There has been a
lot of talk recently (meaning we saw one posting on FaceBook) claiming that the
U.S. Constitution says nothing about “subsidiarity,” i.e., the principle that
social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate level
consistent with their resolution. Thus, individuals
should handle individual issues, local authorities deal with local issues,
national authorities deal with national issues, and so on. As CESJ co-founder Father William Ferree
explained it,
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| Fr. William Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. |
“[T]he Law of Subsidiarity has
two parts: First, that no higher organization may arrogate to itself a function
which a lower organization can adequately perform; and secondly, that no lower
organization may ‘capture’ a higher one for its own particular purposes.” (Rev.
William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., Forty
Years After . . . A Second Call to Battle, unpublished ms., cir. 1984.)
Naturally, a little bit of
oversimplification has set in. A common
(mis)understanding of “subsidiarity” is that the State does whatever an
individual cannot do for him- or herself . . . which tends to nullify the act
of social justice altogether, and leads straight to totalitarianism.
Others assume that
subsidiarity means that the State has no legitimate role whatsoever . . . which
— carried to its reductio ad absurdum
— also nullifies the act of social justice by positing that only the
individual, not any form of social organization, can have or receive a
delegation of authority. As Ferree
noted,
“Many people who profess great
interest in the Law of Subsidiary Function don’t want to hear about the second
part of the Law of Subsidiarity. This leads to such outlandish formulations as
one I ran into personally in trying to dialogue with some students in the
hectic passage from the Sixties to the Seventies: this earnest young man was
even condescending in the patience with which he tried to explain to me that
the lower level was always right!’” (Ibid.)
Thus — if we agree with Ferree — it’s a matter
of appropriate jurisdiction. A national
authority should no more interfere in purely domestic matters (e.g., how many children parents may
have, the definition of marriage and family), any more than an individual
citizen (say, a movie star visiting a hostile country) can claim to speak for
the nation as a whole.
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| Albert Venn Dicey |
Subsidiarity, then, consists
of individuals doing individual things, nations doing national things, and
intermediate institutions (those “corporations” not under direct State control
against which the totalitarian philosopher Thomas Hobbes railed) handle all
intermediate things. Individual human
beings, not the collective or the State, are inherently sovereign, and exercise
that sovereignty by joining together with others in free association in
organized communities and institutions: the pólis,
from which we get Aristotle’s description of human beings as “political
animals.”
As the English
constitutional scholar Albert
Venn Dicey (1835-1922), a great admirer of the U.S.
Constitution, explained, “We, the People” as politically sovereign individuals, not the collective, delegate legal sovereignty via revocable grant to
the legislature that represents them. Rights are therefore a grant from the
people to the State, not the other way around. (A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the
Study of the Law of the Constitution. Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund,
Inc., 1982, 285.)
How this should operate in
practice can be seen in the work of another astute commentator on democracy in
America: Alexis de Tocqueville. As he
described the role of free association in the United States in the mid-1830s,
“The citizen of the United
States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in
order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social
authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims its
assistance when he is quite unable to shift without it. This habit may even be
traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their
games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and
to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined. The same spirit
pervades every act of social life. If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and
the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute
a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an
executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of
recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately
concerned. If the public pleasures are concerned, an association is formed to
provide for the splendor and the regularity of the entertainment. Societies are
formed to resist enemies which are exclusively of a moral nature, and to
diminish the vice of intemperance: in the United States associations are
established to promote public order, commerce, industry, morality, and
religion; for there is no end which the human will, seconded by the collective
exertions of individuals, despairs of attaining.” “Political Associations in
the United States,” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy
in America, Volume I.)
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| Alexis de Tcoqueville |
Thus, as de
Tocqueville noted,
“In some countries a power
exists which, though it is in a degree foreign to the social body, directs it,
and forces it to pursue a certain track. In others the ruling force is divided,
being partly within and partly without the ranks of the people. But nothing of
the kind is to be seen in the United States; there society governs itself for
itself. All power centers in its bosom; and scarcely an individual is to be
meet with who would venture to conceive, or, still less, to express, the idea
of seeking it elsewhere. The nation participates in the making of its laws by
the choice of its legislators, and in the execution of them by the choice of
the agents of the executive government; it may almost be said to govern itself,
so feeble and so restricted is the share left to the administration, so little
do the authorities forget their popular origin and the power from which they
emanate. (Alexis de Tocqueville, “The Principle of Sovereignty of the People in
America,” Democracy in America, I.iv.)
Given all of this, how did
things ever get into the shape they are today, with rampant State-worship
combined (sometimes in the same individual) with rejection of the proper role
of the State, and a complete corruption of the principle of subsidiarity?
We’ll look at that tomorrow.
#30#
