One Protestant Tradition's Interface With Austrian Economics : Christian Reconstruction as Critic and Ally

Christian Reconstructionists are postmillennial Calvinistic Protestants whose adherents seek to reconstruct society in accord with biblical principles. Unlike socialist-utopian postmillennialists, Reconstructionists hold to broadly free-market views and have an affinity for Austrian economics. However, Reconstructionists contend that libertarianism's secular defenses of the free market, its methodological individualism, and its epistemological subjectivism have insurmountable weaknesses that leave its adherents with a philosophically ambiguous, internally inconsistent, and practically unconvincing argument against top-down centralization. Reconstructionists argue that only the Bible can provide an objective advocacy of capitalism. Reconstructionists also defend a covenantal social theory against the individualistic social theory of libertarians. They claim that insofar as the Austrian method and biblical Christianity contain presuppositions, neither can claim to avoid an appeal to faith. Despite their differences, we conclude that libertarians and Reconstructionists can have dialogue to their mutual advantage