In Radical Sufficiency, Christine Firer Hinze takes up the theme of the “American Dream” of “a ‘good living’ through work whose conditions and rewards make possible dignified material and social circumstances for oneself and one's household” (1). She concentrates on the American working class, mostly in the twentieth century, and examines their economic situation through the lens of Catholic social thought amplified by social-scientific research.
Firer Hinze's touchstone is the work of Monsignor John A. Ryan (1869–1945), the most influential American Catholic social theorist of the early twentieth century, who held that justice for workers had three essential elements: sufficiency (a living wage), security (a “safety net” in old age, illness, and the like), and status (“opportunities to creatively participate and share appropriately in the business's running and profits” [9]). Ryan is the subject of the book's first chapter, which is followed by a chapter setting out how Firer Hinze will develop and update his thought. Each of the remaining five chapters returns to Ryan before shifting focus to the contemporary world of work. “A twenty-plus-year project,” Radical Sufficiency draws on extensive research in sociology, economics, and social ethics, as reflected in its twenty-six-page bibliography.
Chapters 3 through 5 attend to structured power relationships, a subject insufficiently considered by Ryan and official Catholic teaching, specifically to relationships based on gender, race, and class. An insightful chapter on gender charts a course between Ryan and official Catholic teaching, on the one hand, and on a confluence of feminist and neoliberal thought, on the other. The former's emphasis on “women's distinctive (and fixed) nature” fails to acknowledge “the harm done by problematically gendered ways of organizing and relating public and domestic economies” (109). The latter envisions an “ideal worker” (Joan Williams' term), “who is employed full-time, even overtime,… takes little or no time off for childbearing or childrearing,” and “performs as if he or she has no needs or responsibilities beyond the workplace” (90). Firer Hinze shows how the feminist form of this view, exemplified by Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In (2013), disadvantages working-class women who have family responsibilities. She calls on our society, which overly prizes autonomy, to acknowledge the value and inevitability of human dependency and to acknowledge and justly compensate those who do the work of caring for those who are dependent. The fact that “care work” is more often done by women is not necessarily oppressive to them, but the conditions under which both paid and unpaid care work is performed often are oppressive. Our “persistent bias toward market participation as the primary avenue toward women's empowerment” impedes us from “redesigning economic and workplace cultures and practices to effectively support the interdependent, provisioning functions of both markets and households” (106).
Succeeding chapters review an extensive literature on the intersecting but distinct ways in which discrimination based on race and discrimination based on class have blocked or hindered Americans’ achievement of good livelihood. Firer Hinze traces the economic consequences of racial categorizations throughout US history, up to the present, when nonwhites continue to live in a state of “permanent recession” (129). Racism has often impeded working-class solidarity, but at their best labor unions sustained a “social moral economy” that “helped ‘counter the inequalities … that Americans otherwise experience’” (183, quoting Theda Skocpol).
In her sixth chapter, Firer Hinze takes on consumerism as one of “the most significant forces impeding progress toward sustainable, inclusive livelihood” (215). Already, around 1923, Ryan foresaw the US economy becoming a “squirrel cage” in which people work ever longer hours in order to buy ever more stuff. Ryan proposed that, beyond a certain level of sufficiency, “all material wealth … ought to be put wholly at the service of alleviating the personal and institutional conditions that cause others to suffer deprivation” (223). Fueled by advertising, however, modern capitalist economies chose the squirrel wheel, leading to economic inequality and (as Ryan did not foresee) ecological degradation (225). Following David Cloutier, who in turn draws on Fred Hirsch, Firer Hinze emphasizes “positional” goods—goods that exhibit one's superior status relative to other people. By its nature, the drive for positional goods is insatiable—one must always stay ahead—and therefore it leaves ecological sustainability out of reach. Firer Hinze concludes, “To make further progress toward the ecologically sustainable, inclusive-livelihood US political economy that social Catholicism adumbrates, we urgently need to find ways to loosen and break consumerism's cultural and economic grip” (251).
Firer Hinze's concluding chapter reviews what needs to be done in order to create a sustainable livelihood for all and surveys initiatives already in progress, such as living wage campaigns, toward that end. She ends the book in the hope that she has offered “a kind of provision kit of resources, orientations, and inspiration to help sustain economic justice seekers on what will necessarily be a continuing journey” (300).
This brief synopsis does not do justice to the wealth of information and insight into the American economy that Firer Hinze provides. Perhaps under the influence of the Buddhist ideal of right livelihood or of recent reading in David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs (2018), however, I would have liked to see more discussion of what makes work “dignified” (77) or “honest” (298). Firer Hinze's revaluation of care work indicates the direction she might take in answering this question, but she does not explore the issue more generally. Even so, this book, accessible to graduate and upper-level students, is indispensable for any teacher or scholar who wishes to explore economic justice in the United States within the framework of Catholic social thought.
