The Economics of Monasticism
Nathan Smith, George Mason University, March 15, 2009
The Hermitage of the Holy Cross began in 1986, when, as the story was told to the author, an Orthodox
priest’s wife left him, and, finding himself alone, he decided to start a hermitage, and see whether anyone
would join him. He died in 1992, but the hermitage, still small, continued. Seven years later, several
monks joined, doubling the monastery’s size. Short of space, and crowded by the city, the monks moved
to a new site in West Virginia, where they received a grant of land. The monastery is now over twenty
years old, and with a membership of 16 converts, many of them young, it is likely to last a long time.
Holy Cross has already lasted longer than New Harmony, Brook Farm, Modern Times, Utopia, and many
other secular utopian communities. Holy Cross, one of about fifty Orthodox monasteries in the United
States, is a recent example of a historical pattern that has been repeating itself for eighteen centuries or so.
Meanwhile in Israel, history’s most successful secular socialist experiment, that of the Israeli kibbutzim,
was in decline. The heyday of the kibbutzim lasted for about two generations, from their first flowering in
the 1930s until they began transitioning away from a collective lifestyle in the 1980s. They practiced
agriculture at first, later manufacturing as well. Property was held in common to the extent that, at first,
even clothes were shared. Children slept in “children’s houses,” rather than with their parents, in an
attempt to undermine the parent-child link and the private life. Early on, when Israeli politics was
dominated by Labor, the kibbutzim had a special place in the nation’s identity and supplied a
disproportionate share of the civil and military leadership of the country. The kibbutzniks numbered as
many as 130,000. By the late 1990s, skill differentials in pay, private budgets for food and electricity,
guest workers to work in the fields, home sleeping for children, and other innovations were steadily
changing the socialist lifestyle into something more like capitalism, as the kibbutzim struggled to achieve
economic efficiency and stop the loss of members. Many kibbutzim still exist, but the socialist way of life
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has largely been abandoned. Most experiments with voluntary secular socialism have been much briefer
than the kibbutzim. None has lasted longer.
Holy Cross and the kibbutzim are examples of two social phenomena which are in some ways quite
similar, yet have had quite different fortunes. Many attempts have been made to establish utopian
socialist communes in the past two centuries, generally in deliberate, self-conscious efforts to realize a
collectivist ideal and show the world a new way to live. These experiments generally fail. The kibbutzim
are the exception that proves the rule, for they, almost uniquely, overcame the challenge of establishing a
new way of life and carrying it on for more than a generation, yet they still went into decline for many of
the same reasons that other socialist experiments ultimately dissolved. Moreover, while the kibbutzim are
generally not explicitly religious, the shared Jewish identity of the kibbutzniks arguably gives the
communities some religious flavor, as compared to purely secular communes like Brooks Farm or New
Harmony. Monasteries, though religious, are socialistic in their economic and governing principles. In
particular, monks are forbidden to own private property. Yet monasticism has been far more successful
than socialism, with many monasteries lasting for generations, and some well over a thousand years.
More subtly, monasticism was an organic development, an example, like markets, of Hayekian
spontaneous order. It was a social order which emerged from the actions, in a sense self-interested, of
individuals who were not intentionally trying to create order. It was a practice first, and only later was it
conceived of as an idea and codified or modified into monastic ‘rules.’ Later monks naturally tried to
learn from the successes and failures of earlier monks, just as happens in markets. But the almost
accidental origins of the Hermitage of the Holy Cross are typical. Socialism, by contrast, began as an
idea which the kibbutzim and other experimental communities tried to realize. Monasticism and socialism
share the rejection of property and the communal way of life, but monasticism is an emergent order which
is highly robust, while socialism is a utopian ideal of which attempted realizations repeatedly fail or fall
short. This pattern seems persistent enough to constitute something like a social law.
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The proximate explanation of the law is surely celibacy. Whereas the kibbutzim and other socialist
communes try to breed new generations of themselves from within, monks are celibate and recruit from
the outside. This results in a persistent favorable selection effect, sharply raising the average commitment
of the members. But this only pushes the question deeper, for if celibacy makes socialism work, why do
not secular communes adopt it as a rule? The explanation developed here for why monasticism works is
that monasteries create environments conducive to a ‘specialized consumption activity,’ namely worship,
the enjoyment of which depends on individual stocks of ‘spiritual capital,’ which is accumulated through
‘learning-by-doing,’ thus increasing the attachments of monks to the community. Socialism fails because
it lacks this peculiar self-reinforcing incentive for membership, making socialist communes vulnerable to
dissolution through high turnover. However, other specialized consumption activities could in principle
play the same role as worship in providing a basis for a socialistic commune, and the fact that only
worship seems to have done so historically suggests that no other human activity has the peculiar
properties of worship, in particular the tendency to become alphabetically preferred to other goods as
spiritual capital increases. In particular, worship seems to be the only motive strong enough to trump the
reproductive drive for large numbers of people.
While the model emphasizes utility theory, it has important institutional and constitutional ramifications.
Second, since monks have no property, and protection of property is a crucial function of most legal
systems, the viable communal arrangements suggested by the model—and, it is argued, historically
embodied in Christian monasteries for two thousand years—represent a fundamental alternative, perhaps
even in some sense a moral challenge, to the capitalist state. First, monastic vows represent an intriguing
special case of contract theory. Economists often take for granted the fulfillment of contractual
obligations, without stating explicitly whether law or conscience accounts for the practice, or what legal
institutions and/or moral habits must underlie the assumption. Economists tend to regard contracts as
typically monetary on one side, e.g., customer pays $X for good Y, and thus presuppose the existence of
money. Political theorists, by contrast, have sometimes built their theories of the state and of state
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legitimacy on notions of a ‘social contract,’ albeit one the typical citizen has never seen or consciously
assented to. The monastic vow is open-ended like the ‘social contract’ of political theory, but it is
(typically) made voluntarily and consciously like a contract in the market. Finally, it is suggested that
monasteries represent consensual, open-access orders in a way that today’s liberal-democratic polities do
not, even though liberal ideology pretends to “consensual” government.
The strange viability of monasticism is of great historical importance, because the capacity of the
monastic social order to sustain and extend itself in the medieval West and elsewhere, even or especially
in chaotic times when few stable institutions existed, has been of tremendous service to civilization.
Medieval Western monks preserved learning and education, evangelized Europe, preserved, developed,
and taught agricultural and industrial technologies, settled new lands, built churches, and supplied
leadership for the church and sometimes for the state, and monks played a similar role in Russia. No less
importantly, monasticism, and the Church whose institutional integrity the monasteries undergirded, was
a rival power center that provided a crucial check on Europe’s fledgling states, arguably making possible
the emergence of limited government.
I. Background and Literature
The economics of monasticism, in the sense of the phrase here intended, has received, as far as this author
is able to discover, virtually no scholarly attention to date. This is not to say that no one has studied the
ways in which monasteries satisfied the material wants of their members or dealt with money, property
and production. Many historians have done that. But the methods of the discipline of economics have
scarcely at all been applied to the phenomenon of monasticism. (A dissertation by Richard Roehl in 1968
on the Cistercian movement is one of the few exceptions.) I believe an economics of monasticism is
worthwhile for three reasons. First, the individual monk seems, at least superficially, as near a case as
history offers to a counter-example to homo economicus, and accounting for his behavior represents a
stimulating puzzle for an economist. Second, as I said before, the viability of the monastery as an
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institution, with its socialist principles, is a puzzle. Third, monasteries are a sufficiently important part of
economic and especially institutional history that it is desirable not to leave them a “black box.”
Despite a lack of attention by economists to monasticism specifically, there are several literatures in
economics that are relevant. First, Gary Becker’s economics of the family and of “household production”
is relevant, since a monastery is a special kind of household. Becker was an early “economic imperialist,”
that is, a scholar who applied core assumptions of economics, in particular rationality and maximizing
behavior, to subject matter that had traditionally been the province of other fields. Becker and Stigler
(1977) made the controversial argument that, at a deep level, people’s tastes are, or can be regarded as,
roughly the same, and observed differences in realized tastes reflect differences in “consumption capital.”
The claim is little more than semantics unless we can go further and account for the dynamics of
consumption capital accumulation and depreciation, but if we can, an empirical challenge that is far from
impossible, we may be able to explain much that otherwise would have to be regarded as exogenous.
This idea was applied to religion by Iannaccone (yr?), who advocated “a human capital approach to
religion,” treating beliefs, values, familiarity with rituals, etc., as forms of human capital that determine
people’s “productivity” in practicing different forms of religion. This idea, here labeled ‘spiritual
capital,’ plays an important role in the model developed in this paper.
Second, Becker (yr?) was also the source of the concept of “household production” as a means of
explaining individual choices. The theoretical move was to assume that people maximize utility subject
to a “full income” constraint of goods/money and time, where time is used both for earning money in the
market and, in combination with goods, for “production” of “commodities” which enter directly into the
utility function. For example, for a couple to watch a movie at home requires goods—a TV, a DVD
player, a rented or purchased DVD, a supply of electricity, etc.—and time—about two hours on, say, a
Saturday night. Since a monastery is a type of household, the household production approach to utility
theory is used in this model.
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Third, in addition to arguing for the “human capital approach to religion,” Iannaccone developed two
other subtle and surprising arguments. First, Iannaccone (1986?) developed a model of church and sect
which shows how a typology of church and sect can emerge from an individual maximization problem in
which people choose conduct to maximize the sum of ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ rewards. Iannaccone
showed how, given the assumptions that ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ rewards functions are single-peaked and
bounded from below, the ‘production possibilities frontier,’ in religious-secular rewards space, can take
two importantly different shapes. If the religious and secular ‘poles,’ or behavioral norms, are close
enough together, and not too ‘steep,’ i.e., if the religion and/or the secular society are sufficiently
‘tolerant,’ the frontier bends outwards. In this case, slight changes in the shape of indifference curves, for
an individual or between individuals, cause slight shifts along the curve, and there is a moderate
equilibrium where people choose conduct somewhere between the religious and secular norms. But if the
poles are farther apart and/or the slopes of the curves are steeper, the middle of the frontier may ‘cave in,’
giving the curve an inward-bending shape. In this case, the moderate strategy loses its appeal, and slight
changes in indifference curves will cause conduct to jump from the secular to the religious norm or vice
versa. People are either in or out. It turns out that the typology arising from this model matches closely
with a well-established typology in sociology that distinguishes churches (which exist in low tension with
the surrounding society) and sects (which exist in high tension with society). Iannaccone’s church-sect
model, as an explanation of deviant religious behavior, may be applicable to monasticism, with the laity
playing the role of the ‘church’ while the monastery plays that of a ‘sect.’ One intriguing implication of
the model is that the sect must offer higher rewards than the church, in order to motivate deviant
behavior.
Another paper by Iannaccone (1992) on “sacrifice and stigma” would seem to be even more applicable to
monasticism. In this paper, Iannaccone tries to explain the higher sectarian rewards implied by his
church-sect model by arguing that religion is a “club good” subject to “participatory crowding”—the
rewards an individual derives from participating in religion are an increasing function of the average
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participation of others in the group—and then giving an ingenious mathematical proof that a church (or
sect) can raise utility by imposing on members observable costs that are purely wasteful, destroying
resources (sacrifice) or damaging members’ social status (stigma), and thereby reducing “free-riding.”
Obviously monks make great sacrifices and in some social contexts face substantial stigma, which
undoubtedly increases the seriousness of the average monk. Iannaccone’s “sacrifice and stigma” model is
implicit in the assumption, used throughout this model, that individuals must choose between the
commune or monastery, and the world.
A fourth relevant literature is the theory of the firm. Coase (1936) observed that firms, a feature of
capitalism so easily taken for granted, actually represented striking exceptions to the generalized market
organization of capitalist economies. They are islands of planning in a market sea, and the fact that they
exist at all suggests pervasive market failure. Coase argued that firms form in order to minimize
transactions costs, and the new institutional economics of Oliver Williamson and others builds on this
insight. A monastery is like a firm, only more so. It is hierarchical like a firm, but a monastery’s control
over its monks, unlike a firm’s control over its employees, is not bounded by a 40-hour work week and
their right of exit. The model developed here does not deal explicitly with transactions costs, but the
concept of “shareable goods,” crucial to the model, assumes that transactions costs sometimes make it
inefficient, or infeasible, to assign property rights and allocate goods through exchange.
A fifth relevant literature is the debates about the feasibility and/or desirability of socialism. Since
monasteries have essentially socialist economies, with central planning, egalitarian distribution, and no
property rights, the question of how and why monasteries work is related to the issue of whether
socialism works. Indeed, the failure of socialism makes it newly puzzling that monasteries succeeded as
well as they did.
Finally, the literature on ‘constitutional economics’ is relevant to monasticism. This literature is perhaps
more a strand of political science, or even of political philosophy, than of economics, but economists of
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the ‘public choice’ school, pioneered by James Buchanan, have made important contributions. The point
of contact here is the idea of a ‘social contract,’ which was a convenient fiction of political philosophy for
centuries, but a fact of life in the monasteries.
II. Monastic Socialism
Modern socialist ideas emerged in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Socialists advocated a radically
different economic organization of society. There would be no private property. Instead, the slogan was:
“from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Productive resources would be
owned, and economic activity would be planned and directed, by “the people,” or the state. This was the
utopian dream which the socialists hoped the future would see realized.
Yet an economic order of this kind—an order based on common property and central planning—had been
laid out long before in The Rule of St. Benedict,1 and practiced in the monasteries for centuries. Here is
St. Benedict on private property:
The vice of personal ownership must by all means be cut out in the monastery by the very root, so that no
one may presume to give or receive anything without the command of the Abbot; nor to have anything
whatever as his own, neither a book, nor a writing tablet, nor a pen, nor anything else whatsoever, since
monks are allowed to have neither their bodies nor their wills in their own power. Everything that is
necessary, however, they must look for from the Father of the monastery; and let it not be allowed for
anyone to have anything which the Abbot did not give or permit him to have. Let all things be common to
all, as it is written. And let no one call or take to himself anything as his own (cf Acts 4:32). But if anyone
should be found to indulge this most baneful vice, and, having been admonished once and again, doth not
amend, let him be subjected to punishment.
Here is Benedict on “whether all should receive in equal measure what is necessary”:
1
Available online at: http://www.kansasmonks.org/RuleOfStBenedict.html#ch34
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It is written, "Distribution was made to everyone according as he had need" (Acts 4:35). We do not say by
this that respect should be had for persons (God forbid), but regard for infirmities. Let him who hath need
of less thank God and not give way to sadness, but let him who hath need of more, humble himself for his
infirmity, and not be elated for the indulgence shown him; and thus all the members will be at peace.
St. Benedict thus anticipates the kibbutzniks, who sought to “go beyond mathematical equality to ‘human
equality,’ taking into account discrepancies in biological, familial, and other circumstances” (Muravchik,
322). Finally, here is Benedict on the strict obedience required of all subordinates in the hierarchical
organization of the monastery:
The first degree of humility is obedience without delay... As soon as anything hath been commanded by
the Superior they permit no delay in the execution, as if the matter had been commanded by God Himself...
without hesitation, delay, lukewarmness, grumbling or complaint.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has become a truism that socialism does not work. How is it, then,
that monastic socialism has lasted nearly two thousand years?
III. Viable Voluntary Socialism: A Formal Model
Among economists, the two most influential arguments why socialism does not work are: (a) a lack of
incentive-compatibility, and (b) von Mises’ “calculation problem.” First, a socialist system lacks the
proper incentives: individuals who will, in any case, receive “each according to his need” and no more,
have no incentive to labor “each according to his ability.” At most, if harsh discipline is used, they have
an incentive to pretend to do so. Second, under socialism economic decisions are supposed to be made by
a central planner, but no central planner can have all the information needed to plan an efficient and/or
just direction of efforts and allocation of resources. Information is inevitably decentralized, and often
only the man on the spot is able to make efficient decisions. Only market economies with property rights
and an efficient and pervasive price mechanism, runs this line of argument, can create incentives to effort
while leaving decisions in the hands of those with the information to make them.
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But this argument against socialism is vulnerable to a reductio ad absurdum that was pioneered by Coase
(1936). As Coase observed, real capitalist economies are full of islands of planning and hierarchy,
namely, firms. If markets are so efficient, why do firms exist at all? Why do the bosses, workers, etc.
who comprise firms not operate as free agents, trading with each other good by good and service by
service? Coase attributed the existence of firms to transactions costs, which pure free-market theory does
not take into account, and reduction of transactions costs could just as easily motivate the creation of
small, voluntary communes, or perhaps even of full-fledged socialism. This is not to say that incentives
and calculation are not problems for socialism. The Soviet system fell short of socialism, for money
continued to be used, and small private property existed, and these shortcomings from the point of view
of socialist ideology were critical even to the system’s limited economic success. The Soviet Union did
not claim, strictly speaking, to be socialism; rather, the Soviets saw themselves as trying to build
socialism, an attempt which ultimately failed. At the national level, the incentive and calculation
problems seem to be fatal. But socialism on a smaller scale, and on a voluntary basis, might be viable.
The experience of the kibbutzim and other voluntary socialist experiments shows that incentivecompatibility and calculation problems are serious, but not necessarily decisive. The retreat of the
kibbutzim from the socialist way of life after 1980 did reflect, in part, the need to align incentives
properly. To give households budgets instead of providing electricity and food for free encouraged
people to economize, and differential pay scales helped to encourage overtime work and skill acquisition.
Yet the kibbutzim enjoyed many years of economic success prior to the 1970s. Even in their declining
years they were not unable merely to provide for their members; the difficulty was in providing a life that
was attractive relative to the increasingly prosperous mainstream Israeli society which kibbutzniks were
free to join. The theory of repeated games, and experimental evidence that fairness and “other-regarding
behavior” are important parts of behavior may shed light on why humans seem to be able to solve the
collective action problems involved in a socialist way of life better than abstract “rational agents” could.
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And economies of scale in household production might enable a commune to out-perform a system of
free agents even if shirking and mismanagement are serious problems.
In a study of utopian communities in the United States, Rosabeth Kanter does not find incentive and
calculation problems to be the major problems that these experimental societies encountered. On the
contrary:
The successful nineteenth century [utopian communes]… tended, on the whole, to become financially
prosperous. Whereas in their early years they had suffered through periods of struggle and hardship, by the
time they dissolved they were often wealthy, or if they had many outstanding debts, these had followed a
period of prosperity. (Kanter, 157)
Instead, the biggest problem was commitment:
For communes, the problem of commitment is crucial. Since the community represents an attempt to
establish an ideal social order within the larger society, it must vie with the outside for the members’
loyalties… The problem of securing total and complete commitment is essential… A person is committed
to a group or a relationship when he is fully invested in it, so that the maintenance of his own internal being
requires behavior that supports the social order… he is committed to the degree that he can no longer meet
his needs elsewhere. (Kanter, 1973, 65- 66)
Kanter finds that the degree of commitment is the key determinant of the success of nineteenth-century
communes:
In long-lived communities of the nineteenth century, group life was organized in such a way as to support
six commitment-building processes. The nine successful groups tended to have, at some point in their
histories, a large number of concrete social practices that helped generate and sustain the commitment of
their members… The twenty-one unsuccessful communes, by contrast, tended to have fewer such
commitment mechanisms and in weakened forms. (Kanter, 75)
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It turns out to be fairly easy to construct a formal model of how, on the one hand, voluntary socialist
communes might be viable even if they are internally inefficient. First, we will introduce the concept of
“shareable goods,” which are a bit like club goods or local public goods. Within a household or
commune, some goods are non-rival and non-excludable. Examples may include lawns and gardens,
books or libraries, and in some cases furniture and interior decoration, and odors and sounds or the
absence thereof. Next, we propose a household production model in which household members’ utility is
a function of two kinds of goods, “shareable” goods (C) and “non-shareable goods” (X):
(1)
U  U C, X  ; U / C  0; U / X  0;  2U / X C  0
Assume further that the Inada conditions apply.
Utility, as shown in equation (1), is increasing in both goods, but with diminishing marginal utility from
each good. Household members have a time constraint, and divide their time between producing
shareable and non-shareable goods:
(2)
X  TX ;
C  TC ;
TX  TC  1
where TX is the time devoted to producing X and TC is the time devoted to producing C.
We are interested in the individual’s choice between living in a commune (monastic or secular) and living
in what monks call “the world,” that is, ordinary life, whatever that may consist of at any particular time
in history. Either of these choices involves interaction with others in ways that may enhance utility. It is
instructive, however, to look first at the simplest case, a “Robinson Crusoe” case in which the individual
does not interact with others at all. In this case, the individual chooses X and C such that
U U

.
X C
We know, given our assumptions about the functional form of U(C, X), that there is some set of (positive)
values for C and X that satisfies this condition as well as the time constraint, and that it involves Robinson
Crusoe producing and consuming some of both goods.
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How does a member of a commune (or miniature socialist republic) differ from Robinson Crusoe? For
the moment we will assume there is no coercion or planning in the commune. The individual is free to
produce as much or as little X and C as he likes, and the commune make does not take his X to give to
others, or others’ X to give to him. (All C produced in the commune is available to all, by the nature of
the good.) At this point, the C contributed by other agents begins to matter, so we need to introduce
notational conventions that can handle this distinction. Let Ci represent the shareable goods produced by
individual i. Individual utility is then:
(3)


U i  U  X , Ci   C j 
j i


The individual chooses X and Ci to maximize utility, with the constraint (previously irrelevant because
never binding) that Ci ≥ 0. If Ci > 0, the solution will satisfy the condition:
(4)


  Ci   C j 
U
U
U
j i



X
Ci




  Ci   C j 
  Ci   C j 
j i
j i




Given the functional form of U, we know from equation (4) that the person will produce less Ci, and more
X, than in the Robinson Crusoe case. He will also produce less Ci than would be socially optimal, since
any Ci he makes benefits the whole community, but he does not take this external benefit into account.
This is “shirking.” Some individuals may shirk still more, choosing Ci = 0. However, people will not
shirk to the point where the total C in the community is less than the Ci in the Robinson Crusoe case,
because in that case their marginal utility from producing C would be greater than their marginal utility
from producing X. Individuals in the community will therefore consume more of both X and C, and will
enjoy higher utility than Robinson Crusoe. Utility rises continuously with community size. This result is
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shown in Figure 1. Note that the rate of increase in utility as a function of community size slows, but this
is not due to “crowding”—no crowding effects have been assumed—but to shirking.
Figure 1: Utility rises as the commune gets bigger
Finally, we consider utility
in “the world,” that is,
Utility
Utility in
commune
neither in Robinson Crusoe
isolation nor in a commune,
but in the general society,
which may be anarchical,
feudal, a slave economy, a
N, population
market economy, or
whatever. The world typically offers greater opportunities for specialization and trade, thus raising
productivity. Utility is then:
(5)
U  U  X , C   U  ATX ,TC 
where A is a factor that expresses a person’s productivity in making non-shareable goods in the world,
with the benefit of specialization and trade, as compared to Robinson Crusoe isolation. Typically, A > 1,
but importantly, in an anarchic situation, or for a slave, or under a kleptocratic regime, A < 1 is possible,
signifying that a society is so dysfunctional or an individual’s position in it is so disadvantaged that the
individual would be better off withdrawing altogether as a voluntary Robinson Crusoe.
In “the world,” we assume that people’s opportunities vary. Alternatively, we may assume that tastes for
worldly living, as opposed to solitary or communal living, differ. This variation in “worldly
opportunities” (tastes) is shown in Figure 2:
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All members of
Figure 2: A distribution of fortunes in "the world"
the society in
“Worldly”
opportunities
Figure 2 are
arrayed along the
Utility
horizontal axis,
from the least
favored to the
most favored,
N, population
while the height
of the curve
represents worldly opportunities.
The next step is to superimpose the curves in Figure 1 and Figure 2. Before doing so, we must explain in
what sense the axes are commensurable. Utility is ordinal and means little more than that individuals are
able to make choices. We assume the relevant population from which the commune draws its
membership is not infinite. The horizontal location of any point on the curve in Figure 2 may be
interpreted as the rank of an individual in the distribution of opportunities, or as the number of people
whose utility is equal to or
Figure 3: Comparing utilities in the commune and “the world”
less than the height of the
utility curve at that point.
A
Utility
Figure 3 shows the choice
C
between the commune and
“the world.” Curve A in
N1
N2
N3
Figure 3 represents the
N, population
distribution of “worldly”
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utility, Curve C, utility in the commune. In this example, individuals to the left of N1 are “voluntary
Robinson Crusoes” or “hermits”: their worldly opportunities are so bleak that they would exit “the world”
even if there is no commune in existence for them to join. In terms of equation (5), these are individuals
for whom A < 1.
These “hermits” are important. Note that we have not assumed that the hermits are opposed to living with
other people, per se. Rather, their opportunities in “the world,” whatever that may be (it depends on the
place and the historical period) are so unattractive—or they find the character of “the world” so repugnant
for moral or aesthetic reasons—that they would prefer solitude. But they would welcome companions or
followers in retreating from the world. When these N1 individuals withdraw, they will form a commune
of size N1, but it will not stay that size, because a commune of that size can attract more members. The
commune will therefore grow to size N2, which is an equilibrium, since all commune members prefer the
commune to the world, while all those still in the world prefer the world to the commune. A large
commune, for example of size N3, is not sustainable, because some members will wish to exit.
The single equilibrium result in Figure 3 depends on the existence of “hermits.” If there are no hermits,
competition between the world and the commune may take the form shown in Figure 4.
In this case, there are three
Figure 4: World / commune competition with multiple equilibria
equilibria: zero, N4, and N5.
A
Utility
C
The equilibrium at N4 is
unstable, and thus unlikely
to be observed, but it marks
the boundary between the
N4
N5
region that converges to
(stable) zero and the region
N, population
that converges to (stable)
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N5. What this means is that the commune must achieve some “critical mass” to survive. If it does, it
grows to size N5. If not, it will dissolve.
In general, our priors about the shapes of curves A and C are that A is, by definition, monotonically
increasing, and we have strong reason to believe C is increasing at least over some range. There might be
several equilibria with positive commune size, but since we are interested mainly in whether or not
communes exist at all, this case is, for our purposes, not importantly different from the basic multipleequilibria case in Figure 4. Another possibility is that the A curve is above the C curve at every point, so
that no commune is viable.
So far, our model makes two predictions that seem to be consistent with reality. First, the important role
played by “hermits” in catalyzing monasticism fits the history of early Christian monasticism, and
suggests one reason for the tendency of communes to have a religious basis. As historian C. H. Lawrence
reports:
In its primitive form [monasticism] was a way of life developed by solitaries, or anchorites, living in the
desert. The world ‘monk’ itself derives from the Greek word monos, meaning alone… Writers on the
subject [of early monasticism]… have suggested two alternative explanations for the movement [of hermits
into the desert]. Some… have claimed that the first Christian anchorites were refugees who sought safety
in the desert from the persecution launched against the Church by the imperial government under Decius
and Diocletian. Others have argued that the movement resulted from the softening of the moral fibre of the
Christian community after Constantine had given peace to the Church in 313. (Lawrence, 1)
By these accounts, religion motivated the flight of hermits into the desert because it made either
persecution or compromise and hypocrisy so distasteful that participation in the ordinary life of the
secular empire had negative value. Second, the model suggests an explanation why monasticism has
declined in the past two centuries. As worldly opportunities have become more and more attractive, the
A curve has risen above the C curve in many populations, making monasteries unsustainable.
17
But our main result, that multiple equilibria are possible, only poses new questions. Since “hermits” are
presumably rare, multiple equilibria is likely to be the usual situation. But if there are multiple equilibria,
what determines which of the equilibria will occur, in general or at any particular time? And how does
this relate to Rosabeth Kanter’s problem of ‘commitment?’
IV. Path-Dependency, Turnover, and Transience
A simple answer to the question of which equilibrium will occur is path-dependency. At time t+1, if the
A and C curves are such as to imply multiple potential equilibria, the equilibrium that will occur will be
whatever occurred in t. If there was a commune at time t, it will persist. If not, none will emerge.
Probably this is too simple, since it rules out both (a) the possibility that a commune might disband due to
a shock or to excessive turnover, and (b) the possibility that a group of non-hermits who would be better
off, collectively, in a commune than in “the world,” might solve the coordination involved in setting one
up. So we may frame the question: Given that a commune exists in time t, under what conditions will
period t+1 “inherit” that commune? (We assume discrete time for simplicity of analysis.) Is it enough
that a commune existed in period t? Or does there need to be some continuity of membership?
Two extreme assumptions that may be adopted here seem implausible. First, it seems unlikely that all
commune members must stay in the commune for it to persist. But, second, it seems unlikely that a
commune can maintain continuity if all its members exit and are replaced by new ones. A salient,
moderate assumption is that each period t+1 inherits from period t a commune equal in size to the
previous period’s commune minus those who choose to exit. If this is above the critical mass for
commune survival—in Figure 4, if it is more than N4—then the commune persists.
How likely are commune members to stay? Since willingness to be a commune member depends on
“worldly opportunities,” the stability of commune membership depends on the autocorrelation of worldly
opportunities. First, let us take the extreme case of no autocorrelation. For the moment we will also
18
ignore mortality. Let NT be the threshold population needed to sustain the commune, NE be the
equilibrium population of the commune, and S, the share of the commune in the population. What are the
odds that a commune of size NE in period t+1 will retain NT members so as to persist until period t? This
is equivalent to asking what the odds are of getting NT heads in NE coin flips, with an “unfair” coin that
turns up heads on any given toss with probability S. The answer is:
psurvival 
(6)

NE !
NE !
N N
S NT 1  S  E T 
 ...
NT ! N E  NT !
 NT  1! N E   NT  1 !
NE !
N N
S N E 1  S  E E
N E ! N E  N E !
Now, equation (6) looks intimidating, but the key is to note that S, the share of the population that lives in
the commune, must be small. The kibbutzim may have comprised as much as 5% of the population of
localities in Israel around World War II. This is probably the largest share of any society that has ever
lived in secular, voluntary socialist communes. Every term on the right-hand side of equation (1) is
multiplied by S to the power of NT or higher. If, for example, S is 1% and NT is ten, each term in
equation (1) will be multiplied by 10-20. So we may conclude that, if there is no autocorrelation in
individual willingness to be a commune member, the probability that a secular commune will survive
from one period to the next is very small. If the coordination problem of setting up a commune is at all
difficult to solve, we should expect to see the no-commune equilibrium most of the time.
At this point, we have a formal model of the commitment problem. If an individual’s commune
membership decisions in successive periods are independent, the commune will dissolve with near
certainty due to high turnover. It is important, then, to examine more carefully the factors that affect
commune/monastery membership decisions, and the likelihood of strong autocorrelation in these
decisions.
V. The Worship Motive, and the Accumulation of Spiritual Capital
19
The result from Sections II and III is striking, but relies on (at least) two questionable assumptions. First,
the commune gets stuck at the non-cooperative solution of its internal public goods game, which seems
unduly pessimistic. This issue will be dealt with in Section VI. Second, the assumption of no
autocorrelation between an individual’s desire to be in a commune at time t and at time t+1 is implausible.
But to explain (as opposed to merely assuming) autocorrelation in an individual’s preference for
commune / monastery membership, it is necessary to introduce, in Beckerian fashion, some sort of
specialized consumption capital. Given our interest in monasticism, we will focus on spiritual capital,
bearing in mind that we have not yet explained why spiritual capital rather than some other kind of
specialized consumption capital should be involved.
In general, there are reasons both to believe that membership in successive periods should be positively
autocorrelated, and that it should be negatively autocorrelated. On the one hand, commune membership
depends on personal traits, and people are to some extent consistent over time. People who are ‘the type’
to prefer a commune at one time might stay that way. On the other hand, if there are life-cycle effects on
tastes and opportunities, so that, for example, young singles will be attracted to the communal life but will
later marry and want privacy, then today’s commune members will want to leave in a few years. We can
introduce a bit of formalization by labeling the preference for a commune a form of ‘capital.’ A person
who takes a liking to the communal life after living it accumulates ‘consumption capital’ in the communal
lifestyle through ‘learning-by-doing’. A person who gets tired of the communal life depletes this capital.
Of course, this is little more than semantics unless we can describe the dynamics of
accumulation/depletion of such ‘capital.’ To do so is difficult if the ‘capital’ in question is taste for some
generic communal lifestyle, but easy if we focus on consumption capital in worship, or what we will call
‘spiritual capital.’
The more one worships, the more one comes to value it. This rule, while there are exceptions to it, is
corroborated widely enough in reports of personal religious experience to warrant a strong presumption in
its favor. A short book by an anonymous 19th-century Russian, The Way of the Pilgrim, provides a
20
particularly lucid and accessible personal account of this phenomenon. Readers not versed in the
literature may provisionally take my word for it that the account is representative of religious experience
and writings in the respects that I highlight, and especially of the kind of religiosity that motivates
monasticism. The ‘pilgrim’s’ story begins when he hears a quote from Paul’s epistle to the
Thessalonians: ‘Pray without ceasing.’ He is perplexed by it:
I began to think how it was possible to pray without ceasing, since a man has to concern himself with other
things also in order to make a living. (Pilgrim, 3)
The pilgrim reads the Bible, goes to hear famous preachers, and seeks out holy men for an explanation to
the puzzle, but is disappointed. Having become a wanderer, begging for dried bread to live on, he
eventually meets a wise abbot who, after some spiritual instruction about prayer, and after spending the
whole night together reading The Philokalia, the main text of a Greek mystical tradition called
hesychasm, tells him to try constantly repeating the prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me’ with
every breath. The results, at first, are unsatisfactory:
For a week, alone in my garden [he had found work tending the garden of a nearby peasant], I steadily set
myself to learn to pray without ceasing exactly as the starets had explained. At first things seemed to go
very well. But then it tired me very much. I felt lazy and bored and overwhelmingly sleepy, and a cloud of
all sorts of other thoughts closed round me. (Pilgrim, 12)
The pilgrim goes back to his spiritual instructor, who tells him that God has allowed ‘the attack of the
world of darkness’ upon him, as ‘a further testing of your humility,’ and advises him to keep trying, and
to say the Jesus prayer three thousand times a day without fail. He begins to have more success:
I gladly accepted this guidance and went home and began to carry out faithfully and exactly what my
starets [elder; holy man] had bidden. For two days I found it rather difficult, but after it became so easy
and likeable, that as soon as I stopped, I felt a sort of need to go on saying the prayer of Jesus, and I did it
freely and willingly, not forcing myself to it as before. (Pilgrim, 13)
21
After this, the elder raises his quota to six thousand, and then to twelve thousand:
The first day I scarcely succeeded in finishing my task of saying twelve thousand prayers by late evening.
The second day I did it easily and contentedly. To begin with, this ceaseless saying of the prayer brought a
certain amount of weariness, my tongue felt numbed, I had a stiff sort of feeling in my jaws, I had a feeling
at first pleasant but afterwards slightly painful in the roof of my mouth. The thumbs of my left hand, with
which I counted my beads, hurt a little... [but] as I formed the habit I found the satisfaction of it... I spent
the whole summer in ceaseless oral prayer to Jesus Christ, and I felt absolute peace in my soul. During
sleep I often dreamed that I was saying the prayer. And during the day if I happened to meet anyone, all
men without exception were as dear to me as if they had been my nearest relations. But I did not concern
myself with them much... If I happened to go to church, the lengthy service of the monastery seemed short
to me and no longer wearied me as it had in time past. My lonely hut seemed like a splendid palace...
(Pilgrim, 14-16)
The pilgrim soon comes to prefer the Jesus prayer to all other goods:
And that is how I go about now, and ceaselessly repeat the prayer of Jesus, which is more precious and
sweet to me than anything in the world. At times I do as much as forty-three or four miles a day and do not
feel that I am walking at all. I am aware only of the fact that I am saying the prayer. When the bitter cold
pierces me, I begin to say my prayer more earnestly, and I quickly get warm all over. When hunger begins
to overcome me, I call more often on the name of Jesus, and I forget my wish for food. When I fall ill and
get rheumatism in my back and legs, I fix my thoughts on the prayer and do not notice the pain... I have
become a sort of half-conscious person... The only thing I wish for is to be alone, and all by myself to pray,
to pray without ceasing; and doing this, I am filled with joy. (Pilgrim, 17-8)
Perhaps surprisingly, the pilgrim does not become a monk. However, the hesychast tradition in which he
is instructed through The Philokalia is primarily a monastic tradition, and hesychast mysticism has been
practiced on the “Holy Mountain,” Mount Athos, a monastic colony in Greece, for centuries, and to some
22
extent by monks elsewhere. The pilgrim’s pious impulse is one that has often led people to the monastic
life.
We can draw a number of stylized facts from the pilgrim’s story. First, the pilgrim gets ‘utility’ from
worship, in the sense that utility is a source of enjoyment and a motive for action. Second, the pilgrim’s
capacity to enjoy worship, i.e., his ‘spiritual capital,’ increases in the course of the story. Third, an
important means by which spiritual capital is increased is ‘learning-by-doing’: the more he worships, the
easier and more enjoyable it becomes. Fourth, his preferences by the end of the story appear to be
‘alphabetic,’ with worship taking preference over all other desires. Fifth, the environment matters, in two
ways: (a) he benefits from spiritual instruction, but that aside, (b) in the end, he prefers solitude. All of
these stylized facts can be embodied in the following utility function:
(7)
U  U  C, X ,W ; A, B, S   AX 0.5C 0.5  sBW  W 2
where C=shareable goods, X=non-shareable goods, as before, but now W=worship, s=spiritual capital,
and A and B represent the conduciveness of the environment to enjoyment of material goods and to
worship, respectively.
The variable B allows us to take into account that some environments are presumably more conducive to
worship than others. Monasteries, with their silence and their shrines, presumably offer, at least for some,
a better environment for worship than crowded cities.
The last term, -W2, is included to represent the fact that individuals grow weary of worshipping after a
while. Thus, the pilgrim initially grew weary in the long monastic services, or while saying prayers.
Without this term, we would have the unwelcome result that everyone with nonzero spiritual capital
desires unlimited worship, and will worship nearly all the time if their worldly opportunities are poor
enough. Equation (7) implies, instead, that low-s individuals will soon grow tired of worship even if they
23
have nothing else to do. As s and B grow larger, δU/δW will increase, and individuals will engage in
more worship.
Finally, the functional form of equation (7) is chosen so that, for sufficiently high levels of s and B
relative to A, an individual will abandon all activities other than worship. If we assume that X and C
represent consumption over and above subsistence, this is not an inaccurate description of the lives of
many ascetic saints. The pilgrim begs for dried bread to survive, but beyond that is clearly indifferent to
worldly goods.
How will a utility function of the form shown in equation (7) affect behavior? The time/budget constraint
is the same as before, except that the individual now dedicates some time to “producing” worship as well
as shareable and non-shareable goods:
(8)
X  C  W  TX  TC  TW  1
Solving the utility maximization problem, we get:
(9)
0
 sB A

W  
2 4
1
1 / 2

 1 sB A
C X  

2
4
8

0
A / 2

2
 A A2 AsB  sB 
U  


4
4
 2 16
 sB  1

Equation (9) shows, for each variable, two corner solutions and one interior solution. If sB < A/2, the
lower bound on worship is binding: the individual engages in no worship at all. In fact, all individuals
with positive spiritual capital would choose to engage in some worship in this model if there were no
opportunity cost, but since there is an opportunity cost, low-s individuals will choose W=0. If sB >
2+A/2, the upper bound on worship is binding. If A/2 < sB < 2+A/2, an interior solution will occur, and
the individual will “consume” positive amounts of X, C, and W.
24
We are interested in how individuals choose between environments when different environments are
available. That is, if there are two environments, one of which has a high A and a low B, and the other a
low A and a high B, how does an individual decide between them? In particular, how does spiritual
capital influence the choice?
The cross-partial derivative of utility with respect to A and s indicates the change in the marginal benefit
of more favorable worldly opportunities with a rise in spiritual capital:
(10)
 2U  B

As
4
Since this expression is always negative, we know that the more spiritual capital a person has, the less he
benefits from an improvement in his worldly opportunities. The intuition is clear: since the individual is
devoting some of his time to worship, he takes less advantage of such opportunities. The cross-partial of
utility with respect to B and s indicates the change in the marginal benefit of environmental
conduciveness to worship with an increase in spiritual capital:
(11)
 2U
A
 sB 
Bs
4
We know the expression on the right-hand side of equation (11) is positive because it is only applicable if
the individual is practicing some worship, that is, if sB > A/2. Therefore, any favorable shift in A will
increase the appeal of a given environment more for low-s than for high-s individuals, while any
favorable shift in B will do the opposite, increasing the environment’s appeal for high-s individuals more
than for low-s individuals. For any two environments such that one environment has a higher value of A
and the other a higher value of B, there is some threshold s above which an individual will switch from
preferring the high-A environment to preferring the high-B environment. An example is shown in Figure
3:
25
Figure 3: The choice between the world and the desert for World: (A,B) = (2,1); Desert: (A,B) = (1,2)
Worldling and Hermit
3.5
3
Utility
2.5
2
World
1.5
Hermit
1
0.5
0
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7
1.8
1.9
2
Spiritual Capital
Figure 3 shows the case in which an individual is faced with a choice between two environments. In one,
which we call ‘the world,’ A=2 and B=1. The other, which we call ‘the desert,’ is less productive in terms
of material enjoyments, with A=1, but more productive in worship, with B=2. If s < 1, this individual
prefers the world. If s > 1, like the pilgrim, he prefers the desert.
The process by which a monastery forms will now be evident. There is some distribution of spiritual
capital in the community. The desert may be more attractive, spiritually, than the world, either because of
persecution or prosperity: in times of persecution, hermits will seek safety from torture and death, or
temptation to apostasy under duress; in times of prosperity, they will seek to escape the corrupting
influence of worldlings, hypocrites, and cynics who penetrate the church for gain. Some high-s
individuals will flee to the empty desert, at the cost of severe hardship. Others will follow them, and
communities will form. This stylized account roughly describes early monasticism and several later
revivals and reforms.
Once formed, turnover in monasteries will be lower than in the secular communes whose transience was
explored in Section IV, because their membership will be high in spiritual capital, which gives rise to
26
autocorrelation in their membership decisions, even if we continue to assume that worldly opportunities
are randomly drawn in every period. Monastic stability is strengthened further if we introduce favorable
dynamics of spiritual capital. Specifically, suppose that:
(12)
st 1  F  st ,Wt  ,
F
F
 0,
0
st
Wt
In this case, monks at time t will be more likely to wish to be monks at time t+1 both because they tended
to be high-spiritual-capital individuals to begin with and spiritual capital is persistent, and because being
in the monastery causes them to worship more and therefore to acquire more spiritual capital.
Finally, the conduciveness of the environment to worship is likely to be an increasing function of the
average spiritual capital of its residents:
(13)
B  B  s0 , s1 ,..., sn  ,
B
0
si
Equation (13) implies that monasteries will become more attractive to their members as the latter engage
in more worship and gain spiritual capital, but it also implies that monasteries might have problems with
‘free riders,’ who benefited from the spiritual capital of the others, but contribute relatively little
themselves—the hypothesis of Iannaccone (1992). Two implications of this are (a) that monks may
deliberately adopt costly ascetical practices to make their communities less attractive to free-riders, and
(b) some high-s individuals may want to move still further into ‘the desert.’ Both of these predictions are
consistent with the history of monasticism.
We showed in Section III why the incentive-compatibility and calculation problems, though serious
difficulties for communal arrangements, are not necessarily insurmountable; and the evidence suggests
that they are not. In Section IV, we gave some reasons to expect the commitment problem to be very
serious, as the evidence suggests that it is. In this section, we have shown that a specialized consumption
27
activity can help to solve the commitment problem by creating a selection effect favorable to persistence
of membership across successive periods.
What we have not shown is why does the specialized consumption activity has to be worship. It is far
from obvious that worship is the only activity that the variable W in (7) might describe. Many other
activities might have at least some of the same relevant properties. Music, surfing, or smoking pot
arguably resemble worship in that the enjoyment of them is increased by the accumulation of a certain
specialized human capital, and that certain environments are more conducive to their enjoyment than
others. We could imagine musical communes full of music-lovers, with shelves of scores and rooms full
of instruments, or surfing communes located on great beaches, and our model should expect these
communes, too, to have a ‘commitment’ advantage.
Another important property of W in eq. (7) is that W is potentially a large determinant of utility, to the
extent that if sB is sufficiently high, preferences may become alphabetic, with worship preferred to all
other activities. The model suggests that a good that has the potential, given sufficient consumption
capital accumulation, to become alphabetically preferred, should be able to provide the basis for
socialistic communes. History suggests that only worship, in fact, tends to provide the basis for such
communes. The argument tentatively points, then, to the conclusion that among the ends of human
endeavor worship has a unique place.
VI. Monastic Constitutions
The basic supply-and-demand model of economics implicitly assumes a constitutional context that
features alienable property rights. For A to demand, and B to supply, one unit of good X at a marketclearing price of P, B must own his supply of X, A must own his means of payment, and A and B must
have the right to transfer these rights. The model begs the question of how property rights come about,
and why, if A is stronger than B, he does not simply take the X, rather than buying it. The model of
monasticism we have developed here does not require an assumption of alienable property rights, either in
28
the world, or in the monastery, since no trade occurs there. What institutional or constitutional
assumptions, if any, does it require?
The “world” has been modeled merely as an exogenous distribution of outside opportunities. It therefore
lends itself to a wide range of interpretations, as I said before: feudal, anarchic, capitalist, etc. All that is
needed is (a) that at least some individuals are free to choose between the world and the monastery, and
(b) that the world permits allows the monastery to exist, that is, monasteries are not destroyed from the
outside, or not too often. These conditions may hold not because of the world is particularly willing to
allow its subjects to exit to the monastery, or to allow the monastery to operate, but rather because
monasteries are located in remote places and are “invisible” to temporal powers. However, usually
monasteries have needed some support or at least toleration from the state.
Within a commune or monastery, “shirking”—producing an inefficiently large amount of non-shareable
goods—is a dominant strategy for each individual, but Pareto-inferior for the community. Up to this
point, I have continually assumed that nothing is done about this shirking problem. But since this
outcome is Pareto-inferior, we might hope and expect that they could be induced to produce more
shareable goods, making all commune members better off. How can this be accomplished?
There are actually three questions. First, who is to decide (if not the individual monk) who does what in
the monastery? Second, what should the decision-maker(s) make the monks do—or, if we assume that
the goal is to maximize monks’ utility, how can the decision-maker(s) know what allocation of the
monks’ effort will achieve this? Third, given that a decision has been made, how can individual monks
be induced to behave in accordance with it?
Coercion may or may not be an option. St. Benedict endorsed moderate corporal punishment against
monks; in early medieval Irish monasteries (outside the sphere of influence of the Benedictine rule),
harsher corporal punishments were used. By contrast, it would probably be illegal for a monastery
operating in the contemporary United States to use this method. But coercion may not be necessary. The
29
‘folk theorem’ from repeated game theory suggests that there should be many cooperative equilibria to
the commune’s problem, provided that two conditions hold:
(a) each member has a positive probability of being in the commune in the next period; and
(b) expectations can be coordinated so that members expect to be ‘punished’ by their fellows if they
‘defect.’
If conditions (a) and (b) hold, the monastery might be able to secure obedience to a monastic rule without
using or threatening physical coercion, but only withholding the services, perhaps including religious
services such as communion, from the disobedient. St. Benedict recommends the use of moral pressure
rather than physical punishment on more spiritually mature monks who err. Condition (a) underscores the
importance of the commune being stable. If p is the probability that the commune will continue,
cooperative strategies that are individually rational when p = 0.8 may cease to be so when p = 0.6. A
commune’s dissolution can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Condition (b) gives one reason to expect that
communes might establish rigid rules. If, for example, the community adopts a ‘grim trigger’ strategy,
punishing any deviation by irrevocably shunning the offending member, it may be difficult for the monks
to change a rule which becomes inefficient without risking exorbitant punishment. In a market economy,
with property rights designed in the spirit of the Coase Theorem, any rule that became inefficient would
quickly be overridden by private agreements, as those desirous of engaging in behaviors with negative
externalities would pay compensation to those who suffered from the externalities. In a community
without property rights, rules could be changed only by a perhaps cumbersome collective decision
process.
While monks may, for many purposes, have less freedom than people in the world, they are typically in
the monastery by their own choice, as a result of voluntarily taking a monastic vow. It is by no means a
universal rule that those who, historically, comprised the populations of monasteries, all participated by
consent. In Benedictine monasteries throughout the Middle Ages—the institution was abolished in the
30
13th century—there were “child oblates,” who were dedicated to the monastery by their parents. This
involves no less and perhaps a bit more consent than the process by which one is born to be an American
citizen, or a member of the European nobility, or of the dalit caste in India. But it hardly amounts to real
consent. Younger sons of noble families sometimes may have had to become monks, not standing to
inherit. When the Cistercians recruited lay brethren to work the monastic lands, many of these may have
been bread-converts. Certainly there were other causes and motives for an individual to enter the
monastic life other than genuine religious vocation. Nonetheless, it was not only the ideal but probably
the typical case that a member of a monastic community came to be there by his own consent.
What of the converse? Could all men who were willing to consent to the monastic life do so? Not
always, certainly. But in the High Middle Ages, when the Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans and
Dominicans, among others, were all recruiting, with the Cistercians recruiting illiterate men from the
ranks of the peasants to be lay brethren working monastic lands, some variant of the religious life was
surely a practical option for most of the population, should they feel called to it.
Monasticism thus constituted, or at least approximated, an example of a consensual, open-access order—
probably the first in history. Of course, there had been voluntary associations before. The Christian
church was perhaps, briefly, a consensual, open-access order of sorts, but infant baptism compromised the
element of consent in the Christian church, which was later removed entirely by the persecution and
killing of “heretics.” In any case the Christian church was a looser association that left people largely free
to pursue their own ends and did not generally employ or provide for its members economically.
Monasteries, by contrast, were social orders in a practical and comprehensive sense, governing and
providing for their members from the time of joining until death. And to the extent that monks joined as
adults and took vows, monasteries were based on a social contract.
31
The nature of the monastic social contract is interesting because the idea of a social contract became so
important to later political philosophy. Most famously, Thomas Jefferson wrote, in the Declaration of
Independence, that:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by the Creator with
certain inalienable rights… that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed.
In writing this, Jefferson was channeling the thought of John Locke, leading ideologist of the Glorious
Revolution in England. The polities established by these revolutions—parliamentary Great Britain and
the democratic United States—have been among the most successful and powerful in the world for the
past three centuries, and have served as models for dozens of other polities and for the ideology of
liberalism to various tenets and aspects of which almost the whole world today pays lip service. Before
Locke, Thomas Hobbes, the leading political philosopher of absolutism, also based his theory on the
concept of a social contract.
In the late 20th century, social contract theory was refreshed by James Buchanan, who, writing with
Gordon Tullock in The Calculus of Consent, theorized about how a people might establish a rule-based
constitution, pre-committing to accept some adverse decisions by the majority because they anticipated
that their gains from having public decisions made in this fashion would outweigh their losses. Rawls
followed with his book A Theory of Justice which has been more influential, but I will focus on Buchanan
because he is an economist. Unlike Locke, who accepted the rather inadequately motivated idea that the
relevant criterion of consent was the will of the majority (albeit constrained by the claims of individual
rights and property), Buchanan insisted that:
In discussing an original constitution or improvement in an existing constitution, we shall adopt consensual
unanimity as a criterion. That is to say, we are concerned with examining proposals that will benefit each
member of the social group. There are two reasons for adopting this criterion. First, only by this procedure
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can we avoid making interpersonal comparisons among separate individuals. Second, in discussing
decision rules, we get into the familiar infinite regress if we adopt particular rules for adopting rules.
(Buchanan and Tullock, 14)
The motivation for Buchanan and Tullock’s insistence on unanimity is certainly strong enough. But it is
hard to figure out what is meant by “conceptual” unanimity. Does every individual have veto power over
the establishment of a constitution, or not? If not, lacking the evidence of revealed preference, how can
we know whether it would be in their interest to establish a constitution? In practical terms, the unanimity
criterion gives rise to hold-up problems. If a private road-builder is trying to build a road across five
farmers’ lands, and four have agreed to sell, the fifth can try to extract the entire surplus the road-builder
hopes to earn from the project going forward, counting his previous costs as sunk. The road-builder
would rationally agree at that point, but foreseeing the hold-up problem, he will be likely not to undertake
the problem at all. Establishing a constitution by consent involves the same problem: if some of the
prospective members are ready to agree, recalcitrant or opportunist members can try to extract unfair
concessions from them.
It is not clear to what extent Buchanan, or Locke, conceived of the social contract as a historical event
rather than a theoretical construct. John Rawls made it clearer that what he had in mind was a thoughtexperiment, but it is not clear that Locke did not think a social contract had really been established
sometime in the remote past, while Buchanan seems to have thought of his theory as roughly describing
the creation of the US Constitution. There are plenty of practical reasons why a populous nation could
never really establish a social contract by unanimity. Mere communication and voting would be a
formidable obstacle. And even in the unlikely event that a constitution could be designed that really did
prospectively and in expectation benefit every member of society, some people would undoubtedly form
the mistaken belief that it harmed themselves or others and oppose it on that ground.
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A genuine consensual—unanimous—constitution would have to form in a different manner. Instead of
everyone in a pre-defined population reaching agreement on a set of rules, which is impossible due to
conflicts of interest, errors, and hold-up problems, rules would have to be established prior to consent, by
an individual or a relatively small group, and then other individuals would have to consent one by one,
with the population subject to the constitution being determined by self-selection, and presumably not
including the entirety of any population which could have been identified prior to the introduction of the
new constitution. In short, it would have to emerge as monastic rules and monasticism emerged.
Second, the experience of monasticism sheds a surprising light on the relationship between property
rights and consensual government. In Thomas Hobbes’ conception of the social contract, individuals
surrender everything to the sovereign and are left with no rights except bare survival. By contrast, in
Locke’s conception, property rights are a metaphysical fact which the state cannot alter, but rather is
established to protect. For Locke, then, people bring prior property rights with them into the social
contract. Buchanan and Tullock do not explicitly make the metaphysical commitments Locke makes, yet
they, too, take property rights as given:
Individual consideration of all possible collective action may be analyzed in terms of the costsminimization model, but it will be useful to ‘jump over’ the minimal collectivization of activity that is
involved in the initial definition of human and property rights and the enforcement of sanctions against
violations of these rights. Clearly, it will be to the advantage of each individual in the group to support this
minimal degree of collectivization, and it is difficult even to discuss the problems of individual
constitutional choice until the range of individual power of disposition over human and nonhuman
resources is defined. (Buchanan and Tullock, 44)
Defining property rights is sufficiently difficult and potentially controversial that it is hard to imagine
how one could even consider ‘jumping over’ this crucial question in a theory of constitutional origins,
without some Lockean-style notion that property rights are somehow natural and pre-existing. But are
they? Is it plausible to think of property rights as a feature of a pre-constitutional situation? Or would
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any attempt to establish a constitution ex nihilo need to accomplish the impossible task of settling, with
general (unanimous!) consent, the question of what belongs to whom?
The experience of monasticism suggests the opposite, namely, that the basis for a consensual order must
be the renunciation of individual property rights in favor of egalitarian poverty. Of course, since the
order is consensual, those who have property may stay in the world and try to keep it, if they can. No one
is compelled to give up his property against his will. But those who wish to enter the monastic order must
abandon property claims.
In their lack of individual rights, monastic constitutions like that of St. Benedict resemble the Hobbesian
constitution in the absolute power that they give to the abbot. However, importantly, they differ from
Hobbes on the legitimacy of the use of force. Hobbes argued that contracts extracted by force are valid.
According to Hobbes, such contracts consist in bargains where one party gets obedience, the other, life.
A Lockean would reply that a coerced individual had a right to his own life prior to any such negotiation,
and so cannot be legitimately offered it in return for obedience. Monasticism, in its Cistercian or its
contemporary form, gives the abbot absolute powers a la Hobbes, but governs with consent of the
governed in the fashion of Locke.
It may seem ironic that monastic practice anticipated liberal ideology, considering that monks have a
reputation, sometimes deserved, for being reactionaries and allies of the most archaic traditions of divineright monarchy. It is no more ironic than the fact that much of the intelligentsia of the liberal democratic
West in the early 20th century supported communism. In any case, the Church, particularly in the
medieval West, was no uncritical ally of Europe’s various kings. On the contrary, Church-State rivalry
arguably opened the way for liberalism, as Fareed Zakaria has argued:
The rise of the Christian Church is, in my view, the first important source of liberty in the West—and hence
the world… The Catholic Church… never saw itself as furthering individual liberty [but] from the start it
tenaciously opposed the power of the state and thus placed limits on monarchs’ rule… [It] was the first
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major institution in history that was independent of temporal authority and willing to challenge it. By
doing this it cracked the edifice of state power, and in nooks and crannies individual liberty began to grow.
(Zakaria, 31-4)
So the consensual order of monasticism made possible the institutional integrity of the Church which,
though itself illiberal, engaged in power struggles with the state which created room for the emergence of
political liberty. Such is the many-layered irony of monasticism.
Conclusion
Monasticism is an important historical phenomenon which is characterized by unusual economic
arrangements. In aspiration and to some extent apparently in practice, the ordinary self-seeking behavior
that economists have long assumed as a matter of course motivates people’s economic behavior is
completely and deliberately abolished in the monk. The monastery is thus a sort of socialist commune or
miniature socialist republic specialized in worship. The puzzle is why monasticism has been so
successful when socialist experiments have repeatedly failed. The answer proposed here begins with the
standard explanations for why socialism fails—a lack of incentive-compatibility, and the problem of
calculation—are serious but not insurmountable. The real problem with socialist communes is
commitment: people’s preferences and outside opportunities are variable, and they will cause high
turnover which will cause communes to dissolve. Monasteries solve this by offering an environment
conducive to the enjoyment of a specialized ‘good,’ worship, whose value to an individual increases with
the accumulation of ‘spiritual capital,’ which in turn increases through learning-by-doing. This gives
monks a reason to stay, and reduces turnover. The unique efficacy of worship in providing a basis for a
socialistic communal way of life seems to reflect the unique place of worship in the human utility
function, which allows it to crowd out all other desires. A model of this kind can explain why
monasticism emerged spontaneously and has persisted for centuries and millennia.
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While monasticism took shape as a spontaneous order, and formal ‘rules,’ like that of St. Benedict, were
only introduced later to codify or modify traditional practices, monasteries were always based on a ‘social
contract,’ unlike most social orders, which are based on accidents of birth and on coercion, even when, as
in the case of modern liberal states, they claim to be based on consent. While the monastic social contract
resembles those of Locke’s and Jefferson’s theories in being consensual, in its absolute, hierarchical
character, and its lack of individual rights and especially property rights, it rather resembles, or even goes
beyond, the social contract of Hobbes. One conclusion that becomes evident in examining the contrast
between monastic practice and social contract theory is that if social contracts are to be regarded as real or
potential historical events, they must emerge like monastic rules, governing only the population of those
who specifically consent to them. Also, the contrast confirms doubts about the possibility of preconstitutional property rights.
The success of monasticism in medieval times, and their disproportionate contributions to civilization,
may in most cases reflect little more than economies of scale and gains from cooperation, along with the
surplus resulting from celibacy and freedom from childrearing costs; but it was the consensual,
collectivist lifestyle of the monasteries that enabled them to achieve these gains at a time when they were
difficult to achieve through private contract. Later history has shown that monasticism is not the only
solution to problems of cooperation and institutional stability, but it is doubtful that civilization would
ever have arrived at the institutional technologies that the West enjoys today if its development had not
been accelerated by monasticism. While no activity other than worship seems to have enough of a place
in the human utility function to provide a basis for collectivism as a complete way of life, university
faculties may be another example of an institution based on a specialized consumption activity (studying
obscure subjects), the enjoyment of which is enhanced by a form of consumption capital (knowledge and
research skills) which is acquired through learning-by-doing. They bear some resemblance to
monasteries, being places of pilgrimage supported in large part by charitable donations from the outside,
within which motives other than profit are dominant.
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