A quick thought on Subsidiarity, in response to David Cloutier

David Cloutier (CUA, Theology) has a helpful piece in a recent issue of Commonweal called "The Paid Family Leave Impasse:  How Catholic Social Teaching Can Help."  Among other things, he explores the issue, and some policy proposals, using the principles of Subsidiarity and Solidarity.  Here's a bit:

Catholic social teaching can help us understand, and perhaps correct, the failure of both parties to address this issue. The problem is not that each party fails to balance solidarity and subsidiarity—as if some fifty-fifty compromise could be worked out. Rather, neither party understands the way solidarity and subsidiarity ought to be related to each other. That relation is one of means to ends. Solidarity is meant to govern the end of social action, while subsidiarity is the principle that determines the best means to that end. As John Paul II puts it in Centesimus annus, subsidiarity means that “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it…always with a view to the common good.” Understood in this way, subsidiarity is not just another name for libertarian individualism; rather, it is about the importance of genuine participatory structures for achieving solidarity.

It's entirely true, of course, that "subsidiarity is not just another name for libertarian individualism" or, as Cloutier says later, "atomistic individualism."  (It's also not simply about devolution or federalism, as others have pointed out.)  That said, I'm not sure that it's quite right to say that the subsidiarity principle is (only?) about identifying the "best means to [the] end" (i.e., "Solidarity").  I take the subsidiarity principle to (also?) be about pluralism, social ontology, the reality of group personhood, and the moral and legal rights and duties of non-state societies.

I found this essay by Russell Hittinger, "The Coherence of the Four Basic Principles of Catholic Social Doctrine," really helpful on this (and many other!) point(s).