Christine Firer HINZE. Radical Sufficiency: Work, Livelihood, and a US Catholic Economic Ethic. Washington, DC: Georgetown UP, 2021. Pp. x + 349. $39.95 pb. ISBN 978-1-64712-026-9. Reviewed by Benjamin J. BROWN, Lourdes University, Sylvania, OH 43560.

Christine Firer Hinze offers an analysis of what ails the U.S. economically, grounded in a vision of human communal flourishing, which she calls a radical inclusive sufficiency agenda that “embraces inclusive, sustainable livelihood as its concrete historical ideal” (265).  She builds upon Monsignor John A. Ryan’s well-known thought and approach to social justice in the early to mid-1900s, referred to as a living wage livelihood agenda.

After an introduction, the first chapter summarizes the context, thought, and agenda of Msgr. Ryan, focusing on the positive.  Ryan is probably “the most talented architect and effective spokesman” for Catholic social teaching in the 1900s (27).  However, Firer Hinze argues that he was also a realist who pulled his punches and was willing to be only “sufficiently radical” to accomplish the feasible, balancing “ameliorative reform and radical transformation” (51).  Her second chapter surveys his shortcomings.

As the book’s title indicates, Firer Hinze proposes both to radicalize Ryan’s program and also to refocus it on the notion of sufficient livelihood, the former advancing inclusivity, the latter rejecting consumerist excess.  Therefore, she tackles issues of inequity and problematic power structures in chapters three thru five, focused on gender, race, and social class, respectively, making a case that we need a radical socio-economic reorganization to become truly inclusive.  The sixth chapter then turns to the sufficiency side of her agenda by examining the complex and corrosive reality of consumerism.  The final chapter synthesizes the various threads of the book, presents her vision of social flourishing, and focuses on “how to make things better” (264).  While grounded in the dignity of the human person and the value of faith communities in general, Radical Sufficiency offers little theology, likely intentionally following Msgr. Ryan’s natural law focus (30-31) so as to reach a wide audience.

Firer Hinze’s treatment of Msgr. Ryan is strong, her chapter on consumerism excellent, and her criticism of the anthropology of the current “economic orthodoxy” (neoliberal market orthodoxy) incisive.  The principles of her agenda when she finally presents it wholly in the last chapter are compelling and even beautiful.  This vision includes reorienting priorities towards what matters most (relationship, leisure, self-development, community participation – not money or things); valuing free markets but directing them towards their true end of “maximizing provision for actual people and their households” (268); meaningful work and family living wages; real and extensive solidarity, which requires sacrifice; better valuing the care economy (child care, household work, etc.); the importance of the local and subsidiarity; sustainability; democratic principles of rights and participation; and personal agency, responsibility, self-reliance, honesty, and pulling one’s own weight.

Typical of works on social justice, including Catholic social teaching, proposing concrete and specific solutions for the problems is only lightly engaged.  Firer Hinze quotes at least three times Ryan’s exhortation that “we shall make mistakes in the process, but until the attempt is made, and a certain (and very large) number of mistakes are made, there will be no progress.”  Indeed, and she offers several examples and concrete suggestions at the end; however, the reader is left wanting more.

While Radical Sufficiency offers much that is good, the three “radicalizing” chapters in the middle, focusing on structures of power, will leave many readers dissatisfied.  They provide some nuance, yet too much adopt an inadequate lens and simplistic reading of our situation.  Regarding the former, Firer Hinze looks at relations of gender, race, and class in terms of power, money, and a flat sense of equality, typical of the postmodern and Marxist worldviews that have influenced her.  She criticizes Catholic social teaching for not paying enough attention to power dynamics without seeming to realize that this is intentional; CST offers a fundamentally different lens and solution, that of love, built on the model of the family.  Inequality, let alone inequity, is not unjust if all are provided for sufficiently, including space for self-determination; power is not constitutive of human flourishing.  The author captures a love-oriented vision in her discussion of solidarity in the last chapter, but unfortunately it does not inform much of the rest of the book.  And while she acknowledges that both personal choices and structural issues are almost always at work (175) and that responsibility and agency are essential to flourishing, the book unfortunately focuses almost exclusively on the structural.  Like many social teaching texts, a healthy dose of virtue ethics is needed.

This outlook then leads her to uncritically appropriate single-variable analyses that purport to show systemic prejudice, such as the long-debunked myth that there are major gender and race pay gaps.  She gives only a nod to the difference that healthy intact families make, even though their lack is a fundamental driver of poverty and many other social problems.  Any sound social justice program must address the predicament of absent fathers and mothers and the various reasons for their absence (such as the consumerism she rightly critiques and its commodification of marriage and sex), as well as substance abuse, addiction, waning religiosity, and crime.  Despite these lacuna, Firer Hinze helpfully attends to an often missed area, the care economy; the mostly unpaid care-giving mostly done at home supports and enables our whole social and economic system and needs to be more highly valued and less gendered.

The book is very well-researched and includes an impressive, useful bibliography, but unfortunately is too jargon-heavy for undergrad courses or a popular audience.  While Firer Hinze articulates well many aspects of Catholic social thought and is more balanced than many who have undertaken similar works, the shortcomings in content are significant.  However, the last two chapters are fairly strong and could almost stand on their own, especially the admirable chapter on consumerism.