The Doctrine of Subsidiarity and the Liberty of the Person

I find this in a letter to the editor written by Terrence Richardson of Glastonbury: “People generally don’t understand that the issue” –central to the Supreme Court draft decision on Roe v Wade – “isn’t about what we want. It’s about which authority is best suited to make the decisions: SCOTUS [the Supreme Court of the United States], 50 independent state legislatures, or one U.S. Congress.”

That is a brief description of the  Principle of Subsidiarity, an indispensible vein of liberty that runs through all governments everywhere, but most glowingly here in the United States.

The animating idea of subsidiarity is that public functions should be exercised as close as possible to the citizen. The doctrine, originally a principle of social organization within the Catholic Church, holds “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also 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 to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.”

Political decisions in a multi-level government should be made at the smallest and most intimate level. In this way, important political decisions are NOT restricted to a single tier of government, and policies are decided by the governed through their elected representatives.

The doctrine, deeply woven into what has been called “the American experiment in self-government,” recognizes that every political decision is bifurcated. Or, to put it another way, every political decision seeks to answer two interdependent questions.  The first question may be put this way: There is a problem that admits of a political solution -- what must be done to solve the problem?

The second question, equally important, is – who decides what shall be done?

The U.S. Constitution provides an irreducible answer to the second question. The doctrine of the separation of powers means, if it means anything at all, that, to assure the liberty of the person, it is necessary to avoid a concentration of power in the hands of political saviors or autocratic political parties. The further removed political decision-making is from the people affected by such decisions, the greater becomes a sometimes irresistible drift from a representative republic to an always more efficient and forceful central government. Benito Mussolini, the father of totalitarian fascism, really did make the trains run on time.

Mussolini’s definition of fascism – everything in the state, nothing above the state, nothing outside the state – was as simple and brutal as the ensuing reality of fascist governance. Just now there is a discussion brewing among scholars touching on the question: Is the system of governance in China fascist or communist? The very first victim of totalitarian governments, whether fascist or communist, is the doctrine of subsidiarity. Its second victim is the liberty of the person.

So then, the proximity of decision-making will determine both the liberty of persons and the nature of governance itself.

It is this principle, inseparable from self-government, that stands between Acton’s absolute power corrupting absolutely and the liberty of the person yelling “Stop!”

Aristotle begins his Politics with a discussion of “the household” as a political unit, moving to “the village” and onward to “the polis,” the city state from which the word “politics” is derived.

Indeed, the family is to politics at a micro level what the state and the larger federal government here in the United States is to our multiform political system. If one concentrates upon the genealogy of political power in the United States, one finds it flowing from free persons through various muni-governments – those mentioned by Aristotle – to municipal governments, then state governments, then an overarching federal government. And the genius of the American experiment in representative government, of all governing forms the most fragile, is that governance has been organically framed in the United States to preserve and strengthen rather than displace such "lesser" political power units.  

We’ve just emerged, sort of, from a contentious quarrel between “the family” and “the municipality” – Aristotle’s “village” -- centering on the question who should decide what should be done about a sexualized curricula that many parents found inappropriate for very young children. And the struggle, yet ongoing, revolved around the question who is to decide what is to be done?

Such quarrels are always fierce because the general public, without quite naming it, fully understands the indispensability to republican rule of the doctrine of subsidiarity.

American governance rests on the notion that responsibility for the future of children belongs by nature to fathers and mothers, and that American government was formed not to displace the various forms of political power displayed everywhere in a functioning republic. On the contrary, it was formed, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, to form rather than to displace a perfect, preexisting organic union.