PÉRIN, CHARLES-HENRY-XAVIER. – Economist, born in Mons (Belgium) on 29 August 1815, died in Ghlin, near Mons, on 4 April 1905. After practising law, from 1844 to 1881 he held the chair of economics at the Catholic University of Louvain, inaugurated ten years earlier by de Coux. He took an active part in the congresses of Catholic jurists and was the first Catholic economist.
From classical liberal economics he accepted its contribution of liberty, but opposed its individualistic utilitarianism; he fought against the emerging socialist school, fearing its power to absorb the human personality, and maintained that social progress had to be founded on «free popular associations» and on the «protection of the upper classes through an intelligent and charitable patronage». The cornerstone of evolution was «the divine virtue, historically unfailing, of the Gospel and the Church». But in the face of Rerum novarum his reservations and distrust of democracy fell away: whereas in 1890 he was still proclaiming «neither liberals nor socialists», in his last book, Premiers principes d'économie politique (1896), he echoed the Leonine teachings, writing: «we seek the solution of the labor question... in all the forces offered to us by the social organism, in liberty and the public authorities... If one is a socialist merely because one represses the freedom to do evil and protects the weak through legal regulations against the injustice of the stronger, Catholics are socialists...» (p. 40). He was the author and teacher of the Christian-democratic program, from its premises through long-term social reforms, and was no less a convinced advocate of short-term social reforms.
His principal works are: Les économistes, les socialistes et le christianisme (Paris 1849); De la richesse dans les sociétés chrétiennes (ibid. 1861, ’68, ’82); Les lois de la société chrétienne (ibid. 1875–76); Le socialisme chrétien (ibid. 1879); Les doctrines économiques depuis un siècle (ibid. 1880); Mélanges de politique et d'économie (ibid. 1883); L'Etat et l'Eglise dans la société internationale (Rapport au Congrès de Reims), in Revue catholique des institutions et du droit, 20 (1883), pp. 48–57; Du droit de propriété des personnes civiles, ibid., 2nd series, 3 (1889), pp. 313–22; Ni libéraux, ni socialistes (lettre), ibid., 2nd series, 5 (1890), pp. 463–70; L'ordre international (Paris 1888); L'économie politique d'oprès l'encyclique (ibid. 1891); Premiers principes d'économie politique (ibid. 1896).