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Common
Good, Sovereignty, and Subsidiarity
Robert
A. Gahl
Pontificia
Università della Santa Croce
Roma
1.
The Current Crisis: Globalization, Federalisms, and the Transformation
of Forms of Governance
On
August 8, 1998, while teaching the history of medieval philosophy
to a group of young Kenyans, I heard a strange thud in the
distance and then a menacing boom, the classroom windows shook
and rattled. I asked my students if they recognized the noise,
but for these young residents of Nairobi that noise was as
mysterious as it was for me. I continued my lecture but after
about five minutes, ominous shreds of wet paper started falling
out of the sky. I suspended class when we realized that the
people running in the streets outside were fleeing the massive
explosion that had just occurred about three kilometers away
in the center of downtown. It took nearly a week to learn
that the terrible car bomb that had brutally injured over
a thousand Africans was orchestrated by al Qaeda who had simultaneously
attacked the United States Embassy in Dar-es-Salam, Tanzania.
Whether or not we realized it then, a new world-wide conflict
was well under way. The world suddenly seemed smaller and
yet much more complex.
This
conference has brought together philosophers, jurists, literary
scholars, film critics, and political scientists to advance
the trans-Atlantic conversation regarding the ethical foundations
of our common tradition. After the tragic events of September
11, 2001 the post cold war geopolitical transformation, begun
with the peaceful revolution of 1989, has accelerated and
with this acceleration has come a heightened interest in and
an intensified need for renewed understanding of the foundational
principles of sovereign authority and the powers of governance.
Ours is a critical moment of epoque change. The Islamicist
war, terribly symbolized by the attack on the Twin Towers,
opened the millennium by putting into question the very foundations
of our political order, whether international, national, local,
civil, or perhaps even religious. As in every crisis, ours
offers great risks and, I hope, even greater opportunities.
After
the brief, personal anecdote, I began by sketching a broad
geopolitical picture because this paper has an ambitious scope.
My aim is to propose a rethinking of the very foundations
of political order. I will not speak of issues from the perspective
of the left or the right or of partisan politics. Rather,
as a priest and as a philosopher, I hope to offer a provocative
reconsideration of the fundamental concepts of political order.
[With deep admiration for the wisdom and erudition of my audience,
I look forward to learn much from the discussion that will
follow. Only sorry that Sam Gregg has had to get back to the
U.S..] The depth of today's crisis calls for a correspondingly
profound analysis. A return to the central concepts of the
roots of our civilization in classical political thought is
needed for a full understanding of our current situation and
therefore to reconfigure the future in continuity with our
common tradition.
Surely
it was an exaggeration to say that everything changed with
9/11. Nonetheless, the global political transformation now
underway is inevitably shaped by tragic events like those
of August 8, September 11, and the more recent March 11 of
Madrid. To ignore the far-reaching consequences of these sad
dates would be to bury one's head in the sand. The current
discussion regarding the ratification of the new draft of
the Charter of the European Union and its implications with
respect to the sovereignty of the member nations, the international
criminal court, immigration, the Christian roots of Europe,
the role of the United Nations in promoting justice and peace
between and within member nations, the composition and the
authority of the Security Council, are just some of the topics
of current political dispute that cannot but be influenced
by the new circumstances caused by the transformation of international
politics now underway.
Francis
Fukuyama with his The End of History and the Last Man and
Samuel Huntington with his The Clash of Civilizations and
the New World Order have famously proposed new and alternative
geopolitical paradigms. While Fukuyama has recognized in an
honest and courageous article that his proposal in The End
of History was deeply flawed and is no longer viable, Huntington's
analysis is limited to a description of some of the principal
risks of the current crisis. Many political responses have
been offered to particular aspects of international law and
relations but the need remains for a comprehensive theoretical
analysis rooted in the tradition of classical political theory.
My aim here [this morning] is to begin such an attempt.
Not
only in France, and not only in Europe, there has been a growth
of anti-Americanism. This new anti-Americanism is quite different
from the cold war reaction of the Communist left against American
capitalism. This new anti-Americanism is a more complex reaction
that includes anti-global sentiments (sometimes of the no-logo
version often expressed here in Italy by its “anti-McDonald's”
variant) and a reaction against the perceived hegemonic thrusts
of the war against terrorism according to the terms once formulated
by President George W. Bush with what Europeans see as his
characteristic brashness: “you are either with us or against
us”. Perhaps everything depends upon how you understand the
first person plural in Bush's affirmation.
By
examining its deeper roots, a philosophical consideration
can place into proper perspective current anti-Americanism.
About 25 years ago, in a lecture entitled “The American Idea,”
the Anglo-American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre described
the anti-Americanism deep-seated within the American character
as a paradoxical, unconscious, and ultimately philosophical
contradiction—a “contradiction between a profound commitment
to the principles of equal rights and liberty on the one hand
and an equally profound commitment to individualistic practices
which generate inequality and unfreedom on the other”.
According
to MacIntyre's trenchant observation, the American is constantly
in self-contradiction. The American proudly defends the universal
and non-discriminatory application of the principles of equality
while considering himself a unique individual, with a unique
role within a specific community (family, church, company,
club, etc.). But this strong sense of belonging to a specific
community inevitably implies a contradiction, if not a conflict,
with universal equality when applied to a pluralist society.
Whenever one's own belonging to a particular community depends
upon strong values, especially if those are moral or religious,
it is inevitable that there be disagreements with other communities
of value with respect to the determination of social equality.
Since, communities are formed upon conceptions of the good,
political membership in one, rather than another, entails
a difference in one's view of the political good, at least
in terms of the hierarchy of goods, if not also in terms of
a direct disagreement regarding the goods to be promoted.
The recent French law, approved after the recommendation made
by the Stasi Commission and its solemn defense by Jacques
Chirac, regarding religious symbols in schools and other public
places, is an explicit attempt to overcome the conflict between
the particular values of individual communities and a pluralist
state by suffocating rival particular identities.
The
recent French example, and we could find many more in just
about any one of the European nations, demonstrates that today
it is not only the American who is in contradiction with himself.
Notwithstanding a few local and usually nationalistic movements
in defense of their own culture, language, and values, like
America, Europe is now also a melting pot that aims to absorb
cultural differences into a homogeneous mixture. America is
more a swirling amalgam that dynamically absorbs many profound
diversities than a grand mosaic composed of distinct tiles
distributed according to a vast artistic design , as often
proposed by a deeply rooted American myth [that would prefer
to liken our country to the spectacular decorations of Palermo's
Capella Palatina or the Cathedral of Monreale]. Like the American,
the contemporary European identity—with its Scots, Silesians,
Sicilians, Ticenesi, Lombards, Catalans, Basques, Bavarians,
and Bohemians—also entails an inevitable tension, if not outright
contradiction. The more the European lives according to his
own culture the less he has in common with the other Europeans.
Even if his individual identity is rooted in a particular
tradition (language, culture, religion, ethnicity, etc.) he
nonetheless aspires to equal justice without consideration
of his own nationality or regional origins. According to MacIntyre's
essay, the attempt to reconcile diverse and particular moral
visions with universal liberal principles is helplessly utopian.
MacIntyre's analysis of American and European self-contradiction
leads to the conclusion that free persons everywhere aspire,
with the same ardor with which they love their own people
and country, to the paradoxical American ideal of equality
and cultural pluralism.
This
similarity between Europeans and Americans may seem to be
a sign of hope, but unfortunately, the similarity also entails
a more noxious form of anti-Americanism [, surely more present
on the continent than in Sicily, and much more virulent in
sectors of the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere in the Middle
East]. This more noxious form of anti-Americanism is ripened
by resentment and blames America for all of the defects of
Western modernity. MacIntyre observes that : “When it appears,
it is always a sign of a failure to recognize that in the
democracies of the West you cannot reject America because
in the end, if you are honest, America is you.” And he continues
to remark that just as in the United States everyone has two
nationalities, the American and that from which his “ancestors
originally sprang, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, or in
North America itself,” so too, “free persons anywhere also
have two nations, whether they like it or not—their own and
the United States.”
If
the unachievable attempt to unite the aspiration for universal
justice and the membership in particular communities is a
specific characteristic of the American, then perhaps it is
easier to understand one of the deeper causes of the frequent
overlapping of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. The overlap
between the two prejudices is not just due to the political
posture of the Bush administration with respect to the Holy
Land. The overlap is deeper and due to the same sort of philosophical
contradiction, in the American and in the Jew, whether a citizen
or not of the USA. Many Jews experience a similar internal
paradox, perhaps even more intensely than the average American,
insofar as they often desire to conserve their own particular
identity, and even, especially in the case of Jews of deeper
religious belief, consider their identity as entirely unique
and exceptional, while seeking to promote liberal universal
justice not just for its own sake but also as a vaccine against
the evils of historical anti-Semitism.
The
problem of the conflict between the particular and the universal,
so characteristic of the American ideal and now practically
universal, is closely related to the deepest root of today's
international crisis.
The problem of membership or belonging, of authority, and
of sovereignty is at the heart of today's crisis. Which is
my fatherland or country? Are you Sicilian, Italian, European,
Christian, Catholic, or all of these things at once? [Perhaps,
in my case the response is even more difficult than for many
of you who continue to live in the same country where you
were born, where you grew up, and where your grandparents,
or parents reside.]
The
current crisis is so deep because the very pillars of our
Western political order include a paradoxical, bi-directional,
vertical tension. This tension includes, at once, an expansion
of supranational and local political authorities. These two
contrasting forces pull at once in an upwards direction, towards
greater globalization, and in a downwards direction, towards
an ever greater federalism, regionalism and local autonomy.
The modern nation state is stretched thin to the point of
disappearance[, despite the efforts of the President of the
French Republic]. In order to begin the search for a solution
to this problem of conflicting, bidirectional, political dynamism,
the best place to begin, at least for an Aristotelian and
for a Thomist, is the end pursued by the various levels of
authority, that is, the common good.
2.
Metaphysics of the Common Good
Although
rejected by most versions of liberal political theory [often
because of the fear of authoritarianism as Samuel Gregg explained
yesterday], the common good is a central concept in classical
political philosophy. Already in ancient Greece, the polis
was understood as ordered towards the fostering of the common
good. The Roman Stoic philosophers further developed the concept
of the common good and St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas
advanced it even further by uniting the classical understanding
to the Christian theology of salvation. Cicero defined the
notion of “populo” as “a multitude united by consent to law
and a communion of utility.”[6] St. Augustine consciously
proposed a much deeper understanding of a people and therefore
of the common good. According to Cicero's definition, a community
owes its unity to law (ius) and utility. According to Cicero's
definition, the personal compliance with law, whether simply
on account of one's personal circumstances or directly chosen
for oneself, was merely for the sake of utility.
Let
us consider a tennis court as an illustrative example of a
Ciceronian common good [even though Cicero never saw a tennis
racket]. A tennis court could be owned and operated in common,
by a neighborhood, by a sports club, or by the government.
Every tennis court has some rules, whether written or unwritten,
regulating its use and maintenance. The group of people who
somehow share in ownership of the tennis court satisfy the
Ciceronian definition of a people. They have a common law
and a common utility, despite the fact that they may be entirely
indifferent to one another or even nurture hatred towards
the other members of their association or neighborhood. Indeed,
since the more the other members of the community use the
court and line up to reserve it, the less I can play, it may
very well be my hope that my neighbor break his leg, so that
the court will be free for me and my friends.
St.
Augustine realized that Cicero's definition of a people is
inadequate for the Christian. Due to his deep understanding
of Christian charity and the influence that it ought to have
on society, St. Augustine realized that Cicero's definition
is insufficient for establishing a true political society.
In Book 19 of the De Civitate Dei, Augustine defined a people
as “an association united by rational concord regarding those
things they love.”[7]
For Augustine, a true community requires affective unity with
respect to their common love. The common good of a community
constitutes a new dimension of the love among the members
of a community. For Augustine, the unity required to speak
of a people presupposes the creation of a common good, that
is, a triangular relationship established between persons
and the good that they love in common. The common good formed
between two persons can be represented with a triangle because
two angles of the triangle represent the two persons who jointly
desire a good which constitutes the third angle. The three
angles of a triangle represent the two friends and the good
that they hold in common, the basis of their friendship. In
every community, the individual persons are united by the
good that they desire in common.For Augustine, an authentic community requires more
than its members desiring some good in common. They must also
care about one another.
What is more, Augustine's demanding notion of a true community
requires that the members love one another as they love themselves.Love for one another requires that they cooperate,
not just to promote some good, but also cooperate to promote
their own reciprocal, human good.
To
illustrate the Augustinian concept of the common good, let
us take a look at another example: a birthday party.
A birthday party often includes the participation of friends
and family, decoration, music, food, drink, and, of course,
a birthday cake. In the example of the tennis court from the
perspective of a Ciceronian community, the more the others
use the court, the less I play. If they do not show up, then
I get on court, and so long as they do not come to play, I
can stay on for as long as I want. But with the birthday party,
the more the merrier. If one of my friends is sick in bed,
maybe my piece of cake will be a little bigger, but, if it
is a truly Augustinian birthday, then we will sorely miss
him. The common good founded on love, and not just utility,
is greater when it is shared by the persons whom I love, because
my friend's benefit is my benefit. In a sense, I can have
my cake without even eating it. The principal difference between
Cicero's and Augustine's view of the common good is that for
Augustine, the common good forms part of the persons themselves.
The common good is not just an instrument. From the Augustinian
viewpoint, once the triangle of the common good is created
by the concert of our mutual love, my friend's good is my
good, and vice versa. A true community of benevolence is established
because together we love the same things. The phenomenology
of community in this strong sense, that is, one based on an
Augustinian love for the common good, arises from a concern
for goods that are more than material. Such a community is
based upon the spiritual sharing of goods whose commonality
is intrinsic to them as goods. They are goods precisely because
they are shared, not just because they are instrumental. [While
I acknowledge that the political good may be instrumental
and suggested yesterday by Sam Gregg while drawing from Maritain
and Finnis, once the common good is seen within the broader,
even metaphysical context of human perfection, hierarchy,
and order, then the political common good is seen as good
insofar as it is a participation in the final end. Because
the common good is more than instrumental, it is also for
itself,] The more I enjoy or participate in the common good,
the more my friends can too.
Today's
political crisis is all the more dramatic because our society
lacks the philosophical concepts needed for a solid foundation
for governance and political authority in general. At least
since Hobbes, if not since Macchiavelli, Western society has
rejected the possibility of basing governance upon the pursuit
of Ciceronian utility, let alone an Augustinian common good.
Liberalism continues to be the dominant paradigm of political
philosophy. We find liberalism on the right and liberalism
on the left. Liberalism that privileges freedom from state
intervention and liberalism that privileges state intervention
in order to promote equality and in order to defend free expression
of rival value systems. All the forms of liberalism that are
somehow heirs of John Stuart Mill exclude, on the basis of
principle, the very possibility of the state pursuing something
like the Augustinian good. In the place of the common good,
liberalism pursues justice, equality, and fair and efficient
processes for negotiating between competing interests. The
justice prized by liberalism has little in common with the
classical understanding of justice, founded upon a thick concept
of the common good and a specific anthropology of human perfection.
In contrast, the liberal political theorist envisions justice
as exclusively founded upon the right to liberty and personal
inviolability to be protected and promoted through due process.
In
A Theory of Justice, John Rawls captures, and based upon the
brief biographies written recently on the occasion of his
death, even seemed to personify in his own life, the liberal
paradigm of justice. Rawls based justice upon his thin theory
of goods and proposed that the best way to judge the hard
cases of distribution between competing interests is to place
oneself in the original position, that is, from behind the
veil of ignorance, without any particular adhesion to persons
or things or places or ideals. For Rawls, justice may be best
adjudicated from the position of pure neutrality enjoyed by
Adam Smith's impartial spectator. Any personal love, any view
regarding human happiness, would contaminate political judgment.
For this reason, in accord with his A Theory of Justice, those
religious adherents who hold that there is a unique response
to the disputed questions within a pluralist society should
be excluded from the public square when it comes time to fairly
adjudicate between conflicting parties. Any firmly held moral
or religious convictions, any fidelity to any particular community,
would be an obstruction of justice. So, for instance, anyone
who holds that homosexual, or heterosexual, behavior is intrinsically
disordered ought not to have any say in the determination
of whether to offer public recognition to same-sex unions
or marriages. Personal commitment to
objective truth would constitute conflict with justice.
Perhaps
today's crisis is an opportunity to consider a new paradigm
of the state based upon the common good. According to classical
and Christian political philosophy, to govern is nothing other
than to direct oneself and the others towards the due end.
For St. Thomas Aquinas, the common good of the civitas cannot
be separated from the individual's good because the human
being can only reach his end within the perfect political
community. The need for community is not just for the sake
of some limited utility but is necessary to reach human fulfillment
in accord with one's rational nature.
Indeed, [like Ralph McInerny's example of the mother tongue,
that he mentioned on Tuesday morning] Aquinas offered as an
example of our need to live in community the learning of a
language. The ability to speak a language is proper to human
nature and yet to learn to speak and to understand a language
requires living within a community.
In
Dependent Rational Animals, in response to the pretense of
human autonomy in much of modern philosophy, MacIntyre proposes
the need to develop the virtues of acknowledged dependence.
A solitary quest for the human good could never be successful,
neither for attaining the good nor for determining in what
the good consists. The human can effectively pursue the good
only with and through others. The dependence of the human
animal includes both material and spiritual needs. We cannot
pursue the truth alone but only in the company of others and
in dependence on teachers and tradition. For this reason,
Aquinas repeats Aristotle's wise and encouraging counsel:
“that which we can do through our friends we can do somehow
by ourselves.” In fact, I would suggest
that it is only through the communitarian enactment of a story
of the genre of divine comedy that the human can find the
fullness of the truth regarding his good.
Augustine’s
De Civitate Dei describes political association as a communal
pilgrimage. Augustine
compares God’s people, that is, the Church, to a heavenly
City which, while wayfaring on earth, “invites citizens from
all nations and all tongues, and unites them into a single
pilgrim band. She takes no issue with that diversity of customs,
laws, and traditions whereby human peace is sought and maintained.
Instead of nullifying or tearing down, she preserves and appropriates
whatever in the diversities of divers races is aimed at one
and the same objective of human peace. . . . Thus, the heavenly
city, so long as it is wayfaring on earth . . . fosters and
actively pursues along with other human beings a common platform
in regard to all that concerns our purely human life and does
not interfere with faith and worship.”
According
to the Augustinian account, each person understands himself
within his own autobiography, a thesis carefully developed
in The Confessions. But this autobiography cannot be written
alone.
Self-knowledge is attained through our relationships with
others, with our own family, with friends, co-workers, and
of course with God. The family, church, local communities,
and the state draft their own narratives that take into account
the multiple, variegated, and ordered allegiances of their
members.
The
Thomistic understanding of common good can be incorporated
into the Augustinian narrative of pilgrimage. Aquinas proposes
the personal narrative of the quest for the good, the last
end, as compatible, even inspired by The Confessions, and
a communitarian narrative with various plots according to
one's place in society and in the Church, like that of The
City of God. These various plots correspond to the various
peoples who together seek the common good of a single but
variegated political community.
According to the Augustinian and Thomistic views, the unity
of society is provided by the common quest for a transcendent
good, suggestively described by Charles Taylor with his concept
of a hypergood necessary for the unity of life of a single
human being or for the whole of society.
Such a paradigm would permit the common quest for practical
truth by persons who disagree about important aspects of the
human good in society so long as they agree to honestly pursue
together the true human good. With an imaginative application
of the classical concept of the common good and with political
cooperation, perhaps the liberal paradigm that so often degrades
into oppressive state intervention could be replaced with
the dialectic quest for the common good that entrusts an important
role to the intermediate communities.
If
the political paradigm most apt for the common quest for practical
truth were such a narrative model, then one must ask what
genre of narrative will be the most apt for attaining the
human end. There are two main alternatives: the tragic and
the comic [you might ask where I situate noir, classic noir,
decadent noir, blanc noir, and so on, but I would need much
more time, and greater expertise, to go into detail regarding
literary genres and political narratives].
In
the Poetics, Aristotle defined tragedy as “an imitation of
an action that is serious, complete, and possessing magnitude;
in embellished language, ... and effecting through pity and
fear the catharsis of such emotions”. Aristotle continues: “tragedy
is an imitation of an action that is whole [holos] and complete
in itself [teleios] and of a certain magnitude [megethos].”().
. . . “Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons
but of action and life. . . . So that it is the action in
it, i.e. its plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy;
and the end is everywhere the chief thing.” In addition to
the features which Aristotle explicitly mentions as essential
to tragedy: seriousness, completeness, and magnitude, we can
speak of another essential feature of tragedy, required in
order to “effect through pity and fear the catharsis” of emotions.
This defining trait of tragedy is the impossibility for the
hero to do that which is best, either because of moral dilemma,
because of external conditioning such as supernatural intervention,
or because of non-chosen and insurmountable personal weakness.
Growth
in the virtues requires instruction, counsel, and the imitation
of exemplars of virtue. The experience of one's own incapacity,
not only to act as one would like, but also to act as one
ought, is universal and tragic. Nothing could be more tragic
than the fact that every member of a species is conscious
of the fact that not a single one of them is able to obtain
that which they all desire above all else. But when one lives
with virtue and integrity for a transcendent good, a good
that is above and beyond the contingent concerns of daily
life, the tragic experience can be overcome.
To live in a community committed to the pursuit of such a
hypergood offers a solution to the intrinsic unintelligibility
of the tragic genre. The quest for a transcendent end, extrinsic
to oneself and to the political community, requires the ecstatic
quest for the good.
For
those who turn to their end with an act of faith capable of
strengthening their personal quest for the transcendent good,
the tragic is transformed into the comic. Something marvellous
and unexpected breaks into the scene resolving all the difficulties,
all of the motives of tragic catharsis, by means of a reversal
of the story towards the end that was always desired. This
is the divine comedy that ought to inform all moral experience,
including the political.
I
began this study of the common good by considering that the
common good is always an end pursued by a community. Now,
I will address the relationship and the hierarchy between
the many and diverse common goods present in a pluralist society.
First of all, we ought to consider the relationship between
the common good of society and the good of the individual.
Aquinas follows Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics) when he
holds that a common good is always superior to the good of
the individual, not because the community substitutes or suppresses
the individual but because the common good always also includes
the good of the individuals that constitute the community.
The common good is therefore more extensive than the good
of an individual. With a similar argument, Aquinas shows that
the common good of a larger community has precedence over
a similar common good of a smaller community. In fact, his
doctrine of the common good forms part of his wider doctrine
regarding the causes in general. According to St. Thomas:
“ unaquaeque causa tanto prior est et potior quanto ad plura
se extendit” (any cause whatsoever is more primary and more
powerful in the degree to which it extends to a greater number). The common good informs
political society because it indicates the direction towards
which everyone should tend in order to obtain their happiness.
If the good of more persons is superior to that of fewer,
it could seem, as Enrico Berti proposed in an international
Thomistic conference just less than a year ago, that the supranational
political bodies should always have preference and priority
over the national ones, and the national ones preference and
priority over the local ones, etc. Berti's proposal for a
strong international organism of governance with authority
and precedence over the national and local governments seems
plausible when considered from the perspective of final causality.
Nonetheless, his proposal appears deficient in its ability
to take into account the common good within the perspective
of efficient causality.
Moreover, as Stephen Brock has suggested, even from the perspective
of final causality, Berti's proposal fails to take into account
a crucial Thomistic consideration, the closer causes are to
the action and to their effect the more noble they are. Indeed,
founded upon this consideration from the Thomistic metaphysics
of causality, the principle of subsidiarity, originally proposed
by the Magisterium was rapidly accepted by many political
philosophers as an effective and deep explanation of how to
distribute governing authorities throughout the various levels
of society.
3.
Subsidiary and Sovereignty: not Devolution or Decentramento
The
principle of subsidiarity can illuminate the consideration
of the promotion of the common good, the final cause of every
community, from the perspective of its efficient causes. The
principle of subsidiarity offers criteria for analyzing the
differentiated roles of those responsible for fostering the
common good of various levels of community. Indeed, the principle
of subsidiarity is necessary for a full study of sovereignty
because the principle of subsidiarity determines who is sovereign
over which communities and in view of which common goods.
Subsidiarity is crucial for determining who has the right
and the duty to exercise authority over a community for the
sake of promoting its common good. If one were to address
the topic of political authority exclusively from the perspective
of the common good as final cause and foundation for political
structure, as Berti recently did in his proposal of a strong
international sovereign authority, one runs the risk of absorbing
all sovereignties, even the most natural and basic, within
the “highest” earthly sovereign, the one most distant from
the people.
Despite
the fact that many political philosophers rapidly accepted
the principle of subsidiarity proposed by the Church's teaching
authority and today many scholars and politicians from the
most diverse backgrounds promote the principle, unfortunately
it is often misunderstood and misapplied on account of its
being transplanted into the foreign soil of rival and fundamentally
irreconcilable political theories. To recover the original
and authentic principle of subsidiarity, let us return to
the sources of the concept. The classic reference point for
the first full explanation of the concept is Centesimus Annus
n. 48, where John Paul II wrote that: “a community of a higher
order should not interfere in the internal life of a community
of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but
rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate
its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always
with a view to the common good.”If one reads the text too quickly and with the prejudices
of modern political theory, it is easy to think that the Pope
intends the principle as just merely a means for maximizing
the efficiency of governance, as though the principle of subsidiarity
were the conclusion of a utilitarian calculus. According to
this unfortunately frequent, but deeply and even dangerously
mistaken interpretation, the society of higher order ought
to attribute or delegate authority to the lower so that the
lower can intervene with greater efficiency. But this reading
subverts the true meaning of subsidiarity to the point of
rendering it banal. The papal principle of subsidiarity is
quite different from Tony Blair's devolution or the decentramento
frequently advanced by politicians today in Italy. Genuine
subsidiarity is based on much deeper philosophical roots and
implies a much thicker anthropology. For real subsidiarity,
the higher level of social organization is higher because
it includes a greater number of persons, not necessarily because
it enjoys any authority over the lower authority. Subsidiarity
is not an attempt to rectify the totalitarian premise that
all authority proceeds from the state by then remedying the
original totalitarian premise with devolution. Rather, in
accord with real subsidiarity, the authority of the lowest,
or most local levels may very well be proper and ordinary
authority, not delegated. That is, recognized and acknowledged,
not attributed. The proper authority of communities is especially
evident in the cases of natural communities like the family.
Mothers and fathers have authority that they ought to exercise
over their children and in the government of their family
because their authority is invested in their office as mothers
and fathers, not because some higher human authority has delegated
authority to them.
4.
The Hierarchical Order of Authorities: a Response to Globalization
and the Crisis of the Modern Nation State
The
principle of subsidiarity offers criteria for sovereignty
that can be used to configure a post-liberal political paradigm.
The classical concept of the common good and the principle
of subsidiarity can open a way for a political theory that
permits each level of society and every community, whether
large or small, to govern themselves with their own authority
for the sake of promoting their proper good as a participation
in the universal common good. To specify that the state can
and ought to promote the good, and not just guarantee the
procedures needed for fair play among rivals, permits a more
robust understanding of the state but not necessarily a stronger
state. The ordered distribution of authorities guaranteed
by subsidiarity would preclude all forms of statist totalitarianisms.
Moreover, genuine subsidiarity allows for a recovery of natural
hierarchies, in the family, in recreation, in religion, and
in the workplace.
Last
year in Rome, on the occasion of the centenary of the death
of Leo XIII, Russell Hittinger made an almost shockingly post-liberal
proposal: the more authorities the more individual freedom.
Hittinger's proposal is especially fascinating when seen within
the context of his broader research on the concept of munus.With the recognition of more levels of authority, including
the natural ones, the sovereignty that nearly every human
being enjoys becomes more evident. Every human being ought
to strive for, in the first place, self-dominion, and nearly
all are obliged to exercise dominion over at least a few others.
Even children have responsibility to exercise a certain, but
clearly limited, dominion over their younger brothers and
sisters, classmates, and playmates. The Latin word munus is
difficult to translate into any of the modern languages because
its semantic field was once so rich. It included the concepts
of office, gift, service, charge, duty, and right. [sacrifice?]
The word munus embraced all of these concepts in just five
letters. The recovery of the regal or kingly character of
the human being, suggested by the Christocentric anthropology
of John Paul II, would help overcome the liberal impetus for
autonomy and permit the promotion of the intermediate communities
of civil society that can coordinate the quest for the common
good while conserving particular identities.
If such a proposal can offer a viable solution for integrating
the various authorities, state, region, religious, local,
family, etc., within a nation perhaps it can also work in
order to order the authorities and the goods among nations.
See Jacques Chirac, Discourse of the President of the
Republic regarding “The respect for the principle of laicité
in the Republic,” presso il Palazzo dell'Elysée, 17 dicembre,
2003.
“The American Idea” 66: "For at
its best the American Idea does not involve a rejection
of the past in the name of the future or rather in the
name of an ahistorical present. America rather is an attempt
at one specific way of connecting the past to the future
and a way that was new in human history; it was and is
an attempt to found a historical tradition that would
move continuously from a particular past to a universal
future, a tradition that in becoming genuinely universal
could find a place within itself for all other particularities
so that the Irishman or the Jew or the Japanese in becoming
an American did not cease thereby to be something of an
Irishman or a Jew or a Japanese. In assuming the burden
of this task America took into itself a genuinely Utopian
quality, the quality of an attempt to transcend the limits
of secular possibility. America's failures are intimately
connected with this grasping after impossibility; but
so are its successes." 67-68: “America’s worst danger
is to forget how conflict [p. change] and contradiction
are central to its historical identity; but Americans
ought also to remember that this is so because their is
the representative historical identity of the modern world,
because it is in America that Europe undertook what it
could not achieve at home.”
“Populum esse definivit coetum multitudinis,
iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatum.” Quoted
by Augustine, De civ. Dei, XIX. 21.
Augustine, De civ. Dei, XIX.24:
“Populus est coetus multitudinis rationalis, rerum quos
diligit concordi ratione sociatus.”
In Political Liberalism , (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993) Rawls responds
to the criticism that his theory of justice, despite its
purported neutrality, does naively ignore certain worldviews.
Rawls explicitly acknowledges the existence of a plurality
of "comprehensive doctrines" and proposes a
description for their peaceful cooperation in public affairs.
Nevertheless, the problem of an illusory neutrality is
accentuated when Rawls excludes from the public square
all those who promote comprehensive doctrines which claim
to hold uniquely correct answers to disputed questions
of, for instance, morality. There is nothing “neutral”
about such an exclusion. It is based on the prejudice
hidden by the pretense at neutrality of Rawls’s political
liberalism. For
a penetrating critique of Political Liberalism's
hidden fallacy of exclusion, see Robert P. George, "Pluralismo
morale, ragione pubblica e legge naturale," in Etica
e Politica nella Società del Duemila, ed. Robert A.
Gahl, Jr., (Rome: Armando, 1998), pp. 79-91.
(cfr.
Enrico Berti, “Il concetto di 'bene comune' d'avanti alla
sfide del Terzo Millennio,” Congresso Tomistico Internazionale,
Roma, 21-25 settembre, 2003).
cfr.
Berti, “Il concetto di 'bene comune' davanti alla sfide
del Terzo Millennio,” Congresso Tomistico Internazionale,
Roma, 21-25 settembre, 2003.
Devo
questa considerazione ai commenti brillanti di Maia Lukac
de Stier, sua collega argentina, e alla risposta di Stephen
Brock alla conferenza di Berti.
La citazione continua: “By intervening directly and depriving
society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State
leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase
of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic
ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients,
and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.
In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood
and satisfied by people who are closest to them and who
act as neighbours to those in need. It should be added
that certain kinds of demands often call for a response
which is not simply material but which is capable of perceiving
the deeper human need. One thinks of the condition of
refugees, immigrants, the elderly, the sick, and all those
in circumstances which call for assistance, such as drug
abusers: all these people can be helped effectively only
by those who offer them genuine fraternal support, in
addition to the necessary care.” E ancora per più riferimento: «una società di ordine superiore
non deve interferire nella vita interna di una società
di ordine inferiore, privandola delle sue competenze,
ma deve piuttosto sostenerla in caso di necessità e aiutarla
a coordinare la sua azione con quella delle altre componenti
sociali, in vista del bene comune» (CCC 1884 e CA 48).
(CCC 1894: “Secondo
il principio di sussidiarietà, né lo Stato né alcuna società
più grande devono sostituirsi all'iniziativa e alla responsabilità
delle persone e dei corpi intermedi.” 1885: “Il principio
di sussidiarietà si oppone a tutte le forme di collettivismo.
Esso precisa i limiti dell'intervento dello Stato. Mira
ad armonizzare i rapporti tra gli individui e le società.
Tende ad instaurare un autentico ordine internazionale.”
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