Destaque: Papa João Paulo II e Ludwig von Mises

(Deixo apenas o início do texto)

Two Men From Galicia By Christopher Westley

With the death of Pope John Paul II last week, many have compared his intellectual contributions to those of Ludwig von Mises. Comparisons are certainly apt, as both men have much in common. That their experience with 20th century totalitarianism shaped their lives is well known. It is less well known that they both spent their formative years in a similar area of Poland—Mises's ancestral home of Lemberg and John Paul's Krakow are in an area of Poland known as Galicia.

When Mises grew up, the Habsburg family was still in power and this region had not yet succumbed to the forces of modernism then spreading across Europe. Mises himself would be a lifelong friend of Otto von Habsburg. That family's influence no doubt still characterized the region when John Paul was born some two generations later. During the beatification of Emperor Karl in Rome last October, one news report stated that John Paul himself—previously Cardinal Karol Wojtyla—was named by his parents for Karl von Habsburg. (At the time of John Paul's birth, Emperor Karl's martyrdom to the advances of the Progressive Era was well under way. He would die three years later.)

So it was a Catholic culture, aristocratic, and somewhat non-democratic, that shaped Mises and John Paul into top-rate intellectuals within their realms of the social sciences. Their intellectual formation—reflecting several centuries of Scholastic influence on the Continent—contrasted with the modernizing tendencies of Europe at a time when Hegel was still the most popular philosopher in Germany. Aristotelian ideas were still very strong in Austria as well as in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the decades leading up to World War I.

Both Mises's and John Paul's philosophies center on the human person, as suggested by the titles of each man's important treatises—Mises's Human Action and John Paul's The Acting Person. In both of their writings, there is a strong emphasis on the sanctity and centrality of the individual.(...)"