PÉRIN, CHARLES-HENRY-XAVIER. - Economist, b. at Mons (Belgium) on 29 Aug. 1815, d. at Ghlin, near Mons, on 4 Apr. 1905. After having practiced law, he held from 1844 to 1881 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 the contribution of freedom, but he fought its individualistic utilitarianism; he struggled against the rising 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 by means of an intelligent and charitable patronage." The linchpin of evolution was "the divine, historically unfailing virtue of the Gospel and of the Church." But in the face of Rerum novarum his reservations and diffidence toward democracy fell away: whereas in 1890 he still proclaimed "ni libéraux, ni socialistes," in his last book Premiers principes d'économie politique (1896) he echoed the Leonine teachings, writing: "we ask the solution of the workers' question... of all the forces that the social organism offers us, of freedom and of the public authorities... If one is a socialist only because one represses the freedom to do evil and protects the weak against the injustice of the stronger by legal regulations, then Catholics are socialists..." (p. 40). Of the Christian-democratic program he was the author and teacher from its premises to its long-term social reforms, and he 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 (Report to the Congress of 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 (letter), ibid., 2nd series, 5 (1890), pp. 463-70; L'ordre international (Paris 1888); L'économie politique d'après l'encyclique (ibid. 1891); Premiers principes d'économie politique (ibid. 1896).
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Augusto Moreschini