be a matter of imposition on the market […]” 

(2). Hirschfeld does not buy the idea that theology and economics are two separate concerns; 

theology provides one possible framework of higher ends for economics that economics cannot 

itself provide. Theology is useful for believers who are trying to reconcile their faith with their 

economic life. “But it is of more general value insofar as it serves as a reminder that some 

comprehensive framework is necessary if we are to remember that wealth is meant to serve us and 

not to be our master” (3). The modest goal of the book is to open a conversation with secular 

economists about the need for “some comprehensive framework,” and to suggest that seeing 

humans as God’s creatures could be one such framework. 

The modesty of this goal manifests itself in some stern warnings against utopian thinking. 

Hirschfeld identifies the challenge economists present to theologians with a quote from 

Machiavelli that says, in part, “it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who 

lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation” (4). It 

is nice to talk about virtues and goods, but how can that talk be practical? “Is there any way to 

craft a theological economics that can take on board the real insights on offer from the hard-headed 



73  Cavanaugh 

pragmatism of economists while still contributing a substantive moral analysis?” (9). Hirschfeld 

briefly surveys the various types of theological economics currently available and finds them all 

wanting. The first bends theology to economics: Michael Novak says the imago dei endorses 

entrepreneurial capitalism, while Philip Wogaman says the same doctrine supports the welfare 

state. The second limits theology to deciding on ends, while economists come up with the means. 

The problem here is that most everyone agrees on the ends already; we all want full employment, 

living wages, affordable housing, etc. The real question is how to get there. The third approach is 

a theological critique of the premises of economics. This is the approach with which Hirschfeld 

has the most sympathy, but she accuses its practitioners of utopianism. D. Stephen Long and 

Kathryn Tanner are the main culprits here; both offer only wholesale rejections of mainstream 

economics instead of nuanced critiques.  

 

Tanner’s critique of the role of finance in our economy omits any account of the 

function finance could play if it had the right spirit. As a result, there are no tools 

for pragmatically thinking through what could be done to combat the negative 

effects she details. Correlatively, Tanner’s take on financial capitalism is one sided. 

There is indeed much to critique. But Tanner gives us no tools for thinking about 

how to balance the negative effects of modern capitalism with its beneficial role in, 

say, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the past few decades. 

Tanner thereby leaves herself open to the Machiavellian charge that this is merely 

utopian thinking. (22) 

 

There is something immediately appealing about this type of pragmatism. We want to be 

affirmative of the world, and we also want a seat at the table so that we can effect real change. But 

I have grown increasingly suspicious of typologies that box every other thinker in a field into one 

or another unworkable paradigm, only to present the author of the typology as the lone voice who 

solves the problems plaguing the field. I don’t think Hirschfeld is fair to Long or Tanner. More 

broadly, I worry that Hirschfeld has a kind of a priori investment in mainstream economics that 

may prevent her from getting to the root of the problem. Taking cues on pragmatism from 

Machiavelli does not seem like a good place to start. 



The Utopianism of the Obvious 74 

Part of the problem is that Hirschfeld’s appeal to the “hard-headed pragmatism of economists” 

gets dismantled in the course of her own analysis. Mainstream economists are not hard-headed in 

their analysis of the human person, of “how one lives” and “what is done,” to use Machiavelli’s 

words; they are quite drastically wrong, according not only to Augustine and Aquinas but to 

empirical psychologists like Schwartz and Gilbert. They are hard-headed, but in another sense of 

the term: stubborn and unable to see the evidence in front of them. The idea that mainstream 

economics is hard-headed realism is an ideological stance that deflects attention from the field’s 

failure to deliver on grandiose promises to provide a science of human behavior and 

simultaneously attempts to get people to behave as the economists’ model says they should behave. 

Hirschfeld would do better to avoid feeding that ideology. 

More crucial than the status of economics is the status of the market economy itself. In bringing 

moral concerns to bear on the market, Hirschfeld seems to take the market as a given, and suggests 

that we need to work within it to combat injustices. Aquinas did not understand the way markets 

work. He lived in a static and hierarchical society in which people’s consumption levels were set 

by what was necessary to live becomingly in one’s station in life. Hirschfeld chides Aquinas for 

not questioning the gap between the high standards of living of the lords and those peasants who 

clung to survival (171). She does, however, appreciate the way that a static society capped 

consumption. Today, by contrast, the measure of what we “need” keeps moving. “The plight of 

the genuinely indigent in faraway places will rouse our sense of concern, but we give far less than 

we might, and I would argue that this is largely bound up in the way we translate rising income 

into rising norms for what is necessary in order to live becomingly, which, in turn, has a good deal 

to do with the otherwise desirable thought that social mobility is a good thing” (173). 

This analysis is right and important, but it is geared toward “us” who have rising incomes but 

don’t give to the poor. What is missing is a more fundamental questioning of the division between 

capital and labor and the contrast between elites and the billions of desperately poor today. Aquinas 

was concerned with giving excess wealth to the poor but did not wonder how some came to be 

lords and others serfs to begin with. Curiosity about primitive accumulation is equally lacking in 

Hirschfeld’s account. I was disappointed that she echoes the frequently-cited conservative talking 

point about the hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty by capitalism in recent decades. There 

are several problems with touting this statistic, as any economist should be able to notice. The first 

is that 80% of the gains have come from just two countries, China and India, and China’s status as 



75  Cavanaugh 

a Communist country rather complicates the narrative of the triumph of capitalism. The second 

problem is that the statistic is based on a poverty line of $1.90 per day in 2011 dollars, which is 

not enough to combat malnutrition and early mortality in most places. Many scholars have been 

calling for a more reasonable poverty line of $7.40 a day; using that measurement, the poverty rate 

has remained steady at 60% since 1981, and the raw number of poor has swelled to 4.2 billion. 

The third and most basic problem is that the statistic is based on money income. Hundreds of 

millions of people have been pushed out of subsistence living and into the labor market, but their 

lives have not necessarily thereby improved just because they now receive and are dependent on 

wages. The Anuak people of Ethiopia had little need for money until they were evicted from their 

ancestral lands by the Ethiopian government; they now work the palm oil plantations on that land 

run by an Indian agribusiness for wages that do not compensate for the loss of their traditional 

sources of food and dignity. Enclosures of common lands are not a just an historical footnote, but 

are at the foundation of the division between capitalists and laborers, and they have accelerated in 

recent decades.7 The reality behind the happy tale of millions escaping poverty is in fact, as 

anthropologist Jason Hickel writes, “a story of coerced proletarianisation.”8 This is the story of 

primitive accumulation. Any hard-headed assessment of the pros and cons of capitalism must 

begin with the creation of the distinction between capitalists and laborers. The transition to a 

market economy was not possible without the forcible movement of people from subsistence living 

into labor markets, and the process is ongoing.9 

One cannot fault an author for not covering every possible angle on a topic. My concern is that 

Hirschfeld’s dismissal of “utopian” thinking can block off more foundational critiques of 

capitalism in a well-intentioned effort to build bridges with economists who simply take the market 

economy as given. The fundamental question is one of what is given—in other words, the 

relationship between what is and what ought to be. What is needed to address this question is not 

Machiavelli but Christian eschatology; unfortunately there is no explicit engagement with this 

theological locus in Hirschfeld’s book. So she admonishes Tanner for imagining a non-competitive 

economy by pointing out “Yet God manifestly did create a world in which some goods are subject 

to rivalry in consumption. There must, then, be some language that accounts for rivalry and the 

associated degree of possessiveness that is nonetheless compatible with our call to mirror God’s 

graciousness” (20). I think it is deeply inadequate to read God’s intentions for creation off of the 

way things are and adjust our expectations accordingly. One can dismiss the eschatological vision 



The Utopianism of the Obvious 76 

of Isaiah 11:6 by putting a hungry wolf in a cage with a lamb and saying “See what happens? 

That’s just the way it is.” But Christian eschatology is meant to mark the difference between the 

way things are because of sin and the way things were created to be. There must, indeed, be “some 

language that accounts for rivalry and the associated degree of possessiveness”; in Christian 

language it is called sin. It is what the Messiah came to save us from. 

There is only one mention of Jesus Christ in Hirschfeld’s book, which comes by way of 

explaining the three parts of the Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, the third dealing with Christ, “who 

is our way back to God” (24). Given the importance of our way back to God in Hirschfeld’s 

account of economic life, it is surprising that there is not a single citation from the tertia pars. 

Again, I do not want to fault Hirschfeld for not covering every locus of Christian theology in her 

book, but I would encourage further work on Aquinas and economics that would take into account 

the importance of Jesus Christ, our way back to God. I am unsure of what exactly that would look 

like, but surely Christ should make some difference to a Christian theological engagement with 

economics. Jesus had quite a bit to say about economic matters, and much of it had a distinctly 

utopian bent. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth” (Matt 6:19); “It is easier for a 

camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” 

(Matt 19:24); “You cannot serve both God and money” (Matt 6:24); and so on. 

This last quote serves as the opening line of Hirschfeld’s first chapter, which is entitled “To 

Serve God or Mammon?: The Dialogue between Theology and Economics.” The emphasis on 

dialogue between theology and economics is important and salutary. For Jesus, however, it was 

not a matter of dialogue between God and Mammon; Jesus personified money as Mammon to 

emphasize that people were prone to treat money as a rival god to the true God. The theological 

issue here is idolatry. Pope Francis rarely talks about the world economy today without talking 

about idolatry.10 Hirschfeld does an excellent job of uncovering the tacit metaphysics that grounds 

mainstream economics (xviii). But she does not really engage with economics as theology, in the 

way that Jesus invites us to do. A model for further reflection on this theme might be Philip 

Goodchild’s book Theology of Money, in which Goodchild unpacks the ways that money today 

holds the place that God occupied in medieval society—as the omnipotent guarantor of value. The 

main difference is that money is short on mercy.11 

Nothing shy of a theology of money seems adequate to address the financialization of the world 

economy today. I am not convinced that the matter is as simple as elaborating the “function finance 



77  Cavanaugh 

could play if it had the right spirit” (22). Will the solution be to send people with the right spirit to 

work on Wall Street? Hirschfeld thinks that a “Thomistic perspective” would have helped in the 

financial crisis of 2008. “A financial environment in which people were vigilant to remember that 

finance serves the real economy and is only of value to the extent that it promotes real transactions 

that produce real economic value, and in which they were also vigilant to remember that the 

abstraction of money can fuel a quest for more that frequently blinds even very smart people to 

obvious realities, would be less subject to the instability of bubbles and manias” (159–160). It is 

an admirable goal to make people “vigilant to remember” what is true and good, but those who are 

too vigilant in this way are likely to face intense pressures to conform or be fired. 

Hirschfeld admits as much in her last chapter, and even describes her vision of a Thomist 

economy as “frankly, a utopian vision of what economic life could be” (192). Secular economists 

are unlikely to buy her theistic anthropology, and a disordered relationship with wealth pervades 

our society. We might add that mainstream “orthodox” economics is hegemonic even at Catholic 

universities. Until Mary Hirschfeld and others like her are teaching in the Economics Department 

at Villanova instead of Humanities, Thomist economics will have little purchase among the 

decision-makers who oversee the economy. She writes of the obstacles to achieving her vision, 

and says “this is the world we inhabit, and it might be difficult to see how the Thomistic framework 

is actually useful. We seem to have foundered on the problem that animated the first chapter” (193) 

where she introduced Machiavelli’s warning. She tries in her last chapter to outline what a humane 

economy would look like, but much of the chapter consists of repeating the critiques of mainstream 

economists she has made in the rest of the book. The last eight pages attempt to lay out “The 

Implications of Thomas’s Framework for Economic Practice.” A Thomistic economy would, first, 

promote happiness, not wealth (209–212), and, second, recognize that economics is not merely 

descriptive but helps shape the cultural conversation (212–217). 

Ultimately, I am not convinced that Hirschfeld has solved the problem of utopian thinking any 

better than Tanner or Long or any other thinker. When the inhumane economic system has such a 

lock on power, and when the obvious has been so well concealed, any vision of a humane economy 

is going to appear utopian. This is a problem for all of us thinkers, and I don’t think we are going 

to be able to think our way out of it. The vision is necessary, but unlikely to become reality unless 

we create alternative economic practices that fit uneasily within the dominant market system as it 

currently operates. Thinking theologically will help get to the root of the problem and expose the 



The Utopianism of the Obvious 78 

idolatry of the current system that leaves billions in abject poverty. That thinking can best go on 

within communities of practice that reject market logic and consider the good life for all as the end 

of any sane economy. Pope Benedict in Caritas in Veritate encourages us to challenge the 

“continuing hegemony of the binary model of market-plus-state” with “hybrid forms of 

commercial behavior” that combine profit and solidarity, and “micro-projects,” including “micro-

finance,” that challenge the dominant forces that dehumanize the economy.12 Pope Francis writes 

in Laudato Si’, “Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen 

sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting means of 

production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community.”13 Both 

Benedict and Francis are keen that such spaces remain not merely niches but evangelize the entire 

economy.14 

My suggestions for further exploration are set against the backdrop of my admiration for what 

Hirschfeld has accomplished in her book. She has established grounds for a dialogue with 

mainstream economics on some very foundational issues. She has given us a thoroughgoing 

critique of rational choice theory, and replaced its anthropology with a Thomist account of human 

desire that, guided by a good Creator God, is capable of being oriented to objective goods beyond 

itself. In the future I would like to see her develop a critique of the theology of mainstream 

economics and develop a Christian theology and practice of economics based on what the event 

of Christ means for our economic relationships with the material world and with poor persons that 

embody Christ. Hirschfeld clearly has more to teach us, and I look forward to her future work.  

 

 

Notes 

 

1. Page numbers in parentheses are from Mary L. Hirschfeld, Aquinas and the Market: 

Toward a Humane Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 

2. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (New York: Ecco, 2004). 

3. Daniel Gilbert, quoted in Jon Gertner, “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness,” New York Times 

Magazine September 7, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/magazine/the-futile-

pursuit-of-happiness.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm 



79  Cavanaugh 

4. Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Vintage, 2005). 

5. Schwartz 108. 

6. Augustine, Confessions III.vi.11. 

7. For a worldwide survey of recent enclosures, see Fred Pearce, The Land Grabbers: The 

New Fight over Who Owns the Earth (Boston: Beacon, 2012). 

8. Jason Hickel, “Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong,” The 

Guardian 29 January 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/ 

bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other  

9. For the history, see Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political 

Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke University 

Press, 2000). 

10. For example, Evangelii Gaudium §55: “We have created new idols. The worship of the 

ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1–35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry 

of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. 

The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, 

above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs 

alone: consumption” (The Holy See, 2013, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/ 

apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-

gaudium.html). For further examples and analysis, see my article “Return of the Golden 

Calf: Economy, Idolatry, and Secularization since Gaudium et Spes,” Theological Studies 

76.4 (December 2015): 698–717. 

11. Philip Goodchild, Theology of Money (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 

12. Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, The Holy See, 2009, http://w2.vatican.va/content/ 

benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-

veritate.html, §41, 38, 45, 47, 65. 

13. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §112. Later in Laudato Si’ he commends the “great variety of 

small-scale food production systems which feed the greater part of the world’s peoples, 



The Utopianism of the Obvious 80 

using a modest amount of land and producing less waste, be it in small agricultural parcels, 

in orchards and gardens, hunting and wild harvesting or local fishing.” In the same section, 

Pope Francis calls on civil authorities “to adopt clear and firm measures in support of small 

producers and differentiated production” (The Holy See, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/ 

contentfrancesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-

si.html). 

14. E.g., “Efforts are needed—and it is essential to say this—not only to create ‘ethical’ sectors 

or segments of the economy or the world of finance, but to ensure that the whole 

economy—the whole of finance—is ethical, not merely by virtue of an external label, but 

by its respect for requirements intrinsic to its very nature” (Benedict XVI, Caritas in 

Veritate §45). 


