Some people think that the political marriage between economic and social conservatives is at best a marriage of convenience. I could not disagree more. My thesis is straightforward: basic shared principles should lead serious social conservatives to be economic conservatives as well. And those same principles should lead serious economic conservatives to be social conservatives at the same time.

Sound conservatism, as a matter of principle and not mere pragmatism, will honor limited government, restrain spending, and provide honest money and low taxes—while at the same time upholding the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions; the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife; and the innocence of children.

Now any healthy, any decent society, will rest on three pillars: the first is respect for the human person, the individual, and his dignity. In a decent society the formal and informal institutions of society and the beliefs and practices of the people will be such that every member of the human family, irrespective of race or sex or ethnicity, and also irrespective of age, size, stage of development or condition of dependency, is recognized as the possessor of profound, inherent, and equal dignity. A society that fails to respect the human person, beginning with the child in the womb, and including the mentally and physically impaired and the frail and elderly, will sooner or later come to regard human beings in general as mere cogs in the social wheel, whose dignity or wellbeing may legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of the collectivity.

"When liberal democratic regimes go awry, it’s usually because a utilitarian ethic reduces the human person to a means, rather than the end, to which other things, such as systems and institutions of law and education and the economy, are means."

In its most extreme forms, totalitarian regimes reduce the person to the status of an instrument to serve the ends of the State, be it the fascist state of the Nazis, or the future communist utopia of the Soviets and the Red Chinese. When liberal democratic regimes go awry, it’s usually because a utilitarian ethic reduces the human person to a means, rather than the end, to which other things, such as systems and institutions of law and education and the economy, are means.

The abortion license, against which we struggle today, is dressed up by its defenders in the language of individual rights. You know the rhetoric. But it is underwritten, I assure you, by a utilitarian ethic that in the end, vaporizes the very idea of individual rights. Legalized abortion treats the idea of an inalienable right to life as (to use Jeremy Bentham’s famous phrase) “nonsense upon stilts.”

In cultures where religious fanaticism has taken hold, the dignity of the individual is typically sacrificed for the sake of tragically misbegotten theological ideas and goals. And we know all too well where that leads.

By contrast, in a healthy liberal democratic ethos—one that is uncorrupted by utilitarianism or “me generation” expressive individualism—we will find support for the dignity of the human person, because witness will be given to the basic human rights and liberties of all, including the child in the womb, including the mentally and physically impaired, including those at the very end of life.

Where a healthy religious life flourishes, faith in God provides a grounding for the dignity and the inviolability of the human person by, for example, proposing, as the Jewish and Christian traditions propose, an understanding of each and every member of the human family—even those of different faiths, or those professing no faith—as persons made in the very image and likeness of the divine author of our lives and liberties.

"The family, based on the marital commitment of husband and wife, is the original and best department of health, education, and welfare. No government agency can hope to do what the well functioning family does."

The second pillar of any decent society is the institution of the family. It is quite literally indispensable. Nothing can substitute for it. The family, based on the marital commitment of husband and wife, is the original and best department of health, education, and welfare. No government agency can hope to do what the well functioning family does.

Now of course, no family is perfect. Yet no other institution, governmental or otherwise, excels the healthy family in its capacity to transmit to each new generation the understanding and traits of character—the values and virtues—upon which the success of every other institution in society, from law and government, to education and business, vitally depends.

Where families fail to form, as they so often do today, or where there is widespread family breakdown, the effective transmission of the essential virtues of honesty, civility, self-restraint, concern for the welfare of others, justice, compassion, and personal responsibility, is imperiled. If they are not transmitted by the family, these virtues are simply not going to be transmitted. No government agency is going to transmit them to anybody’s children.

Without those virtues, respect for the dignity for the human person, that first pillar of a decent society, will be undermined and sooner or later, lost. For even the most laudable formal institutions cannot uphold respect for human dignity where people do not have the virtues that make that respect a reality and give it vitality in actual social practice. That’s why John Adams said that our Constitution, though a brilliant achievement of political science, was designed “for a moral and religious people, and will serve well for no other.”

Respect for the dignity of human beings requires more than merely formally sound institutions, even the best institutions. It requires a cultural ethos, in which people act from conviction, from good character, to treat other human beings as they would be treated themselves. That is with respect, civility, and justice. The best legal and political institutions ever devised are of little value where selfishness, contempt for others, dishonesty, injustice, and other types of immorality and irresponsibility flourish.

"... if all we had to rely on to get people to do the right thing was fear of punishment by law, we would descend into anarchy in a week, perhaps less. We rely on virtuous people—most people, most of the time—doing what is right, not out of fear, but out of conviction."

Indeed, the effective working of governmental institutions themselves depends on most people, most of the time, obeying law out of a respect for moral obligation, and not merely out of fear of detection and punishment for law breaking.  I can assure you that if all we had to rely on to get people to do the right thing was fear of punishment by law, we would descend into anarchy in a week, perhaps less. We rely on virtuous people—most people, most of the time—doing what is right, not out of fear, but out of conviction.

And perhaps it goes without saying that the success of business and our market-based economic system, depends on there being large numbers of reasonably virtuous, trustworthy, law abiding, promise-keeping people to serve as workers and managers, lenders and regulators, payers of bills for goods and services. We have to have people who will show up for work, who will show up on time, not drunk, not on drugs, who won’t embezzle. Notice that business cannot manufacture such people, yet business depends upon them. Who supplies them?  The family.

Now the third pillar of any decent society is a fair and effective system of law and government—the kinds of institutions bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers. This is necessary because none of us is perfectly virtuous all of the time. And some people will be deterred from wrongdoing only by the threat of punishment. More importantly though, as contemporary philosophers of law rightly emphasize, the law coordinates human behavior, even among virtuous people, for the sake of achieving common goals, the common good, especially when dealing with the complexities of modern life. Even if all of us were perfectly virtuous all of the time, we would still need a system of government, a set of laws, considered as authoritatively-stipulated coordination norms, to accomplish many of our most important common ends.

A society, in my opinion, can be a decent one, even if it’s not a dynamic one, if the three pillars are healthy and functioning in a mutually supportive way. If each is itself healthy, you’ll have a decent society.

Now there is a certain type of conservative who believes that a truly decent society simply cannot be dynamic. Dynamism, they believe, causes instability, and undermines the pillars of a decent society. So some conservatives historically, have opposed not only industrialism, but the very idea of a commercial society, fearing that commercial economies inevitably produce acquisitive materialist attitudes that corrode the foundations of decency.

And some, like Amish communities, reject education for their children beyond the minimum of what’s necessary to run a farm (reading, writing and arithmetic), on the ground that further education inevitability leads to worldliness and apostasy and undermines religious faith and moral virtue.

Now a decent society need not be a dynamic one. The Amish example demonstrates that truth. But dynamism, in my opinion, need not erode decency, and I think we can strongly support a commercial market-based economy if we understand it correctly, and defend it, and see it in the context of a larger whole, where moral values and virtues are honored and nurtured. We can affirm the commercial economy and the market system without fearing that it will necessarily take us down the road to corruption. A dynamic society need not be one in which consumerism and materialism become rife, and in which moral and spiritual values disappear.

This theme has been taken up by some on the left. I spend my time swimming in those waters by my institutional affiliation. And one of the latest attacks on the market system and on business generally, is that it tends to crowd out moral and spiritual values.

"... while I applaud those of my liberal colleagues who have rediscovered moral and spiritual values as something important, I must say that in some cases people seem merely to be giving lip service to such values as a pretext to bash an economic system that has been the greatest anti-poverty mechanism ever created."

Now while I applaud those of my liberal colleagues who have rediscovered moral and spiritual values as something important, I must say that in some cases people seem merely to be giving lip service to such values as a pretext to bash an economic system that has been the greatest anti-poverty mechanism ever created. The market system is an engine of social mobility and of economic growth from which all benefit.

So I venture to say that almost certainly the market economy will play a positive role when the conditions are in place to sustain it over the long run. And those conditions include: healthy flourishing families, and an ethos of respect for human dignity, beginning with the child in the womb and all who are vulnerable and in need of our care

So the two pillars of social dynamism, it seems to me, are first, institutions of research, in which the frontiers of knowledge across the humanities and social sciences and natural sciences are pushed back, and through which knowledge is transmitted to students and disseminated to the public at large. And second, business firms, and associated institutions supporting them that are patterned on their principles, by which wealth is generated, distributed, and preserved. I believe that universities, and business firms, along with respect for the dignity of the person, the institution of the family, and the system of law and government, are the five pillars of decent and dynamic societies.

Now it’s all too easily to take these pillars for granted, especially for people who are living in circumstances of general affluence.  It’s important to remember that each of them has come under attack from different angles and forces. Operating from within universities, persons and movements hostile to one or another of these pillars, usually preaching or acting in the name of high ideals of one sort or another, have gone on the attack. Attacks on business and the very idea of the market economy and economic freedom, coming from the academic world, are of course well known. Students are often taught to hold business, and especially business men, in contempt as heartless exploiters driven by greed. In my own days as a student, these attacks were made explicitly in the name of Marxism. One notices less of that these days, but the substance remains the same even if the label has been changed.

Needless to say, where businesses and business men have behaved unethically, they play into the stereotypes of the enemies of the market system, and facilitate their efforts to smear business and the market for the sake of transferring greater control over the economy to government. This is the tragedy of the kinds of things that happened at Tyco and Enron.

Similarly, attacks on the family, and particularly on the institution of marriage upon which the family is built, and on the innocence of children, are common in our educational system today, beginning in kindergarten and going all the way through higher education. The line here is that the family, at least as traditionally understood and constituted, is a patriarchal and exploitative institution that oppresses women and imposes on people forms of sexual restraint that are psychologically damaging and inhibiting to the free expression of their personality.

There is a real threat to the family here, one against which we must fight with all our energy and will. And we must never give up. It is difficult to think of any issues on the domestic agenda that are more critical than the defense of marriage as the union of husband and wife, and the effort to renew and rebuild the marriage culture, and the protection of childhood innocence, and the rights of parents to inculcate in their children key values and virtues related to sexual morality and marriage.

"The reality is that the ideological movements today that seek to redefine marriage and abolish its normativity for romantic relations and the rearing of children, are the very same movements that seek to undermine the market system and replace it with statist control of vast areas of economic life."

If our society goes down the tubes—and may God protect us from any such eventuality—but if we go down the tubes, if our cause is lost, it will not be in the end because of bad economic decisions (though bad economic decision cause tremendous harm and suffering).  It will be because we let misguided but determined people undermine the institution of marriage and destroy the innocence of our children.

Now some will counsel that economic conservatives have no horse in this race. They will say that issues such as marriage and the sanctity of human life are moral, culture, and religious questions about which business people, and people concerned with economic freedom, need not concern themselves. That’s bad thinking! The reality is that the ideological movements today that seek to redefine marriage and abolish its normativity for romantic relations and the rearing of children, are the very same movements that seek to undermine the market system and replace it with statist control of vast areas of economic life.

Moreover, the rise of ideologies hostile to marriage and the family have had a measurable social impact, and its costs are measured in ruined relationships, damaged lives, and all that follow from these personal catastrophes. In many poorer places in our nation, families are simply failing to be formed. Marriage is coming to be seen as “an optional lifestyle choice,” as it already is in much of Europe—only one of various optional ways of conducting relationships and of having and rearing children. Out of wedlock birth rates are very high:  40% now for the overall population and more than 70% for the African-American community. These are profoundly worrying statistics with the negative consequences being born not so much by the affluent as by the those in the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of our society.

When my colleagues at Princeton and in the Ivy League, and in higher education more generally say, “Well you guys shouldn’t be worried so much about these social issues, about abortion and marriage; you should be worrying about poverty,” I say, “if you buys were genuinely worried about poverty, you would be at the forefront, joining us in rebuilding the marriage culture.” Do you want to know why people are trapped in poverty in so many inner cities?  The picture is complex, but it is undeniable that a key element of it is the destruction of the family and the prevalence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and fatherlessness.

The economic consequences of these trends are self-evident. Consider the need of business to have a responsible and capable work force.  Business cannot manufacture honest, hardworking people to employ. Nor can government create them. Businesses depend on there being many such people. But they must rely on the family, assisted by religious communities and other institutions of civil society, to produce them. So business has a huge stake in the health of the family. It should avoid doing anything to undermine the institutions of marriage and the family. And it should do whatever it can to strengthen these institutions.

Economic and social conservatives have common enemies in the overbearing social welfare state, the entitlement mentality, and the statist ideologies that provide their intellectual underpinnings. But the marriage of economic and social conservatives is not, and must not be regarded as a mere marriage of convenience. The reason we have common enemies is that we have common principles. What do you think our enemies are enemies of? They’re opposed to our principles, our common principles. Our marriage is, and must be understood to be, a marriage of principle, even if it’s not always a romantic love match.

"The two greatest institutions ever devised for lifting people out of poverty and enabling them to live in dignity are the market economy, and the institution of marriage. These institutions will stand together, or they will fall together. And if that’s not a reason for economic and social conservatives to unite on principle, and not merely out of pragmatism, I don’t know what is."

The moral foundations of economic conservatism are precisely those of social conservatism: respect for the human person, which grounds our commitment to individual liberty; and the right to economic freedom and other essential civil liberties; belief in personal responsibility, which is a precondition of the possibility of moral desirability; individual liberty in every domain; recognition of subsidiary as the basis for effective but truly limited government; respect for the Rule of Law, even against courts which want to act like legislators instead of judges; and recognition of the vital role played by the family in the flourishing of any decent and dynamic society.

The two greatest institutions ever devised for lifting people out of poverty and enabling them to live in dignity are the market economy, and the institution of marriage. These institutions will stand together, or they will fall together. And if that’s not a reason for economic and social conservatives to unite on principle, and not merely out of pragmatism, I don’t know what is.

Contemporary statist ideologues have contempt for both the market economy and the marriage-based family. They fully understand the connection between the two, and we must come to understand it too. How shocking it is that many conservatives fail to see this vital connection.

Those who do see it however know why social conservatives must become economic conservatives, and why economic conservatives should be social conservatives at the same time.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.