FROM New Polity Press:
This essay is an abridged version of the introduction to The Church Against the State, available now.
The political right is in a state of upheaval. The old alliances are crumbling and long-held truisms are failing. The conservatism of the Reagan years is as dead as Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” This is so obvious that pointing it out has become rather tedious, but the turmoil on the right hasn’t subsided. Those who like the status quo, the neocons and neoliberals, are largely defecting to what passes for the “left,” leaving populists, nationalists, postliberals, neo-pagan Nietzscheans, and even the occasional libertarian to hash out the future of the “New Right.” An increasingly common characteristic of these factions is a rejection of old conservative pieties concerning the free market, pieties that treat economics as a basically apolitical and private sphere to be kept apart from the public sphere of politics. The 2020s have seen a slew of openly political “private” corporations join a slew of openly self-interested “public” politicians to produce the impression, undoubtedly correct, that no such public-private distinction exists, except as a convenient costume change for an unchanging elite. Politics has merged with economics and both have been absorbed with everything else into a virtual mass culture. It is just as credible to assert that everything is politics as that everything is economics, that everything is religion, or that everything is propaganda. The old categories won’t hold.
This phenomenon is not merely conceptual. We are experiencing a real regime change in the classical sense of a shift from one form of polity to another. This shift is creating a conceptual problem, a disjunction between diagnosis and prescription as the old concepts are simultaneously deconstructed and relied upon.
Take, for example, the postliberals gathered around Adrian Vermeule. These thinkers rightly recognize our late-modern economic form as an oligarchy hiding behind the fiction of the “private” in order to profit from the destruction of the clearly public goods of family and community. Yet the postliberals imagine they can rectify this unjust “economic” form by doubling down on the political form that corresponds to it—the centralized, social-engineering, late-modern administrative state. For them, the solution to the tyranny of politically active economics is the reassertion of economically inactive politics, one that can regulate economic actors and order them toward the common good. In this manner, they simultaneously deconstruct and deploy the public-private distinction, relying on it in order to combat it.
We find ourselves with the troubling conclusion that postliberalism amounts to what Vermeule might call liberalism “working itself pure”:[1] The old liberals were wrong; the public-private distinction isn’t natural (supposedly private companies tend toward public tyranny), and so the postliberals must force the distinction into being, must somehow create the properly “public” political realm and in so doing recreate the properly “private” realm. But this doesn’t get them very far. Indeed, some postliberals have come to the less-than-enthusing conclusion that the New Right should just become the Old Left, or “Pro-Life New Dealers,” as a recent attempt at self-classification by Sohrab Ahmari put it.[2] The “baby boomer” conservatives were wrong to idealize the 1950s when, it turns out, it was the 1930s that got things right! Spinning wheels.
Similar exercises in futility plague the other New Right factions. For example, Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land are Austrian economics-style libertarians who have come to the rather obvious conclusion that the anthropology proposed by such libertarianism results inevitably in Hobbesian politics—in a political absolutism that always destroys any meaningful distinction between the private and the public.[3] Their supposedly radical position is merely to embrace this. They reject libertarian fantasies concerning limited-government outcomes in order to retain libertarian philosophical assumptions concerning anthropological individualism, which are even more fantastical. The old categories are undermined as they are reinforced. More spinning wheels. We could give a similar description of the Nietzscheans that surround “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP),[4] or the ultra-patriotic populists, or most other factions. All of these groups offer real insights, and thus far they are worth reading. But ultimately, they aren’t really getting anywhere.
What is missing is an awareness of meaningful alternatives to our modern politico-economic form. In The Church Against the State, I want to suggest a serious consideration of subsidiarity as a source for an alternative set of concepts with which to build a viable economic and political theory and ultimately, hopefully, a viable conservative movement.[5] The term subsidiarity is widely known among Christian democrats and Catholics of various stripes, but the original meaning of subsidiarity rests on an anthropology and a metaphysics that have largely been lost—and so the concept is sometimes rendered as the simplistic axiom that “smaller is better.” Recently, there has been an attempt by postliberals to reverse this axiom, asserting that subsidiarity primarily means that the state has the authority to intervene wherever, according to its own sovereign judgment. This is sometimes described using the Schmittian “State of Exception” concept, through which the state is imagined as watching from above the normal functioning of smaller entities, always ready to intervene here or there in order to achieve its goal of the common good. The smaller are treated, then, as mere “subsidiaries” of the larger, which is to say that “bigger is better.”[6] By subsidiarity I mean neither of these things. Subsidiarity is not a constitutional arrangement of competing powers within the framework of modern politics. Subsidiarity is no mere axiom or principle of governance; it is an alternative, integral social form with deep roots in the premodern Western tradition. In order to understand subsidiarity, we have to start with one of the most important and basic questions that we can ask: “What is the common good?”
The fundamental principle of Christian politics is that all power ought to be used for the common good.[7] As Pope St. John XXIII put it, the realization of the common good is the “sole reason for the existence of civil authorities.”[8] But what is the common good? What it is not is a sum of all the individual “happiness” or “desire satisfaction” found in a society. Nor is it the good of the majority, the good of the “better” people, or anything along those lines. Both of these basic errors operate within a familiar line of liberal reasoning in which the human being is first understood in isolation, as a being standing prior to all social relations.
The things of the cosmos are not first individuals that are later assembled into a collectivity. Rather, they are created already bound up together.[9] This is the basis for the classic cosmology of the hierarchy of being, which is an archaic yet beautiful way of asserting that everything is what it is in relation to what everything else is, and yet everything is moving toward the same end, which is the unity of each with each and of each with the source—God, Who is pure act. The good of the cosmos, then, is a truly common good not merely because it is shared but because it is essentially shared, because it is a good that can be had only when it is had together.[10]
Human beings are integral to this cosmic unity and are an analogous unity among themselves: human social order is a dynamic image of cosmic order.[11] Each human being grows into himself over time as potencies within him are activated by other persons. Only through such education, and so through hierarchy, can a person realize his potential, his perfection.[12] The tradition refers to this perfection, to the extent that it is realized, as “virtue,” and the movement into ever more complete virtue is the experience of happiness. Happiness is therefore enjoyed together, or it is not enjoyed at all. There is no notion of a private good in juxtaposition to a public or collective good. As the Church asserts: “The common good does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity. Belonging to everyone and to each person, it is and remains ‘common,’ because it is indivisible and because only together is it possible to attain it.”[13] What is true of the family is true of larger levels of social order.
This rich understanding of the common good corresponds with a hierarchical political form that the tradition calls “subsidiarity.” Subsidiarity is a social form in which higher levels of association are ordered toward the fulfillment of lower levels of association, and ultimately to the fulfillment of the human person. This does not mean that the higher is somehow subservient to the lower. Rather, the lower levels are fulfilled through their elevation into the higher levels—which is the formation of those higher levels.
Subsidiarity’s hierarchy of authority, then, is nothing like a sovereignty’s hierarchy of power, in which commands imposed at the top are delegated down in a univocal manner. Rather, it involves a series of analogical participations. The most universal “law” is specified in a sort of pyramid of diversification. Each level, each part, bears the whole within it in its own more particular mode; every person, in his uniqueness, is a microcosm, as is every city, as is every country, as is the phenomenal world itself. According to the Christian tradition, God is imaged in each thing and is also imaged (more perfectly) through the ever more diverse, dynamic, and unified whole of real relations, whose contingency and movement is a finite analogy, a moving image, of infinite eternity.[14]
The intermediate levels are not merely useful for the fulfillment of human happiness. They are not merely functional or technological. Subsidiarity is not merely a policy recommendation for allowing the top to govern the bottom well. Rather, the hierarchy of levels of association is the form of the common good itself.[15] The just society, the society pursuing happiness, is, then, a society ordered according to subsidiarity.[16] This is the very heart of the tradition’s understanding of social justice: each level of association is at home in the whole; each is freely given what it needs to be itself even as it freely gives itself to each other level of association. Each is rendered his due as each renders everyone else his due. This is what justice means.[17]
And yet our world isn’t structured as an order of subsidiarity. Our political world is characterized by a massive, fused economic and state structure, within which individuals or maybe lingering families exist without any intermediate levels of order. This regime ought to be understood as an oligarchy in the classical sense, which is the merger of political and economic power. Within such a regime, the wealthy amass power by bringing all structures of power under the sway of wealth. This order sustains a wide range of normative discourses, from classical liberalism to woke-ism or MAGA, but it is more fundamentally described and managed by economics. What I mean is this: Aristotle defined politics as the architectonic science, that is, the science that considers the ends of all the other sciences in light of their final end.[18] A society’s “politics,” therefore, will be relative to that society’s self-posited final end. It will be whatever actually aims all proximate ends to that actual end. In an oligarchy, which is a society ordered toward wealth, this architectonic science is what we currently call economics. What we call politics operates only within the actual regime “space,” which is the economy. Economics as the “science of social order,” therefore, includes all other sciences or arts.
For example, policy preferences and voting behavior are reduced to more fundamental economic behavior through public choice theory; desire formation is reduced likewise through behavioral economics; personal relationships are reduced through various libertarian theories or, rather absurdly, by things like Freakonomics.[19] My point is that in an oligarchy, economics is not a field that operates within politics; rather, economics is oligarchy’s politics in the sense of being its architectonic science. The objective of oligarchy is to render this claim true, to reduce all power to economic power and so to destroy subsidiarity in favor of homogenous technocracy.
Understanding subsidiarity helps us understand the failure of liberal ambitions to create a world of self-constructing individuals who find happiness in seeking whatever ends they happen to find amicable. The entire liberal tradition from Locke to Rawls predicted that liberal society would become a pluralistic tapestry of diversity, with endlessly expanding options for personal fulfillment, as human creativity in the service of economic self-interest turned all of society into a giant entrepreneurial enterprise. What has formed instead is a stifling regime of centralized power and conformity, a regime of mind-numbing homogeneity occupied by people who feel anything but free, but don’t understand why.
This has occurred because the liberal drive for individual utility maximization continuously butts up against the fact that society is, in actuality, constituted by myriad levels of order that are not constituted by self-interested individuals in negotiated contractual relationships; rather, it is constituted by associations that constrain or exclude such relationships. These institutions include not only explicit associations but also such things as morality, religions, family structures, gender norms, community or regional loyalty, manners, and even language itself. So, liberals seek to destroy the power of these institutions and replace them with an extension of the state and the market—with an extension of the formal apparatus that facilitates their conception of the “free” pursuit of ends—which almost always amounts to the free pursuit of wealth. The problem, as Karl Polanyi pointed out, is that society is constantly attempting to defend its happiness by rebuilding solidarity in other directions.[20] The historical trajectory of liberalism has, therefore, been toward the continual acceleration of the centralization of power under the guise of “progress” in order to render the atomization of man true. As a perpetual struggle against human nature, liberalism is always “ramping up.”
This “sovereign” regime of shrinking possibilities becomes increasingly unnatural as subsidiarity is steadily undone, as atomization and thus conformity expands. The regime, then, is increasingly fragile, being built on an ever-shrinking substrate of solidarity. For example, as the everyday experience of truth and goodness provided by friends and family becomes less and less intense, less and less the normalizing ground of our value judgments, the regime’s claim to truth and goodness must become more militant. It must shift from “protecting” or “growing” truth and goodness to being the source of them. Because people must, in their nature, believe in something and desire something, as nature is destroyed the regime must assert with more militancy that it is nature itself, that its animating ideology is nothing short of absolute truth and its end perfect goodness. As the real world of friendships, of solidarity, and of subsidiarity recedes, which is the world in which human rationality functions, the regime must insist that its citizens suspend their rationality and believe in absurdities, must insist that such suspension is the “cost” of the centralized security that renders their atomistic “freedom,” their consumerism, possible. This is why the suspension of reason does not result in skepticism, but the most radical dogmatism.[21]
None of this can last. Eventually the absurdity can’t be justified. As Plato explained, eventually the oppressed in the system will conclude that the elite “are rich because their subjects are cowards,” and one of them will say to the other “This lot are no good; we’ve got them where we want them.”[22] And the oligarchy will fall to a more perfect, populist tyranny, and it in turn, to demagogic and dictatorial tyranny.
What is to be done? The basis of this analysis has been that subsidiarity is the form of society to the extent that it lives in and moves in reality, in conformity with created nature. Because even the most depraved regimes can only dis-order nature and can never overthrow it, subsidiarity is always, to some degree, present. Society is always protecting itself from tyrannical forms by constructing and protecting pockets of friendship somewhere. What is more, tyrannical, ideological regimes are always compelled to relate themselves to ultimate truth and goodness, and so it is always necessary that there be some remaining source of value that falls outside their control. When they lose this, when there is no longer a “justice” to which the regime can claim conformity, the population will no longer believe a word they say. Lies only function on a substrate of trust. This is why tyrannical regimes always ultimately succumb to their own contradictions. Sovereignty is not merely a bad political ideal; it is simply, in the end, impossible.
What this means is that justice and so subsidiarity always already has a beachhead within the regime. We do not need to beat the would-be sovereign at his own game; that is what the “democrats” do to the “oligarchs” in Plato’s telling, which results merely in the people’s deeper slavery. Rather, we start playing a different game. First, we identify where structures of friendship still exist. Then, we cultivate them and expand them. The beauty of the truth of subsidiarity is that this can be done at any level of social order, each of which is a whole unto itself even as a part of a greater whole. We can turn to our families, our communities, our churches and towns and, in doing so, create the conditions of possibility for the conversion of the greater whole. I realize that such moral language is not aesthetically pleasing to the more “based” members of the New Right, but it has the advantage of being true, of being based on some three thousand years of collective wisdom. As Pope St. Paul VI asserted:
Today men yearn to free themselves from need and dependence. But this liberation starts with the interior freedom that men must find again with regard to their goods and their powers; they will never reach it except through a transcendent love for man, and, in consequence, through a genuine readiness to serve. Otherwise, as one can see only too clearly, the most revolutionary ideologies lead only to a change of masters; once installed in power in their turn, these new masters surround themselves with privileges, limit freedom, and allow other forms of injustice to become established.[22]
This essay by Andrew Willard Jones is an abridged version of the introduction to The Church Against the State, available now.
Notes
The thesis of Vermeule’s book Law’s Abnegation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016) is that the construction of the administrative state was not the rejection of the rule of law, but the necessary consequence of law’s attempt to rule. The rule of law, “working itself pure,” results in the rule of the administrative state.
Of course, most of the original New Dealers were pro-life, so “FDR Democrat” might be a simpler label.
Mencius Moldbug [Curtis Yarvin], Unqualified Reservations, vol. 1 (n.p.: Passage Publishing, 2023), especially the “Author’s Foreword” and “A Formalist Manifesto.” Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Perth: Imperium Press, 2023).
Bronze Age Pervert, commonly known as BAP, became well known as a hard-right, Nietzschean Twitter personality. He is, in fact, Costin Alamariu, who holds a PhD from Yale. He has written (as BAP) Bronze Age Mindset (self-pub., 2018) and (under his own name) Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy (self-pub., 2023).
Pope Pius XI first formulated subsidiarity as a principle of Christian social theory, so it makes sense to go to him for a working definition. He writes: “It is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help [subsidium] to the members of the body social and never destroy or absorb them” (Quadragesimo Anno, 79).
Adrian Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism (Medford, MA: Polity, 2022), 154–64.
John Paul II states: “The Church has always taught the duty to act for the common good... she has always taught that the fundamental duty of power is solicitude for the common good of society; this is what gives power its fundamental rights” (Redemptor Hominis, 17).
John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, 54. Or again: “As for the State, its whole raison d’être is the realization of the common good in the temporal order” (Mater et Magistra, 20).
Gaudium et Spes, 14.
On man’s integration into this cosmic order and his task within it, see John Paul II, Laborem Exercens; Francis, Laudato Si’.
Augustine, De trinitate, III.9 [The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P., 2nd ed., The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2015), 132].
Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy, 4.3 [Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, ed. John Farina, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 158]
Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Rome: Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, 2004), 164; see also paragraph 149. As Pope St. John XXIII put it: “The common good is something which affects the needs of the whole man, body and soul” (Pacem in Terris, 57).
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has written: “The social dimension of the human being also takes on another meaning: only the vast numbers and rich diversity of people can express something of the infinite richness of God. Finally, this dimension is meant to find its accomplishment in the Body of Christ which is the Church. This is why social life, in the variety of its forms and to the extent that it is in conformity with the divine law, constitutes a reflection of the glory of God in the world” (Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation, 33).
Leo XIII, Quod Apostolici Muneris, 6; Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 151.
Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 165.
John Paul II, Divini Redemptoris, 51.
St. Augustine famously suggested that we could define a commonwealth as “an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love” and so “to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love” (City of God, 19.24; trans. Marcus Dods).
University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner published a book titled Freakonomics in 2005. The book applied economic models to non-economic fields, such as the naming of children. It was a huge success and Freakonomics has grown into a brand for more books, movies, podcasts, and articles, all following the same program. The assumption here, of course, is that economic laws are the fundamental laws of even the most intimate and non-materialistic aspects of human behavior, such as romance, friendships, or religious observance.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
D. C. Schindler, Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the “Republic” (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 8–15.
Plato, Republic, 556d–556e.
Octogesima Adveniens, 45.