Libertarianism and Catholic Social Teaching

Prof. Patrick Clark (University of Scranton) has a worth-reading essay up, over at the Catholic Moral Theology blog.  It's called "Libertarianism and Catholic Social Teaching:  Convergence and Divergence."  I appreciated, among other things, the fact that Prof. Clark acknowledged and explored the thematic "convergences" between (some forms of) libertarianism and the Catholic Social Teaching tradition, en route to recalling and expounding the dissonance.  It's disappointing, to me, when Catholic intellectuals and scholars settle for name-calling ("Randian!") as a response to the important points that libertarians make about, e.g., the importance of constraining the ability of the political authority to infringe on the (ordered) liberty of persons and of resisting statist utopianism.  (We are, of course, familiar with the various ways in which some forms of philosophical libertarianism, or some policies supported by libertarians, are inconsistent with the Catholic tradition's emphases on community and solidarity.)  Here's a bit:

Leo XIII’s path-breaking encyclical Rerum Novarum is often portrayed as a proposal of a “middle way” between Marxist socialism and the unfettered capitalism of the industrial revolution. Yet both sides of this twofold critique emerge from a common root, namely the denunciation of those political philosophies that warrant the modern state’s claim to absolute sovereignty over their citizenry. Put more positively, Leo XIII sought to protect the genuine autonomy of those intermediary human communities (such as trade unions) from the encroachment of governmental structures whose authority over such communities rested not upon any “general will” but rather upon abstract ideological commitments. These ideological commitments, both in their Marxist and capitalist forms, are built upon the presumption that the social realm is most fundamentally an arena of violence. From the Marxist perspective, this violence takes the shape of the great ongoing “class struggle,” while from the capitalist perspective, this violence is the natural basis for the competition that fuels the market and so ultimately produces ameliorative ends. Either way, political organization amounts to an extrinsic (and wholly benevolent) intervention upon “the way things are.” Both inevitably lead to forms of totalitarianism in so far as the lives of individual citizens and their proximate associations become subordinated to the ideological abstractions that justify modern regimes. In this sense, the entire project of modern Catholic social teaching emerges from a suspicion of the modern state’s claim to absolute sovereignty that bears remarkable resemblance to the libertarian suspicion of government today. Both suspicions are about the corrosive effects of unchecked, centralized power. Yet Catholic social teaching would diverge from libertarianism in claiming that this corrosive potential is not so much about the essential nature of power itself but about the contingent conditions under which power is in fact being wielded here and now.