"Much Ado About Subsidiarity"

Over at Vox Nova, Morning's Minion links to a bunch of posts making the point -- which is quite sound, as Rob Vischer and others have shown -- that "subsidiarity" is about more than devolution, localism, or "small is beautiful," and that it is not reducible to libertarian anti-statism.  One of the writers, though -- James Baresel, at The Distributist Review -- goes a bit wrong, I think, and makes some claims about subsidiarity that, I suspect, Morning's Minion would reject, or at least insist be qualified.

It is true, of course, that Catholic Social Doctrine is not "individualistic", in a liberal or libertarian sense, but it's also a mistake to frame it, without qualification, as "communitarian."

"Subsidiarity" is, as Beresel, Morning's Minion, and many others have said, a rich and challenging (for us today) idea.  As Russell Hittinger has written, the core of the idea is "the existence of social persons distinct in dignity, reducible neither to the individual nor the state[.]"  Indeed, "Catholic Social Doctrine . . . emerged in defense of two propositions: first, that the state does not enjoy a monopoly over group-personhood; second, that societies other than the state not only possess real dignity as rights-and-duties-bearing unities, but that they also enjoy modes of authority proper to their own society."  With respect to subsidiarity specifically, Hittinger writes:

[S]ubsidiarity is not a free-standing concept. As a principle regulating and coordinating a plurality of group-persons, subsidiarity presupposes a plurality of such persons, each having distinct common ends,kinds of united action, and modes of authority. It is not, therefore, a question of whether there shall be group-persons, or whether they are efficient or immediately useful to the state. Rather, the question is how these groups stand to one another and to the state. In its negative formulation, subsidiarity demands that when assistance (subsidium) is given, it be done is such a way that the sociality proper to the group (family, school, corporation, etc.) is not subverted. . . .  Rendered in Latin as sub sedeo, subsidiarity evokes the concept not only of subordinate clauses in a sentence, but also of auxiliary troops in the Roman legion which ‘sat below’, ready and duty-bound to render service.  Hence, it describes the right . . . of social groups, each enjoying its own proper mode of action. While sometimes identified with the word subsidium (help, assistance), the point of subsidiarity is a normative structure of plural social forms, not necessarily a trickling down of power or aid.