I have a libertarian friend, Joe, with whom I have spent many hours drinking bourbon and talking politics. Occasionally, I will express my own economic and political views (broadly and uninformedly distributist/postliberal with a lingering affection for Eisenhower-era Republicanism), and Joe will say, with great frustration, “You have all the right impulses, and you keep coming to the wrong conclusions!” Expecting the government to protect us from the corporations that run our lives, he explains, is foolish because the corporations use the state to legitimize and reify their control of society. I don’t know enough about economics to know whether he is right or not, but I always enjoy the conversation.
I kept thinking about Joe while reading Andrew Willard Jones’s new collection of essays, The Church Against the State. I think what Jones, Joe, and I can all agree on is that the system is broken and that, in particular, “The political right is in a state of upheaval” (1). I think we can probably also agree that “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” (15). Where I wonder if Jones and Joe would part company is Jones’s Aristotelian criticism of the oligarchy (more accurately, a plutocracy) in which we all live:
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. 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. (15-16)
Intrinsic in this description, of course, is the idea that this state of affairs is bad, that human life should not be oriented toward economics, and thus that there is something fundamentally inhuman about the society we live in. Do libertarians agree? I suppose they don’t, not to the degree that they are libertarians, anyway. (Joe calls himself an anarchist most of the time now.)
Jones would prefer that society be oriented toward the common good. That term gets used by people from a wide variety of political orientations nowadays, but Jones is uninterested in the utilitarian maximum-happiness principle or any other conception that would exclude anyone from the common good. Instead, the common good involves all beings making it to eudaimonia, that infamously prickly Greek philosophical term that means “happiness,” or “human flourishing,” or “the good life”—in other words, becoming what they were objectively meant to be.
Both left and right liberalism are incapable not only of bringing about the common good but even of aiming at it, because liberalism of all sorts rests on social contract theory—most strongly formulated by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—which claims that the State is born when people agree to give up certain “natural rights” in exchange for protection offered by the sovereign. In Jones’s view, Locke’s and Rousseau’s sunnier views of the social contract ultimately collapse into Hobbes’s strikingly negative one. (Whenever I think of Hobbes, I think of David Denby’s Great Books, in which a Columbia professor calls him “this unpleasant bastard.”) Ultimately, the social contract is built on violence: first, the famous “war of all against all” described in Hobbes’s Leviathan, then the State’s violent solution to that war:
Humans are engaged in interminable conflict with each other and with nature itself. The total violence of the State does not eliminate this fundamental war of all against all, but rather, in a manner of speaking, decisively wins it and so subdues the wills of the many under the will of the one. In the familiar Hobbesian form, the State’s violence is so overawing and so predictable that the individual inevitably determines that it serves his self-interest better to make contracts with his fellow men than to engage with them, and so the State, in combat—and in this manner, competition comes to replace open warfare. (32-33)
A person’s “rights” under the social contract end up being a combination of his legal persona and the property the State has allowed him to possess. This conception is, if not dehumanizing, at the very least depersonalizing, in that it involves a certain anonymity and interchangeability. What’s the difference between my ownership of the house I live in and the previous owner’s? Not much.
Likewise, the notion of private life is, under the social contract, eliminated or at least subsumed under public life: “To the State, private life is always really a matter of public rights being exercised in a particular way” (37). Jones’s example is marriage, which most people think of as a private affair but which easily becomes public during, for example, a messy divorce. The rights we imagine we have are not really ours at all: they belong to the State, and the State generously loans them to us.
But all of this is a massive abstraction—more or less a legal fiction. The truth is that our personhood does not disappear under the State and that the State has no real vision of our private lives—only of the stories that we tell about them when we dispute contracts. Thus our actual concrete existence and relationships in actual local places are forms of resistance against the encroaching State, an attack on its sovereignty. This the State cannot tolerate, and it responds with a kind of totalitarian bureaucratization of the world. Thus, “the liberal drive to minimize such relationships in favor of rights and contracts, to replace communities with bureaucracies, to replace trades with jobs, to replace authorities with regulations, to replace people with systems, is to make more and more of society operate merely in the registry and within the State’s proper supervision” (39). Liberals call this progress; libertarians and distributists alike are more likely to see it as totalitarianism.
Every reader will no doubt be able to come up with three or four of his own examples of this phenomenon. Personally, I think of the way the government has translated the licensing requirements for doctors and lawyers (which make sense) to barbers and auctioneers (which do not). What’s the danger of my going to an unlicensed barber? The absolute worst-case scenario would be that I have a goofy haircut for a few weeks, and I’m not sure most people would notice the difference.
One of the more sinister qualities of liberalism is that even many people who imagine themselves to be resisting and critiquing it are actually reifying it. For example, the postmodernist, whom Jones admires in many ways, famously argues that all of society is one big power struggle—but how is that position actually different from Hobbes’s? Both say that human life is fundamentally about competition and conflict, not cooperation and friendship. Or there’s socialism, which claims to be the opposite of liberalism but maintains the basic Hobbesian anthropology of war against all against all, or at least the war of class against class. These alternatives are simply not as radical as they imagine themselves to be.
Liberalism ends up reifying itself, in fact. The Hobbesian social contract begins with an anthropology: human life is a war of all against all, and the sovereign (individual or State) mediates these disputes to sublimate that war into competition. That vision of humanity is not true, and yet
As more and more relationships become primarily adversarial and quantitative, actual physical violence, public and private, recedes in favor of contract and conformity. At its hypothetical terminus, the registry would be reality itself: persons would be their personae, places and things would be merely property, and physical violence would become impossible within the constant conflict and relentless sameness of the now actually ubiquitous sovereign will. And in such a way, the accuracy of Hobbes’s diagnosis and the reality of his cure would come fully into being simultaneously, at the end of a single integral process, of a history: total sovereignty and total conflict are inseparable. (50-51)
In other words, once the subjects of a liberal government have fully internalized the false liberal anthropology, it actually makes itself true, and we become unable to conceive of any other form of government.
What’s a genuine alternative to liberalism, if socialism and postmodernism aren’t? Subsidiarity. It’s an important word for Catholic social teaching, but Jones points out that it’s not always easy to understand, often being reduced to “the simplistic axiom that ‘smaller is better’” (4). As it turns out, it’s substantially more complicated than that. The essay here that best lays out the principles of subsidiarity (“The Priority of Peace”) is 55 well-reasoned and well-written pages long and contains 213 footnotes, most of them from Thomas Aquinas.
Subsidiary is so hard to explain because it isn’t a political program or even a political theory—it’s a whole anthropology. I don’t have 55 pages and couldn’t explain it nearly as well as Jones if I did, but I’ll take a shot. Human society, says the subsidiarist, is fundamentally hierarchical and patriarchal, albeit in a more positive way than the communist or the feminist would use these terms. All relationships resemble that of father and son, with the father leading the son into virtue, which is to say ruling his desires with his reason. Importantly, this leading cannot take place through fear, because actions done out of fear are not voluntary and thus not fully human: love must be the motivation, and obedience the response.
Virtue is often described as a habit, but this too is an oversimplification. Instead, “virtue is built through performing many actions that vary widely in their externals—that are even opposites—exactly because they are based on the repetition of internal acts of a properly correlated intellect and will” (88). Virtues are a matter of doing the right thing at the right time, and it’s fundamentally a fatherly action to teach someone how to do so. And the virtues are always instantiated in a set of skills, for which bricklaying is Jones’s typical example. What does it mean for a bricklayer to possess the virtue of diligence? It means that he lays bricks at a reasonable speed to maintain the quality of the wall he’s building—and of course that skill is going to vary based on all sorts of different circumstances.
In this sense, rules or laws are meant to develop virtue in the people who are learning to follow them, even though the more virtuous a person becomes, the less he will need to think about the rules, because he has internalized them. (They become, as it were, second nature to him, just as the false liberal anthropology becomes second nature to us as we internalize it.) I’ve never laid bricks, but I think spelling is a good, if banal, example. A rule like “i before e except after c”—to the limited degree that it’s true at all—is useful only while a person is learning to spell words like conceive. But when I write conceive, I’ve been spelling long enough not to have to remind myself of the rule, which I have fully internalized.
Virtues are not abstract, because they are always instantiated in particular actions performed by particular persons at particular times in particular locales. My courage, if I can flatter myself into thinking I have any, is the courage of me, Michial Farmer, a high-school history teacher in Atlanta in the twenty-first century. And no doubt we can add the other categories in which I live and move and have my being: a husband, a Catholic, an essayist, and so forth. What it means for me to be courageous is analogical to what it meant for King Louis IX of France to be courageous in the thirteenth century, but the two kinds of courage are not the same.
Justice is a particularly important virtue, because it is “The virtue that governs social life” (90). It’s always directed toward the common good, toward the mutual flourishing of everyone in the society. Like the other virtues, it’s instantiated in particular persons performing particular actions in particular societies—and like other virtues, we’re formed in justice by our fathers (and father-figures).
Or, to put this another way, we are formed in justice and the other virtues by our friends. Friendship, by its very nature, demands difference. Joe and I might be drawn together by certain things we have in common, but if we’re not different in some ways, we can’t be friends (because we would be the same person). All relationships of virtue are analogically father-son relationships, which presents a problem for friendships, many of which seem to be built on equality rather than hierarchy. And yet, in another way, they are still hierarchical: “all the dynamics of the father-son relationship are present in the friend-friend relationship, only in the mode of friendship rather than that of parent and child. Friends shift back and forth, trading the positions of authority and obedience, of teacher and learner, of ruler and ruled, leading each other deeper into ever more perfect virtues, [ . . . ] producing unity and peace” (94). Friendship thus does not involve the absence of power—it involves the reversible equilibrium of power. In this sense, the just society is a society of friends, a kind of tissue of friendships, both actual and potential, with every person in the society leading others, and being led by others, into the virtues necessary for the maintenance of that society.
Note that this anthropology denies the sort of equality that liberalism routinely demands for justice. I am not the equal of my father—or to the degree that I am, it’s because a good father “makes up the difference between his son and himself from within the surplus of his virtue and so renders an equality between himself and his child” (98). And the same is true of every relationship in my life: there’s always a hierarchy, but to the degree the relationship is just and virtuous, an equality is born of that inequality.
It’s this virtuous hierarchy that creates order and harmony in society, or, as we might put it, peace. And this peace, in turn, allows us genuine freedom in our obedience to rightful authority (a category that liberalism can hardly even recognize). This rightful authority is the prince, whose job is to stand atop the hierarchy and to help everyone in his society achieve virtue, because every rightful authority should be focused on the flourishing of the levels of the hierarchy beneath him, just as a good father cares more for his children than for himself.
This conception of humanity and politics is so far from the way our society thinks of the job of the ruler (the “sovereign”) that it’s difficult even to picture what it would look like in the modern world. It’s easier to see the dynamic if one thinks of a smaller organization. In a well-functioning school, for example, the principal’s job is to maintain the friendships among teachers and students and to organize the school in such a way that everyone who lives in the community finds it easier to become virtuous. The principal’s job is to care for the souls of those under his authority, which itself exists “only to the extent that it is spoken into the conversation of friends that is custom and which is the common good insofar as it is realized in the order of this city and not another city” (113). And ultimately his authority comes from the fact that he protects the peace that sustains his school. I suspect that anyone who has had a good boss and a bad boss will recognize the difference without much trouble.
Again, this schema is not prescriptive—it’s descriptive. This is the way well-functioning societies work, and societies that don’t work this way hold together only because they are hanging on to some traces of peace. A prince becomes a tyrant through a kind of privation of peace, but as Plato notes in the Republic, a tyrant is produced by the tyrannical souls of the city he rules. The best way to resist tyranny, then, is through the peace of subsidiarity: “The cultivation of virtue among friends, the reassertion of the father-son relationship, and a focus on the sacramental life of the parish” (132). In other words, we must restore the peace that we have gradually lost sight of, beginning with the lower levels of the hierarchy and hopefully moving upwards.
Despite the title of the book, Jones believes it’s a mistake to make the modern liberal division between Church and State. Jones lays out the alternative vision in his essay on the much-maligned Pope Innocent III (best known for calling the Fourth and Albigensian Crusades). Here again the essay is too rich to easily summarize, but in brief, drawing on the famous four-fold meaning of medieval hermeneutics (historical, allegorical, moral, and anagogical), Pope Innocent conceived of monarch and pope as part of a telescoping hierarchy of authority, masters of two realms of the same reality: “In the spiritual realm, the realm of virtue, the pope was obeyed out of love. This was the fulfillment of temporal power, and it is why the pope, as pope, did not have an army. When a people fell out of virtue, they moved back into the allegorical or even, tragically, to the historical. Here extrinsic and coercive law appears, bearing rewards and punishments. This is why the kings needed armies” (161). Thus a just society will constantly be moving from the lower sort of power to the higher, moving its citizens toward charity and contemplation (the hallmarks of anagogy) through an infusion of divine grace. Pope Innocent III, according to Jones, was not actually trying to grasp temporal power, as so many modern readings of his papacy suggest. Instead, he was trying to place both temporal and spiritual power in their proper places in the hierarchy.
All of this appeals immensely to me, as it no doubt will to many other readers exhausted with liberalism. I do wonder how to move it out of the realm of pure theory. After all, very few medieval monarchs actually properly conceived of their role in the hierarchy Jones describes—Louis IX comes to mind, but not very many others—and it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever submitting the modern West to it. Jones himself acknowledges that he is “concerned with the pursuit of truth in this regard and am not much concerned with what is politically expedient in contemporary fights” (ii)—which is totally reasonable, and it’s a hallmark of bad book criticism to fault an author for not accomplishing something he’s not trying to do. But I did find myself hoping that some future writer, inspired by The Church Against the State, will sketch out a practical path forward from liberalism, not to postliberalism but to a new, and perhaps more effective, version of the preliberal notion of solidarity..
In the meantime, this book has helped me understand a bit of what Joe and I have in common. As I said, he’s recently begun calling himself an anarchist instead of a libertarian. Next time we’re drinking bourbon together, I look forward to telling him that he’s got all the right impulses and is coming to the wrong conclusions.
Image Via: Picryl
