Ludwig Windthorst (1812–1891) played such a central role, the

Zentrum (German Center Party) and the German Volksverein.

The position of the Center Party in German Social Catholi-
cism is an important one. Bishop von Ketteler (whose teachings Pope
Leo XIII acknowledged among the inspirations behind his encyclical
Rerum Novarum) assisted Windthorst with developing the Party’s
position on social and economic questions, and his guidance (in the
form of a brochure to Catholic political leaders) shaped the party’s
platform for a decade from its founding in 1871. One central point
of von Ketteler’s program, calling for “the corporative reconstruction
of society,” enjoyed broad support within the Party through the late
1870s, especially among the followers of Vogelsang, and within a
circle of thinkers gathered, under the leadership of Christoph Mou-
fang (1817–1890), around the Catholic Social Review. Moufang was
a disciple of von Ketteler who headed the seminary at Mainz under
him and succeeded him as head of the Party’s “social wing.” Follow-
ing Moufang in this position was Franz Hitze (1851–1921), one of
the most outstanding of the figures gathered around the Review, and
who, with his 1880 work Capital and Labor and the Reorganization of
Society (which followed two years of study in Rome focused particu-
larly on Scholasticism and the social theory of St. Thomas), became
the foremost spokesman for German Social Catholic Corporatism.
By the mid-1880s, support for the integral Corporatist pro-
gram within the Zentrum had waned considerably, due to the spread
of an approach to the problems of capitalism and industrialism which
advocated a piecemeal amelioration rather than a wholesale social
reorganization. But the corporatist vision was maintained by a “vocal
minority,” many of whom were attached to an “agrarian” wing which
felt more acutely the need to unite the peasantry into a recognized
Guild in defense of their interests. The agrarians never ceased to insist
upon “the reorganization of society according to Christian principles
on the basis of vocational estates.” Possibly the most consistent of all
within the Party, the agrarian wing was merely following the course
set for it by its original leader, Baron Burghard von Schorlemer-Alst
(1825–1895), who founded the first Bauernverein (Peasants’ Union)
2 Ralph Bowen notes (German Theories of the Corporative State (1947)) that Hitze’s
work “furnished much intellectual support to corporatist enthusiasts in the Center
and in the Social Catholic movement at large,” and that in the book Hitze maintains
that “the guild system had furnished the best model for the new social organization
which the modern age so desperately required.”
Ethics and thE national Economy
14
in 1862 (of which there were 32,000 members by 1896), and who was
a leading member of the Party’s Corporatist school with Vogelsang’s
disciples and others such as Moufang and Hitze.
Given that those advocating “pure” corporatism were a tiny
minority by the time Pesch came into contact with the Party, it is
all the more significant that his Christian Solidarism, according to
Bowen’s German Theories of the Corporative State, is “the product of
an attempt to systematize the thought of von Ketteler, Vogelsang,
Moufang, and Hitze.” Drawing from those thinkers meant (chrono-
logically at least) to “skip over” the reformist school and to reach back
to the Corporatist position that “saw no hope of social salvation short
of the introduction of a comprehensive scheme of corporative institu-
tions.” And Bowen notes specifically that “a small number of Catholic
scholars continued to maintain an interest in the earlier corporatist
ideal and to teach it in German seminaries as a central doctrine of
twentieth-century Catholic social philosophy.” The most influential of
these “theorists and pedagogues,” he says, was Heinrich Pesch.
The contention that Pesch picked up the baton of the “old”
corporatism, which hoped for more than a mere “tinkering” with
capitalist society through legislative enactments, is confirmed by the
Spanish Jesuit Joaquin Azpiazu in The Corporative State (1940): he
calls Pesch’s Solidarism the very “framework of corporative society.”
And Pesch himself (Ethics, p. 100) refers to “a full-fledged corporate
organization of occupational groups” as the ideal to which efforts
at economic reform should ultimately aspire (note also his nod to
prominent integral Corporatists on p. 137). Furthermore, Azpiazu
relates that many of Pesch’s contemporaries and successors in the
Social Catholic movement within and outside of Germany took for
granted the fact that the true goal of all Catholic social reform efforts
is (to quote a program published by the “radical” agrarian wing of
the Center Party in 1894) “the reorganization of society according to
Christian principles on the basis of vocational estates”:
Outstanding [Germans] like the former minister Erz-
berger, the leader of the Christian labor movement Steferwald,
the editor of Volksverein, August Pieper, also clamored for the
corporative system. The first social week at Munich-Gladbach
(1932) dealt only with the corporative system. The fifth Congress
of the [Swiss] Christian Social Workers Union (1932) and the
manifesto of the German Catholic Workers (1933) demanded a
corporative state “as it is described in the encyclical of Pius XI.”
forEword
15
Pesch’s influence upon Catholic thought was as impres-
sive as its influence upon him. Mulcahy notes that Volume I of his
Compendium saw four editions from 1905 to 1924 and “became a
standard text in the social science curricula in many Catholic institu-
tions of higher learning.” And he calls Pesch the “connecting link”
between Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, the first draft of
which was written by Pesch’s disciple Oswald von Nell-Breuning
(1890–1991). As recently detailed by Dr. Edward O’Boyle of Loui-
siana Tech University, other noteworthy figures in the “study circle”
that gathered around Pesch include Gustav Gundlach (1892–1963),
Heinrich Rommen (1897–1967), Franz Mueller (1900–1994), and
Goetz Briefs (1889–1974). The latter two emigrated to the United
States and founded, in 1941, the Catholic Economics Association.
Two other students of Pesch’s Solidarism are American Jesuit econo-
mists Richard Mulcahy, whose work we have noted, and Bernard
Dempsey, who wrote original works and translated into English
Nell-Breuning’s Reorganization of Social Economy, a detailed explana-
tion of Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno.