Widely considered the foundational document of modern papal social teaching, Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum articulates a host of principles that have informed Catholic social teaching and thought through the twentieth century and beyond. Of these principles, one of the most enduring is Leo’s defense of private property as a natural right. Yet, as a host of commentators have pointed out, this defense bears a striking affinity with the property theory of John Locke. Most crucially, Leo seems to assume the Lockean principle that the natural right to property derives from the act of labor. Insofar as Locke is often referred to as the “father” of classical liberalism, it seems that Leo writes one of, if not the, primary tenets of laissez-faire liberalism into papal social teaching at its foundation.
Rather than challenge the general consensus concerning Locke’s influence on Rerum Novarum, this dissertation argues that the “Lockean problem” extends beyond Leo’s defense of private property as a “sacred and inviolable” natural right on two interrelated fronts. First, while challenging the Lockean notion of “free consent” as the sole determinate of remunerative justice, Leo’s argument for a just wage terminates in a characteristically Lockean eclipse of the laborer’s natural right to property. Second, Leo situates this Lockean approach to both property and remunerative labor in the insurmountable conditions of postlapsarian exile. In concert, these factors constitute the modern economic subject, the subject of labor and property, in the conditions of supernatural necessity, the postlapsarian conditions that require supernatural mediation for consolation in and deliverance from this “vale of tears.”
Ultimately, this dissertation will argue that the Lockean problem underlies a coherent, though problematic, theology of labor in Rerum Novarum. At the root of this theology sits the voluntary alienation of labor under the auspices of remunerative consent. While the sorrow and suffering that accompanies bodily labor derive from the mortal consequences of the Fall, Christ’s freely chosen participation in postlapsarian labor transformed the conditions that burden bodily labor into a cruciform burden. It is this cruciform burden that the laborer carries on the via dolorosa, the way of suffering, that leads from this “vale of tears” to the soteriological horizon of the Crucifixion. At the same time, precisely because Christ freely chose his earthly labor, to participate in Christ’s redemptive suffering and labor requires a voluntary act. Thus, the very consent that alienates one’s labor serves as the voluntary act that renders the sorrow and suffering of bodily labor cruciform. Therefore, inasmuch as Leo’s social teaching assumes Lockean principles and logic, the Lockean problem underlies the theology of labor in Rerum Novarum. From this problem, Leo’s theology of labor represents the sacralization of alienated labor.