There is a disagreement among Christian postliberals. The disagreement, as far as I can tell, revolves around what we mean by “the state” or by “the government.” Everyone agrees that the end of human life is happiness. Everyone agrees that happiness is found in virtue. Everyone agrees that the purpose of politics is the formation of this virtue socially, which we call the common good. Everyone agrees that politics must be oriented toward our final end, union with God. Everyone agrees that grace is necessary for this final end to be achieved. We are all integralists, and that is a very good thing.
We seem to disagree, however, on what constitutes politics, or at least what aspect of politics is the most important. Because of this disagreement (or maybe it’s just a misunderstanding), we are talking past each other. Some postliberals see libertarianism as their primary opponent. This has led them to emphasize the importance of politics for human flourishing. The temptation here is to over-emphasize the state and so to become authoritarian. Other postliberals (myself, included) see authoritarians (left or right) as their chief opponents. The temptation here is to de-emphasize the state to the point of anarchism. The result of this disagreement is that while we agree on nearly everything, we disagree at the simplest level: should we have a smaller state or a larger state? Should the state do more or do less? Should we undermine the state or take control of the state? This matters because even the most rudimentary practical political strategy in the United States must begin here.
What I want to do here is lay out my basic understanding of politics as briefly and simply as I can. I am going to limit my discussion to the temporal power for sake of space, even though leaving out the spiritual power is theoretically untenable and makes me cringe. My understanding of the just ordering of temporal power can be summed up in a single word: subsidiarity. Subsidiarity can help us overcome both anarchist and authoritarian temptations.
Subsidiarity is generally defined as the principle that problems should be dealt with at the smallest social level possible and that larger, or “higher,” powers should only intervene when these smaller levels fail. This is a fair definition, but it suffers from the weakness of being framed negatively and so coming across as a policy recommendation, as a sort of “best practices” for the political order.
In fact, subsidiarity is a positive assertion about who human beings are in our very natures. It is a metaphysical assertion.
Politics is about the formation of virtue. Its problem is this: how does one man lead another man into virtue? Subsidiarity is the assertion that this happens most efficaciously at the most personal level possible. The relationship between a parent and child is archetypical. No one can lead a boy into virtue more efficaciously than his father. This is so because their relationship is profoundly intimate, ordered first and foremost by love and characterized by inequality.
The father leads his son into virtue by knowing his son intimately. He knows his weaknesses and his strengths, his inherent temptations and his natural goodness. The father uses this knowledge to deploy his superior power effectively in the perfecting of his son. This is nothing else than the “care of souls.” This care is most effective when the father can use the son’s virtue in order to build more virtue. If the father can find his son’s love, the place where his son obeys him out of love, he can discipline his son in such a way that the good deeds mandated by the father are performed with a good intention by the son—for such a good intention is a prerequisite for virtue formation. A good deed done with a bad intention is an evil deed, as St. Thomas tells us. (STh., I-II q.18 a.4 ad3; a.9 resp.; q.19 a.5) Likewise, repeatedly doing evil deeds produces vice and not virtue, even if they have the outward appearance of virtue. The father’s ability to turn a small virtue into a greater virtue, or one virtue into another virtue, constitutes his moral authority.
Nevertheless, a child must sometimes be restrained from hurting himself or hurting others, regardless of his intentions. Sometimes he must simply be stopped. A father needs to know when and where this is the case. He must know when to trade his far, far more efficacious moral authority for his far less efficacious coercive power — when he must trade the positive for the negative. This requires prudence, intimate knowledge, and love.
This means that politics is most powerful at the smallest level possible. No law is better at leading a person into virtue than that of a just father. This is the reason that the Bible and the entire tradition use the example of a boy becoming a man to describe how law works:
When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son….
Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of compassion,
with the bands of love,
and I became to them as one,
who eases the yoke on their jaws,
and I bent down to them and fed them. (Hosea 11:1-4).
A father’s law is the most effective law for attaining virtue, and this is not because the father has the most coercive power. As a singular man, he has the least coercive power that a society can bring to bear. Rather, his power is in his moral authority. This moral authority is so profound that his physical weakness is of little account. This smallest thing, a father’s love, is the most powerful force in the attainment of virtue, the true end of politics.
This means that the fullest human happiness (which is the fruit of virtue) is possible only through the smallest level of social interaction; at the level of family and friends and at the level of personal love. We all know this to be true.
This efficacy decreases as we expand in scale and is minimal at the highest level, say, at the level of our national states. Our states have nuclear weapons and armies of hundreds of thousands of men. But they are clearly less efficacious and less powerful in attaining the end of politics, virtue formation, than a father or a group of friends. A national state’s moral authority is minimal, though not absent, even as its coercive power is astronomically greater than that of the father. This is completely appropriate. In the same sort of way that a father must sometimes use his small coercive power in order to protect his son and his family from evil, so the state must use its large coercive power to protect all the layers of political society that lay beneath it.
Stretching between the father and the state we have a hierarchy of decreasing moral authority and increasing coercive power. It is a hierarchy of increasing physical power exactly as it is an inverted hierarchy of decreasing moral authority and so political efficacy.
This complex hierarchy is necessary for two reasons, one positive and one negative. The first reason is that the father’s little society must be integrated into larger societies in order to achieve the common goods that can only be had at those larger levels. These common goods decrease in number and importance as the scale increases. In fact, they track directly with the decrease in moral authority, the two being different ways of talking about the same thing. So, for example, the goods of belonging to a beautiful artistic culture can only be had through a larger polity. There is real moral authority at a higher level when it comes to these goods. But enjoying such goods still requires the proper functioning of the lower levels in order to be maximized; a child must be taught by his family to love art. Goods at the top pre-suppose and perfect goods at the bottom. This is the positive side of subsidiarity.
The negative side is the coercive intervention of the higher powers into the realm of the lower powers. Because of sin, this too is necessary. The family is the place where the greatest happiness is possible because it is the place of greatest power. For the same reason, it is the place where the greatest misery is possible. There is no greater suffering than that of an abused child. In such a circumstance, a higher power must intervene, let us say to remove the child and place him in an orphanage. This intervention is good and right, but it is a compromise; it is a sorrow. The orphanage is no doubt better than the abusive home, but it is not capable of the goods of family life. It cannot reproduce the happiness that is possible in the family. The goods that it is capable of — a roof over one’s head, a full belly, extrinsic education and physical safety — simply cannot substitute for the goods of loving parents. In fact, they cannot even fully be the goods that they are without the goods of family life. A meal at an orphanage is a good that can remedy the hunger of a child, but it cannot achieve the full good that is possible through institutional meal preparation, the sort of good realized, for example, in a family night out at a restaurant. An abusive family poisons the whole hierarchy at its foundation. A child is clearly better off in an orphanage than in a terribly abusive family; but the same child would be far better off living in abject poverty with his loving family than institutionalized in middle class comfort.
This is how the whole hierarchy functions. As one moves up, the positive goods decrease in potency as the negative, remedial power increases. At the level of the nation state there are very few positive political goods. In order to be happy, we need very little that only the nation-state can provide, and yet there is an immense need for remedial, negative power. The organization at that level must be able to defend the goods of all the lower levels from large threats such as a foreign army or cultural-wide corruption.
Ascending from the family to the national state, there is a continuum of decreasing positive goods and increasing negative action. Social justice is the proper ordering of these levels—which is how the common good is achieved. The common good is the good that is only possible as the good of the whole; the source of peace for the entire society; “the tranquility of order,” as St. Augustine terms it.
At each level, an actor acts with justice only if he limits his positive actions to securing those goods that only he can provide and simultaneously does not fail in his duty of remedial action in levels below him. At the same time, he must not attempt to provide either the goods or the remedial actions of the levels below him, above him, or parallel to him. This would be injustice or tyranny. The functioning of this entire hierarchy, from bottom to top, is politics. It is how virtue and so happiness is propagated and maintained. This, considered as a whole simply is the temporal power. The temporal power is not, then, a unitary office. No one man or institution has the temporal power. It is a power that is diffused through a just social order, from bottom to top.
Injustice can, therefore, appear in two main forms. First, if a higher power intervenes in the justly ordered affairs of a lower level, it is simple tyranny. We might call this hegemonic injustice. It is unjust for a state to take children away from their families and institutionalize them, to name an extreme example. Hegemonic injustice occurs when a higher power uses its coercive power to order powers lower than itself, despite the lack of any need for remedial action resulting from a failure of that lower power to attain goods for those under its care. Whether obvious or not, such injustice is always the usurpation of a moral authority. State propaganda or corporate marketing, for example, almost always unjustly usurps the pedagogical function of lower levels.
Such an attempt is not only an act of direct injustice, it is also doomed to fail in the achievement of the end of politics. This is so for the reasons outlined above. The higher power simply does not hold the moral authority of the lower powers. It can only “expand” its moral authority into their realms by faking it through disguising coercive power. Where love is wanting, it manipulates. It uses fear. Such a tactic will end not in the formation of virtue, but the cultivation of ever more sophisticated vice. Propaganda results not in patriotism, but jingoism.
I put little stock in the notion of sovereignty not because I don’t believe in the importance or reality of power, but for exactly the opposite reason. I think those claiming sovereignty are, in fact, trading real, strong power for posturing, weak power, which is why it is manifested in violence. If the national state attempts to cultivate true virtue at anything beyond the shred of moral authority that it is actually capable of, it will have to use violence “positively” and this will cultivate vice instead, namely, good actions performed with evil intentions.
The second form of injustice is the inversion of the first. A hierarchy of subsidiarity starts with a great multitude of little societies, of families. These families are grouped into slightly larger societies and these larger societies into still larger ones, all the way up to some single society. Society as a whole should be imagined, then, as a series of converging hierarchies — a pyramid. An actor acts unjustly if he jumps from his hierarchy to a neighboring hierarchy, which is another way of saying that he tries to usurp the position of the higher power that unites the two hierarchies. We might call this the injustice of bullying. A father, for example, ought to know that he does not have a right (or duty) to perform the same level of discipline over his neighbor’s children as over his own. The same holds true at every level. This seems simple. But it actually manifests itself in complex ways. Take, for example, our recent debates concerning the police. Could it be that that street-level policing is a level that ought to be performed, not by people from a neighboring community, but by the appropriate level of the policed community itself? That, if they are incapable of such remedial action, the problem should be pushed up to a higher level and not moved sideways to another community? Similarly, if one family attempts to use its social power to shame another family to conform to its way of life, or if one city attempts to force its cultural form on another city, they are acting unjustly, as bullies.
Both forms of injustice are antithetical to freedom. This is why I and people who think like me worry so much about creeping fascism. In a proper order of subsidiarity, there can be great diversity among the lower levels of organization precisely because they are united only in a higher level that is not attempting to perform their offices. Freedom is rooted in the scope of positive action (which is the same thing as freedom “for the good”) and the most positive power is present at the lowest levels. There are a great many different ways to raise happy and virtuous children, for example. Each family can be justly different in their freedom. They can operate freely at their level. In the same way, there are a great many different ways to structure a peaceful community. The families that are grouped together under a community will be less different from each other than they will be from the families of a neighboring community, because communities operate freely at their level. This continues: the communities that are grouped together under the rule of a city will be more similar to each other than to the communities grouped under a neighboring city because cities are free to be different in the way they instantiate justice at their level, and so on. Extreme diversity can be combined with ever higher levels of unity within a just society that is ordered toward the common good according to subsidiarity. However, a higher power or a neighboring power can only usurp the proper authority of a lower power through forcing conformity. If a community, for example, attempts the good of the family, it will have to compel all families into its “familial” model, destroying the freedom of the family and so of the individuals that make it up.
Such force is also unproductive for the formation of virtue. Such usurpation, even if well-intentioned, cannot have the particular knowledge and love that is necessary for the proper care of the souls at the usurped level. It has to work on probabilities and make use of more violence and less authority – which just doesn’t work as well.
Subsidiarity demands humility and tolerance and allows for profound diversity. It allows for a real and recognizable freedom. It allows for both the pursuit of the common good and for the virtue of minding your own business.
Subsidiarity as here described is not a policy recommendation. It is an anthropology. As John Paul II wrote: “the social nature of man is not completely fulfilled in the State, but is realized in various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political, and cultural groups which stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy, always in view to the common good.”
The truth of this anthropology is on display everywhere we look. Why have massive government welfare and education programs led to the breakdown of communities and families and the destruction of knowledge? Why has the centralization of political discourse into ever higher-level platforms led to the debasement of that discourse? Why has the ever-strengthening of the national state and market led to the destruction of regional pluralism and the near extinction of toleration for diversity? Why has “woke” virtue-signaling destroyed the very notion of true virtue? An anthropology of subsidiarity helps us to see why. It helps us see that both libertarian individualism and authoritarian collectivism are doomed to fail because they both violate human nature. In fact, they end in more or less the same place.
Is there anything more authoritarian than this statement by the apostle of libertarianism, F.A. Hayek: “There is no other possibility than either the order governed by the impersonal discipline of the market or that directed by the will of a few individuals; and those who are out to destroy the first are wittingly or unwittingly helping to create the second.” And is there anything more individualistic than the fascist destruction of all but state authority? As Mussolini wrote: “And if liberty is to be the attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State.”
My colleagues and I want to focus on the smaller levels because we believe that that is where the most power is found. It is not quietism, a retreat from politics. It is the exact opposite. It is going to where politics is most real and most efficacious. This does not mean that higher levels are unimportant or that we must not fight their tyranny. Rather, we suggest the best way to put a higher authority in its place is to take control of the smaller yet stronger levels below it. The best way to achieve the ends of politics is to go where those ends are most clearly within reach. The real quietist position, I might venture, would be to abandon the realm of real, strong politics and instead retreat to the safe and secure and yet weak “higher” institutions.
In my view, mistaking “politics” for the “state” is a crucial mistake. Realizing that politics is about virtue formation does not translate to a program of redirecting the state to virtue formation. It rather translates to understanding that the state does not have a monopoly on politics. It translates to the understanding that the very notion of unitary sovereignty is antithetical to politics and that nothing could strangle virtue formation more thoroughly than the idea that the administrative state can do much of anything about it. The best such a state can do is fake the moral authority found at the lower levels, leading to false virtues, and to its ultimate demise, which is exactly what happened in the absolutist, confessional states of the modern period.
We often hear it said that “culture is downstream of politics.” Politics is here taken for the unitary state. Even so, the catchy phrase is not mistaken in and of itself. The more unjust an order becomes, the more it is true that coercive state action usurps moral authority and is capable of more effectively producing conformity in vice. We are clearly witnessing this right now. But conformity in vice is not the end of politics. Virtue is. What works in the formation of vice is simply not what works in the formation of virtue. This is why the defense of the phrase always utilizes an example of state-level politics producing vice, say, of a law allowing abortion leading to more abortion, rather than an example of state-level politics producing virtue, say, a law protecting religious liberty leading people to go to church. It is not merely that politics cannot be neutral toward final ends. The “forms” of political order themselves are not neutral. So, if we are after virtue formation, perhaps St. Thomas is closer to the truth when he says “custom has the force of law, nullifies law, and serves to interpret law.” In other words, in the cultivation of virtue, power flows upstream.
It is clearly the case that the political coalitions of the 20th century are falling apart. The conservatism of the Reagan revolution is dying. I am fine with that. I think that the individualism that underwrote recent conservatism was mistaken. However, we ought not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The best thing about the American conservative mind was its suspicion of centralized political power and its respect for the local and the small. Throwing out right-liberalism does not require that we throw out this simple, proudly American impulse; we shouldn’t do it.
My colleagues and I are not proposing anarchism. We are calling not for less politics, but for more politics. We are calling for politics to be taken from the clutches of the modern hegemonic conceit and returned to those who are actually capable of achieving its ends of virtue, happiness, and ultimately the contemplation of God. Now, for this to really work, of course, we would have to bring up God, revelation, and grace — but that is another discussion.