Libertarians are wrong. They posit the purpose of politics as a negative; a ruthless non-interference in the personal and private lives of individuals, summarized in the maxim: “The best government is the one which governs least.” This saps us of our political virtue — our capacity for leadership, rule, and justice, which flow from our God-given natures as social creatures.
The Christian postliberal critique of libertarianism has been fired — and it is surprising that there are still libertarians alive to receive the shot. Postliberalism denies the possibility of a neutral state; it denies the possibility of political leadership that does not direct those who belong to it to a particular end. Rather, all political communities are directed towards particular ends. To posit a libertarian state only seems to abscond from the direction and coercion of individuals on a superficial level. Actually, it is an active directing of persons into libertarianism.
This is so obvious that it is hardly worth mentioning, but the reason that libertarians all seem rather like the same kind of person is because it is not true that they simply posit an absent state that only “steps in” when someone’s rights are being violated. They posit a particular, political theory of man — an individual with a battery of rights, in competition with those who would deprive him of his rights, and submissive to the State, the source and guarantee of those rights. The practice of libertarianism is an active conformity of the human person to the ideal libertarian subject of governance — the atomized, right-bearing individual. The enshrinement of libertarianism in law is an active enforcement of laissez-faire principles over and against other principles of political leadership. A purely libertarian community would not look like a paradise in which diversity and creativity flourish because the State is restrained from tendencies towards oversight and micro-management, but one in which the libertarian doctrine is preached and believed and the libertarian liturgy practiced. The creed of the state becomes the creed of the citizens: do as thou wilt. Most libertarians would say things like “well, I don’t like pornography, but I support your right to film it and watch it.” Most libertarian neighborhoods would look like they were designed by people ideologically committed to valuing private taste over communal taste. Most citizens would develop an identity of non-conformity to the direction of larger institutions. People would be coerced away from practicing, say, integralism.
The fact that there is no “neutral” state is boring. It’s been said. But the persistence of libertarianism as a persona non grata among Christian postliberals often leads well-meaning Christians to reject principles that, in fact, have been stolen and perverted by libertarians from their own tradition.
This is most clear in the case of “subsidiarity.” Susannah Black’s critique of my (Andrew’s) article, “What States Can’t Do,” is a good critique, its only lack being the lack of much to disagree with. She argues:
Subsidiarity doesn’t mean that things ought to be done at the lowest possible level. It means that things ought to be done – that power ought to be exercised – at the appropriate level for the kind of rule that is happening. More local is not better. It’s not worse. It just is...
We agree. The real existence of hierarchical levels of power means that we couldn’t possibly imagine that subsidiarity means “things ought to be done at the lowest level possible.” What would that even look like? A man who boos theater productions because they ought to have been produced by a group of siblings? A man disappointed by the public library because it wasn’t built by his local bowling league?
Some things ought to be done at lower levels, characterized by a relative lack of coercive power, a relative abundance of moral authority, a greater degree of intimate knowledge of persons — and thus a greater possibility for love. No one disagrees that your mother can know you and thus love you better than the local manager of your nearby Target.
If politics were a blank, neutral category, it would be true to say that “more local is not better.” Target is better at selling you duvet covers. Your mother is better at teaching you to restrain your anger. Different levels; different ends; who cares. But libertarians are wrong. Politics is not the negative space in which people are allowed to do what they want without harming others. Politics has a point. The point of politics is virtue. To “do politics” is to engage in making other people virtuous, or it is not politics at all, but an evil or a farce masquerading in its name.
It would probably be best to be didactic: If you think that politics means something like “governments” and “parties,” we’re going to disagree. If you equate “politics” with “social existence,” generally speaking, you’d be closer to the mark — but we’ll still disagree. When we say “politics,” we mean the act of aiding a person in the development of virtue in and through a real power difference. Virtue emerges when one aids and another is being aided. Politics is made possible by inequality, and it has as its conceptual end a perfect society, in which all power difference is rightly ordered to the production of perfect virtue in all persons.
The libertarian hurrah for the “local” stems from the desire to enact its weird anthropology — a world in which small groups of people act in mutual contract with each other makes the idea that we are “individuals with rights” seem a good deal more plausible than a world in which large groups of people act under the authority and leadership of another. Libertarians are only pro-family because they are pro-individual, and individuals have the bad habit of only ever coming from families — a fact which leads to no small degree of libertarian confusion, and had Murray Rothbard famously advocate for the capacity of the individual to sell off members of his family.
A Catholic hurrah for the “local” shares a nominal similarity with libertarianism, but to mistake one for the other would be drastically dumb. Catholic localism stems from the desire to do politics, namely, to produce virtue within a field of inequality. The local is not valued because it is more individual than, say, the national; nor is it cheered negatively, as a way of booing what is bigger. The local is valued from the lens of political realism. It is simply true that a mother is better at attaining the end of politics (virtue within an unequal other) than a Target, a 4-H Club, or a nation-state. She is better because she has a greater degree of knowledge of the particular person upon whom she practices politics; she loves her children, she sees their faults and goodness, and can aid them in the formation of habits grounded in goodness rather than in fault. Higher levels, characterized by less knowledge and love, are less able to produce virtue across the field of inequality, which is why their intervention within the failed family is characterized as remedial.
Black seems to think that, within “What States Can’t Do”, higher levels of human organization are characterized as simply worse than lower levels.
The enjoyment of, say, going to see a musical, and the good of belonging to a thriving artistic culture, are very distinctly not a less intense or less morally authoritative...kind of good than being trained to love music as a child in one’s home. Those fully civilized experiences are what the training is for, though of course the training — all that family karaoke and all those scattered CDs — is also good in itself.
Again, it seems like Christian postliberals have an (understandable) habit of reading their enemy, libertarianism, into every instance of localism. Black seems to be worried that we view the family as the end-all-be-all; mistaking the school of love for the full, civic life that is available to the mature adult who, having received his capacities from the family, goes on to use these virtues for the enjoyment of and participation in a unity which transcends the family; that underlying all of this “family as the building block of society” stuff is that same, tired, sour-faced individualism that we killed and buried years ago:
[T]he good of belonging to a beautiful artistic culture...is the telos, the real thing, that training in appreciation of Broadway musicals at the family level gives you the key to. That is the treasurehouse. The key exists for the sake of the treasurehouse; the treasurehouse, not the key, is the point.
And the Aristotelian/Thomistic teaching, at least, is that there is an experience of political life that is a parallel to the experience of being well-trained in the appreciation of musical theater, while living in a city big enough to support musical theater. That experience is what we call the political common good. And that training at home — training in virtue, yes, by your father and mother, training such as is described in the Hosea passage and in Jones’ images — is what will give you the key to this treasurehouse.
We agree with all of this. No one argues that the family is self-sufficient. To imagine otherwise is to import images of the libertarian bunker into the Christian vision of the home. The family is for its self-transcendence in the City of God, yes. To argue otherwise would be a liturgy of tribalism, not Christianity.
But the provision of goods is simply not the same thing as the production of virtue. It may be intimately related to it; it may be a necessary condition of it; good-provision may even, sometimes, carry virtue-production within it as a kind of seed; but it is essentially distinct from it.
A city, and a city alone, can provide the good of an orchestra playing Wagner. But plenty of Nazis loved listening to Wagner, and damned themselves while doing it. Only the cultural heritage and civic participation enabled the production and performance of tragedies in the Greek city states, but Greek tragedy is not essentially political in the strict sense: the act of aiding a person in the development virtue in and through a real power difference that obtains between the one aiding and the one being aided. (And, if Augustine is to be believed, the Greeks were headed to hell despite the participation in civic life and their enjoyment of goods that no one family could attain on its own). Only a combination of interests can lead to the building and maintaining of a supermarket, but this attainment of a good does not take, as its end, the production of virtue. Equating the political with the social is a useful tool against those who would draw a harsh line and pretend that the politics is only the “official politics” of modern States and their actors, rather than every instance of power difference within a society. But once this silliness has been overcome, there is no need to continue the conflation — the end of politics is particular, and it is the formation of virtue. What we are arguing modern nation-states cannot do is politics, the production of virtue in their citizens; not that it cannot offer goods; not, even, that it cannot aid the task of virtue-production (which occurs in and through the real “care of souls” that some people have over others) by remedial action, coercion, material provision, and so forth.
We are not arguing that there are no goods the family cannot supply for itself; nor that the family is the end of social existence; but that the family is where virtue-formation happens most effectively, and that all true politics thus takes the family as the model for the virtue-formation that happens outside of it. This is why the father-son relationship is archetypical to politics; not, as Black says, “primary.” It is archetypical because it is an obvious moment of inequality, of power-difference utilized for the sake of virtue production. Black, in an effort to ensure that we take the free, mature adult as the final cause of the family (which we should — that’s simply what a virtuous man is!) argues that the primary political unit is the married couple, rather than the father and son.
Rather, within marriage, virtue-building (politics) occurs in a relationship of rapid, surprising, and constant shifts of power, in which one partner, in some one sense, has more power than the other and, in love, orientates this “power” into the service of the weaker partner who, in her weakness, is strong, by having a claim of justice upon the power of the stronger — constantly, analogically modeling the Trinity by being a Father to the Son, and then a Son to the Father, in an exchange of weakness and strength that mutually strengthens the other unto death: I help you be patient; you help me be kind; I take the kid; you take the keys; whatever power I have is for you; whatever power you have is for me. This is why the Scriptures take up the image of the Bride, not because it somehow overrules the political archetype of the Father and the Son, but because in taking Israel (his son) as a Bride, God performs a degree of self-humiliation that we never could have imagined. He marries humanity, and in doing so, establishes a relationship with us analogous to the one just described, making himself graciously available to this exchange of power-over the other, such that the Church is given power over the distribution of God’s grace; such that humanity (by grace, in Christ, one must repeat it!) is made a partner and (wonder of wonders!) granted authority over Heaven.
What, then, is the critique? The critique is a fear of libertarianism, read into the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity. This fear makes it difficult to understand the core of the essay, which is largely unaddressed in Black’s response.
The core argument is this: The form of our political community as a modern nation-state is not neutral. It was designed by those wishing to exclude the Catholic Church from politics, and it carries out its design today. Integralists who would simply “run the modern nation-state” have fallen prey to the insidious “naturalness” with which this technology presents itself. They hope to control an apparatus that instills fear, not virtue; that takes law as its end rather than as a means to the charity which is the fulfillment of law. They tend to think that a confessional State will make people Christian; they have not yet asked, and asked seriously, why our recent historical period of confessional states preceded an unprecedented decline in actual Christian confession. In short, they hope to do something besides politics, falsely assuming a kind of political neutrality in an organizational, administrative, and governmental form invented to shore up the gap left after the ousting of Christendom, ensuring Christendom never rears its head again.
What is most fundamental in this non-neutrality of the modern nation-state is its abject inability to do politics, where politics is understood as the formation of virtue in a power-differentiated other that occurs in and through a love and knowledge of that person — an office which is commonly referred to as the “care of souls.” The reason for this is that the tool that we call the state is the temporal power of the Catholic Church, divorced from its union with the spiritual power, and so transmuted into something quite unlike either — a monopoly on “legitimate” violence, where “legitimacy” is not obtained by justice, and certainly not Christian ordination, but by the sheer fact of power; of the capacity to act, which we are in the current habit of calling “sovereignty.”
Where this is the technique of rule, the ruled will not become virtuous. The state will use its coercive power, through law, to encourage homogenous behavior; the people, insofar as they can be said to obey rather than to submit, will obey insofar as it is in their self-interest to do so. The resulting habitually self-interested man may appear virtuous, but he is not. Contemporary state rule (which, detached from the office of care of souls, tends towards being anonymous rule over an innumerable number) creates a populace who excel in appearing virtuous for the sake of avoiding punishment. The Church’s teaching on subsidiarity cannot be integrated with modern nation-states without violence, because subsidiarity means that political rule at lower levels is real, and not merely real insofar as it is granted or allowed by a theoretically sovereign power. Where this is not the case, subsidiarity becomes the policy recommendation of a totalizing state, rather than an anthropology which recognizes a diverse distribution of power, and so maintains, in justice, a diverse distribution of political rule. For a modern nation-state to serve and protect virtue-formative, political rule as it is practiced in the family, neighborhood, business, guild, abbey, small town, or big city, it is necessary that it recognizes these institutions, not as “intermediate institutions,” mediating the rule of law as it descends from the sovereign state, but as real authorities; sovereigns that are not thereby rival sovereigns; persons with an efficacious care for the souls of others within their particular field; just as that thing we call “the state” has an efficacious care for the souls of others within its particular, limited field. But to recognize this limitation would be for the modern state to cease to be absolute; to cease pretending to “sovereignty” in the contemporary sense; to cease being a modern state and to begin to work as something else; something which, in the High Middle Ages, may have been recognized as the King and his men, with their particular role of promoting the business of the peace and the faith; something which, in our postliberal future, we may call “the state,” but which will take on a particular, limited form as of yet unknown.