A “Social Theodicy”: Rosmini and Spontaneous Order

This article examines the connection between Antonio Rosmini’s thought and the concept of spontaneous order developed by Friedrich A. Hayek. It argues that Rosmini’s political and economic liberalism is internally bound to his theistic and providential metaphysics, and that the middle term between the two is an “imperfectism” grounded in creaturely finitude rather than in the noetic effects of the Fall. Read in this way, Rosmini supplies a realist—as opposed to a merely conventionalist—foundation for the spontaneous-order tradition: Human reason is limited, and so incapable of designing a perfect social order, yet it remains competent to know the just. So construed, classical liberalism and a theistic worldview prove mutually intelligible rather than mutually exclusive.