In the summer of 1907, the Brazilian jurist Rui Barbosa arrived at the Second Hague Peace Conference representing a country most of the assembled great powers regarded as a spectator. The conference was debating the formation of a permanent court of arbitration, and the leading delegations proposed to seat its judges by rank of nation. Barbosa objected, at length and in several languages. Sovereign states, he argued, were juridically equal; a small republic was owed the same standing before the law as an empire. He did not win every vote, but he did win the argument, and the Brazilian press dubbed him a Águia de Haia, the Eagle of The Hague.
I thought of Barbosa while speaking with Paulo Ghedini, founder and president of the Instituto Libertário Cristão in Brazil, for this week’s episode of Acton Line. Ghedini is making a claim about persons rather than nations, but it is the same shape of claim: equal dignity before the law, pressed by someone whose position the great powers of his own intellectual world are inclined to dismiss.
Ghedini came to libertarian ideas as a Brazilian living in the United States during the 2012 presidential campaign, drawn in by Ron Paul’s speeches and the publications coming out of the Mises Institute. He soon discovered that he had become a puzzle to everyone. His Catholic friends wanted to know how he could be a libertarian. His atheist libertarian friends wanted to know how he could be a Christian.
That tension is sharper in Brazil than here. As Ghedini describes it, the Brazilian right is divided between Christians of a conservative and often frankly authoritarian stripe and a libertarian movement heavily shaped by Objectivism and hostile to religion. A Christian who believes in free markets and limited government has, until recently, had no place to lay his head. The Instituto Libertário Cristão exists to build that place.
Ghedini’s case for the compatibility of Christianity and libertarianism rests on four observations. The non-aggression principle, he argues, is not a Rothbardian invention but a restatement of the Golden Rule and the natural law, grounded in the equal dignity of every person. Free will, which God gave to human beings even at the cost of their disobedience, sits uneasily with a state that governs by coercion. Private property is affirmed throughout both Testaments, from the Decalogue to the parables. And the Christian doctrine of the Fall converges with Hayek’s account of dispersed knowledge: both teach that no one knows enough, or is good enough, to be trusted with unlimited power over others.
None of these arguments is unique to Ghedini, but hearing them assembled by someone working in a Latin American context, where the alternatives on offer are often liberation theology on one side and integralism on the other, gives them a distinct urgency.
The hardest part of our conversation, for a Catholic, concerned the social encyclicals. Ghedini reads Rerum Novarum and its successors as practical responses to the industrial revolution and the Marxist threat rather than as definitions of faith. He also argues that the early social encyclicals were shaped more by German Jesuits of a statist bent than by the classical liberals of the day.
I am more inclined than Ghedini to read Leo XIII as a defender of the free economy within a juridical framework, as John Paul II later read him in Centesimus Annus. But Ghedini’s broader point stands within the tradition. Where an encyclical makes claims about economics or politics, prudential claims about means, a faithful Catholic may respectfully disagree, particularly where a proposed intervention fails to achieve its end or undermines the dignity it was meant to protect. That is a very different posture from the old Mater sí, Magistra no quip, and a more defensible one.
Ghedini handles two scriptural flashpoints with care. Romans 13, so often read as a charter for obedience, he situates in a persecuted church counseled to prudence, and he notes that the Greek can be rendered as authority permitted by God rather than positively willed by him. The Good Samaritan and the common life of the church in Acts, meanwhile, describe voluntary acts of persons and communities, not programs of the state. Charity compelled, he argues, is not charity at all; it forms no virtue in the giver.
Ghedini’s aim is modest in method but large in ambition. He wants Christians to stop feeling guilty for believing in free markets, and he wants authoritarian Christians to see that coercing their neighbors through the state is a betrayal of Christian ethics, not an expression of it. His movement leads with virtue and means rather than utility: civil society, free will, and voluntary charity are the only means consonant with the gospel.
Rui Barbosa went to The Hague to insist that the small and the great stood equal before the law. Paulo Ghedini is making the same case, one person at a time, in a country where that claim is still contested. Listen to our conversation on Acton Line here: