The principle of subsidiarity—which the budget plans and vice-presidential run of Paul Ryan put in the spotlight this year—is easily misunderstood. It is sometimes characterized simply as the idea that problems should be solved at the lowest possible level, by (say) the family or the neighborhood rather than the federal government.
The proper application of subsidiarity may recommend a move towards localism at times, but as Villanova law professor Patrick Brennan writes in a new paper, subsidiarity from a Catholic perspective consists of more than that. From the abstract:
Subsidiarity is the fixed and immovable ontological principle according to which the common good is to be achieved through a plurality of social forms. Subsidiarity is derivative of social justice, a recognition that societies other than the state constitute unities of order, possessing genuine authority, which which are to be respected and, when necessary, aided.
Brennan elaborates on this theme as he explains Pope Pius XI’s words in Quadragesimo Anno:
Negatively, it is a principle of non-absorption of lower societies by higher societies, above all by the state. This is the aspect of subsidiarity that is commonly invoked today, but it represents only half the story. Positively, subsidiarity is also the principle that when aid is given to a particular society, including by the state, it be for the purpose of encouraging and strengthening that society. . . .
It bears emphasis that the libertarian misinterpretation of subsidiarity, which reduces the principle to little more than its non-absorption aspect, is falsified by the popes’ repeated insistence that the state has a right, and sometimes a duty, to intervene.
Elsewhere he adds, “The more the work of a particular state can be accomplished through the competencies and authorities of the many and varied societies that are nested within that state . . . the richer that particular state’s socio-political order.” Rather than associating subsidiarity with federalism, then, we might more accurately understand it as pluralism.
Brennan also provides a valuable overview of how Catholic social teaching developed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the face of increasing government centralization. You can download the entire twenty-page paper here.
Perhaps the primary difficulty with implementing this broader (and more accurate) view of subsidiarity lies in negotiating how the government and private institutions can cooperate for the sake of the common good. Can private institutions maintain their particular commitments when taking a more public role? For example, now that most poor people receive numerous forms of public aid—which is in many ways a positive development—how do private groups help them without becoming mere extensions of the government bureaucracy?
To state one aspect of the problem more pointedly, to what extent does cooperating with the government entail accepting the government’s priorities? Recent developments here and in the U.K. suggest that the extent is large. (I’d cite the HHS contraceptive mandate as further proof, but the mandate applies even to religious groups that take no government money at all.)
Even setting aside the divergent moral views of government and religious institutions, can an expanding government truly support and work with private groups or will it simply crowd them out? If conservatives eventually succeed in rolling back the welfare state, would families, religious congregations, and charities be able to pick up the slack?
I haven’t figured out the answers to these questions, but I suppose trying to strengthen our own families, communities, and religious institutions is never a bad place to start.
h/t Jordan Ballor
December 6th, 2012 | 4:29 pm
I think you’re tentatively getting at something that bothers me: the “principle of subsidiarity” is so vague it’s *completely useless* both in practice and in theory. In fact it’s *worse* than completely useless, because so often the spirit of the “principle” is distorted into Brennan’s “libertarian misunderstanding”: the “principle” becomes simply an excuse to rule out of court at once any public institution’s possibly playing a role doing something that “private” institutions simply can’t or won’t do in fact. It’s a bit like what Anscombe said about the complete distortion of the “double effect” doctrine by many writers.
December 6th, 2012 | 5:03 pm
HT, you have a point there. Yet I think that subsidiarity properly understood, in the context of the rest of Catholic social teaching, would not function as an excuse to rule out government action/programs. (I recommend Brennan’s whole paper for more on this.) The problem is less the vagueness of the principle than the habit of all parties to misinterpret it in a way that makes it say what they want it to say.
December 6th, 2012 | 5:24 pm
Yes, but its vague formulation, together with the surrounding lack of clarity (occasionally courting near-contradiction) in the loose, baggy body of texts we call Catholic social teaching positively *lends* itself to anybody making it say whatever they want. They can always claim that their favored interpretation is their “prudential” judgement about what it means. (And no-one besides Our Lord can evaluate “prudential” judgements — another modern distortion prevalent in the Church.) I’ll check out Brennan’s paper, thanks.
December 6th, 2012 | 7:18 pm
One of the challenges to building a true culture of subisdiairity is the obfuscation between government and society–the pantheistic social abosrotion that you refer to in the post. Furthermore, religious institutions and other more local institutions are often vilified for upholding their priorities over the government or State’s,when there are clear conflicting priorities between them.
Since many assume and accept the misbegotten notion that the government’s priorities, since they are “public” priorities are synonymous for the public’s priorities or priorities conducive to true social justice and a common good. Thus, religious institutions are often painted and caricatured as selfish protectors of oppressive, superstitious curiosities–hindrances to “progress” that are better to keep their eccentricities between their embers than block the State’s just and righteous causes.
Nonetheless, we are wise to avoid the other social-pantheism, the absorption of society and the market. The market-centric vision of life is equally as disruptive on familial stability as the State-activist reduction–both voluntarism’s often work in the service of one another, while superficially and rhetorically opposing one another. Both are political forms of a voluntarist ontology that proves an inhuman and wanting substitutes for true, free social cooperation.
A true unity of order begins with one’s relation to God–the basic relation that provides the grounds for true human relations, from the most local to the most public ones. Absent a keen awareness of this constitutive relation, all other relations become utilitarian means for power-attaining ends.
December 7th, 2012 | 1:24 am
Interesting but I’m not sure how this would differ in practice from the popular “go local” variety of subsidiarity. What Brennan calls “positive subsidiarity” sounds like solidarity.
December 7th, 2012 | 1:35 am
“It is sometimes characterized simply as the idea that problems should be solved at the lowest possible level, by (say) the family or the neighborhood rather than the federal government.”
And this would be a fine definition, if the modifier “competent” is placed between lowest and possible.
What the last 100 years has taught us is that the lowest form of government is often the most competent.
The Federal government operates under the premise that all knowledge can be concentrated and centralized, yet even where this is most likely to occur; i.e. where the body of knowledge is largely the product of regulatory pronouncement-we find the Federal government failing-The Securities and Exchange Commission, the body that for 80 years has prescribed the rules that prescribe how we govern corporations and account for the results of their operations-is itself unable to get a “clean” opinion.
http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/650141.pdf
(from page 52)
During fiscal year 2012, we also determined that deficiencies in SEC’s controls over accounting for its property and equipment constituted a significant deficiency. We have reported on deficiencies in SEC’s controls over accounting for its property and equipment in prior audits and have provided SEC with recommendations to address these deficiencies.6 SEC has taken actions related to some of these previously
reported deficiencies. However, our work identified new and continuing deficiencies
in the design or implementation of SEC’s internal control over accounting for property and equipment as of September 30, 2012.
The reality is that social and economic arrangements are incredibly complex and rely upon individual actors operating with undervalued knowledge in the form of “local circumstances”.
Ms. Williams asks, “To state one aspect of the problem more pointedly, to what extent does cooperating with the government entail accepting the government’s priorities?”
The answer in the U.S., is that cooperation is more like subordination. Subsidiarity comports with the Tenth Amendment, but the federal government has clearly evaded this provision through “federal financial participation”. Hello states-do you want federal highway money? Sure you do, so either lower your legal DUI limit to .08 or you don’t get the money. So you local municipal police don’t want to work extra hours on national enforcement efforts? Well then you won’t get the overtime money and departmental grants we have for you. There’s no need federal control on this matter (unless of course your name is Allstate or Nationwide and you want to minimize lobbying effort in your attempt to lower claim expense-especially from those nasty drunk driving cases where the tools of high jury awards have been polished to perfection by the tort bar-you know-the ones with endless ads about justice- “hurt in an accident? we can help, just call 1-800-MAKM-PAY)
What needs to happen now, is that Subsidiarity needs to be understood to provide for the fact that many economic and social arrangements are too complex to be fully understood from afar, let alone concentrated and as such, competing jurisdictions (laboratories of democracy) where various issues can be tested in the real world (too bad we didn’t try this with Prohibition, to see the unforeseen side-effects before federalizing it) so that actual working application, rather than some politician’s passionate rhetoric become the yardstick by which ideas can be tested.
We will be forced to accept subsidiarity, even if the fulcrum of that change is an spiking interest rates preceding that worst of fiscal cliffs, an under subscribed Treasury auction that will catch everybody off-guard.
December 7th, 2012 | 4:36 am
It was the 19th century Catholic historian, Lord Acton, who pointed out the liberal suspicion of intermediate institutions. “It condemns, as a State within the State, every inner group and community, class or corporation, administering its own affairs; and, by proclaiming the abolition of privileges, it emancipates the subjects of every such authority in order to transfer them exclusively to its own. It recognises liberty only in the individual, because it is only in the individual that liberty can be separated from authority, and the right of conditional obedience deprived of the security of a limited command.”
They believe that “Government must not be arbitrary, but it must be powerful enough to repress arbitrary action in others. If the supreme power is needlessly limited, the secondary powers will run riot and oppress. Its supremacy will bear no check.”
Hence, the insistence in the Declaration of the Rights of Man that “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.”
December 8th, 2012 | 11:49 pm
“For example, now that most poor people receive numerous forms of public aid—which is in many ways a positive development—how do private groups help them without becoming mere extensions of the government bureaucracy?” We see where this has gotten us. None are as blind as those who refuse to see. How about another model? How about the CATHOLIC CHURCH provide for the poor? Here’s an insane idea. Suppose the CATHOLIC CHURCH raised money and built its own hospitals to provide medical aid to the poor? Nah, that’s insane. Actually, due to the high taxes and economic misery caused by the Leviathan government, building hospitals and cathedrals is next to impossible. I’ll leave you with the Catholic Truth:
“”it becomes a duty to give to the indigent out of what remains over. “Of that which remaineth, give alms.”(14) It is a duty, not of justice (save in extreme cases), but of Christian charity – **a duty notenforced by human law**.”
December 8th, 2012 | 11:54 pm
Since the article doesn’t even define it, here is the pre-Vat. II definition of subsidiarity. You decide:
“”It is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, fixed and unchangeable, that one should not withdraw from ***individuals*** and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and industry. So, too, it is an injustice and at the same time
a ***grave evil*** and a disturbance of right order , to transfer to the larger and higher collectivity functions which can be performed and provided for by lesser and subordinate bodies. “
December 9th, 2012 | 12:04 pm
JamesD
“A duty not enforceable by human law”
A pint evidently lost on Charlemagne and the Frankish bishops in 778-779, when he enacted “Concerning tithes, it is ordained that every man give his tithe, and that they be dispensed
according to the bishop’s commandment.” Pope Leo III seemed unaware of this restriction, when he greeted Charlemagne’s capitular, extending the same law to the whole fiscal domains of the Frankish empire, with the cry of “Life and victory to the ever-august Charles!”
As the legal historian W G Black remarked, “From this time onwards, therefore, we may say the civil law superseded any merely spiritual admonitions as to the payment of tithes. Their payment was no longer a religious duty alone it was a legal obligation, enforceable by the laws of the civil head of Christendom.”
This remained so, until the dime was abolished by the French Revolution in 1789. During that thousand years, almost to the day, no Catholic writer protested against their enforcement; quite the contrary.
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