Conedera review of Hittinger's "On The Dignity of Society"

Over at First Things, Fr. Sam Conedera has a review of Russ Hittinger's (excellent) new book, "On the Dignity of Society:  Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law".  Russ is, of course, indispensable reading on both topics.   Here's a bit from the review:

The individual has dignity—he is made in the image of God—both because of the excellence of his rational nature and because he is able to cause good in others. The same, Hittinger argues, is true of the social order. A society is not a mere aggregate.

This understanding of what makes a society is crucial for explaining the relationships among the “three necessary societies,” namely, family, polity, and Church. Each of these societies is grounded in the natural social tendency of the human person; each has ends that are given either by nature or by grace, rather than by human will; and each has a distinctive mode of authority. According to Hittinger, one flaw of political modernity is the failure of states to recognize or respect diverse modes of authority in civil society. The modern state reduces group-persons to mere partnerships, disregarding the principle of subsidiarity, on which different societies—family, Church, and so on—have their own proper functions and their own authority. (Importantly, as Hittinger insists, subsidiarity is about doing things not at the “lowest” level, but at the “proper” level.)