Abstract
The title of Allen Calhoun’s substantial book is deceptively broad. Based on the author’s University of Aberdeen doctoral thesis, its setting is local rather than global (America and, to a lesser extent, the UK) and its concerns are theoretical rather than practical. This is not the place to seek help in wrestling with such contemporary issues as the unjust avoidance of local tax by multinationals in the developing world, and still less today’s worldwide problems of tax secrecy and tax fraud. Calhoun’s interest lies rather in tax policy, and specifically in exploring a certain ambiguity in tax law, with, on the one hand, regulations aimed at redistributive justice and, on the other, those that protect private property and the accumulation of wealth.
This exploration draws on theological concepts that were an integral part of medieval and post-medieval economic and political thinking, as discussed in the work of Aquinas, William of Ockham, Luther and Calvin. A major obstacle, though, is that these theological giants have little to say that relates explicitly to taxation as it is understood today, and much of the fascination of Calhoun’s book lies in his diligent overcoming of such an apparently insurmountable hurdle.
The author begins by introducing some useful definitions of efficiency and equity, and in particular ‘tax equity’ as referring to redistributive justice, that is, ‘the change of resources across society rather than merely the allocation of the tax burden’ (p. 13), which will be crucial in understanding the perspective of medieval thinkers, for whom taxation is to be equated with poverty relief. This is followed by a historical survey of taxation in the final centuries of the Roman Empire, and the position of the Christian church, a community within which poor people were not only loved but seen also as victims of injustice.
Concern for the welfare of the poor did not of course necessarily entail the rejection of property: the important thing, in the eyes of the church, was to make good use of the wealth that individuals or the institution possessed. Calhoun considers at some length the contributions of Ambrose and Augustine in criticising ‘bitter enslavement to riches’ (p. 56) and the role of almsgiving. The latter, although not labelled as such, is a basic tenet of relational theology, in that ‘the economy of almsgiving was … a continual exchange and movement of riches that bound the community together as one people’ (p. 58).
This brings us to Aquinas and his teaching on property and on justice, which again has to do with relationships between individuals. Yet, with no explicit grounds in Thomist thought for the redistribution of wealth through taxation, the author can do little more than draw inferences from what is said about the injustice of retaining more than one needs. He points to Thomas’s ‘highly developed doctrine of private property as an affirmative good’ (p. 104), which allows that the individual’s appropriation of property and the ruler’s expropriation of it may each serve the common good, these being held in balance by justice. Taxation, says Calhoun, may be a way of adjudicating between them, although he admits, rather charmingly, that this is an argument that has required ‘excavation beneath the surface of Thomas’s writings’ (p. 105).
Poverty was a central concern for the Franciscan William of Ockham, who lived at a time when arguments raged within his Order about what it meant to be poor. The outcome was the breakaway movement of the Franciscan ‘Spirituals’ who strictly adhered to their founder’s example of living in absolute poverty and Ockham was himself excommunicated for condemning papal opposition to the Spirituals. In voluntarily renouncing the right to appropriate anything for their own use, the Franciscans were somehow returning power to where it properly belonged, in the sphere of dominium. Transferring this to a taxation model, Calhoun argues that the payment of tax is about ‘removing oneself decisively from the principate of dominium’, in other words, giving to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s or, as he later puts it, ‘purifying oneself of the taint of wealth that originates with Caesar’ (p. 255).
Following his excommunication, Ockham became active in the secular sphere. As Calhoun has already noted, extraordinary taxes could be levied by a ruler in the case of special needs, in particular, war. So, in the late 1330s, Ockham was arguing that Edward III of England should be supported in his ‘just war’ against France by subsidies from clergy and laity alike, both from their churches and their personal goods (pp. 126–27), even if the Pope objected. In so doing, Ockham explained and justified taxation as being levied on the reciprocal basis of a ruler providing protection and the people paying for it. Thus, as Calhoun demonstrates, Ockham takes up Aquinas’s doctrine of the common good, but uses it to different effect, with defence of the realm resting not with the Pope but with the king. And with Ockham’s political vision, taxation becomes ‘not so much a balance between competing social goods dictated by theology or natural law, as it is an expression of one of several legitimate theological stances toward political authority’ (p. 154).
In discussing the Reformers, Calhoun continues to face the problem of the lack of direct references to taxation, although Luther is more productive in this respect than Calvin. Luther’s call to provide for the poor by means of both charity and social assistance led to centralisation (Wittenberg’s ‘common chest’). At the same time, taxation was emerging as the main way of funding administration, which resulted in competing visions of its nature. In a bold move, Calhoun argues that Luther’s theology of the Lord’s Supper offers a metaphor for redistribution, in which spiritual and material distribution are connected: ‘taxation can form part of the dynamic overflow of good things that characterizes Luther’s theology of the Lord’s Supper’ (p. 255).
With Calvin, Calhoun notes a shift in theological emphasis, from the present time to the age to come: ‘all we can do in the present age is respond tentatively and temporarily to injustices and inequalities as they present themselves’ (p. 255). Logically, but somewhat surprisingly, this leads the author to designate US and UK tax policies after Calvin as ‘realized eschatology’, where the state becomes ‘the glorious instantiation of the resolution of … theological fractures’ (p. 254).
Despite the Reformers’ writing being deeply rooted in their own contexts—Luther’s Saxony and Calvin’s Geneva—they can also speak directly into our own times. At the end of his chapter on Luther, Calhoun highlights Luther’s use of need as a foundational term in his version of redistributive taxation and comments that: ‘It reorients the idea of social justice away from equilibrium among competing social commitments, to interpersonal duties’ (p. 188)—a message that the UK government, for one, might usefully take on board. This is followed up in the chapter on Calvin with a reference to the current Anglican Bishop of Kensington, Dr Graham Tomlin, who has argued that Geneva was a city that implemented theologically motivated programmes to replace destitution and poverty with a more egalitarian view of social life—in Tomlin’s words, ‘an attempt to establish a welfare state in modern Europe without the need for begging’ (p. 200), another example which we should do well to recover.
Calhoun concludes his book with a very brief summary of the views of his chosen theologians, leaving it to his readers to decide which of those views, or combination of them, they wish to adopt. His own position is in the end straightforward, recommending that tax policy should be a vehicle for accommodating three types of need: the universal need for a ‘subsistence minimum’, along with a need to ‘retain enough … material resources to work productively’, and ‘the needs of the government to create and maintain the conditions necessary for both of the other sets of needs’ (p. 256).
How such a policy, and its theological bases, might translate into an effective means of addressing today’s infinitely complex regimes of taxation, both within and across jurisdictions, is a subject for an altogether different book, for a theologian brave enough to attempt it. On present showing, Allen Calhoun would be well up to the task.