Lawler and Reinsch on Freedom and the Human Person

One of the recurring questions here at MOJ and across the Catholic blogosphere is whether and to what extent Catholicism and American liberal democracy can happily co-exist ("the viability of the John Courtney Murray project" in shorthand). This essay at National Affairs by Peter Augustine Lawler and Richard Reinsch is a rich (and very well-written) reflection on that question by way of an engagement with the thought of Orestes Brownson, the still-unduly-neglected nineteenth century American Catholic thinker. As Lawler and Reinsch note at the outset of the piece:

Some of our most familiar political and intellectual categories, adapted to suit 20th-century debates, now cause us to fall into a simpleminded individualism that we cannot really believe. Too many conservatives, for instance, persist in the tired distinction between individual freedom and collectivism. That unrealistic bifurcation helped discredit the communist or fascist reduction of the particular person to nothing but an expendable cog in a machine, plugging away in pursuit of some glorious paradise to come at the end of History. But today that distinction too often ends up placing in the same repulsive category any understanding of the person as a relational part of a larger whole — of a country, family, church, or even nature. It thus causes conservatives to dismiss what students of humanity from Aristotle to today's evolutionary psychologists know to be true: that we social animals are "hardwired" by instinct to find meaning in serving personal causes greater than ourselves, and that reconciling freedom with personal significance is only possible in a relational context that is less about rights than about duties.

Read the whole thing to see how Lawler and Reinsch think Brownson helps us move past such individualism, but here is a bit from a later part of the essay:

The American, constitutional mean between abstract universalism and tribal secessionism, according to Brownson, is a limited political unity of citizens who know they are also more than and less than citizens. All of us equally are shaped by natural, personal imperatives having to do with flourishing as material, political, and spiritual beings. When we forget any of the three, we fall into trouble. The material being is concerned with the personal subsistence of himself and his family. The political being is concerned with the common good shared by citizens in a "territorial democracy" in a particular part of the world. The spiritual being is concerned with discovering his relational duties to his loving personal Creator and sharing that personal news with his fellow creatures through the church.