In light of our renewed public arguments concerning welfare reform, it is worthwhile to re-examine Michael Novak’s “The Crisis of the Welfare State” (Crisis, July/August 1993). This essay marked a significant development in Novak’s thought, a development arising from his encounter with the papal encyclical, Centesimus annus. Novak repeats his well-known critiques of the welfare state and of socialism, and he marshals papal statements in support of his arguments. But after more than a decade of opposition to any “third way” between socialism and capitalism, Novak now explicitly embraces “a new ‘third way’ — a welfare society.” This exciting new theme should suffice to demonstrate to Novak’s critics that he does not approach papal documents with a closed mind. He is no dissenter.
The essay contains many wise observations and the germ of sound public policy. His “homely example” of how the state can pursue the common good while respecting society’s “little platoons” — tax credits for a family with a handicapped child at home, rather than the provision of state-sponsored institutionalization — is taken from the heart of Centesimus annus. While he calls this an “indirect” way for the state to advance the commonweal, that he embraces any role for the state in the provision of social assistance should not escape the notice of those who believe him to be a simple apologist for the unmitigated individualism of rapacious capitalism.
This new focus on “society,” however, is eclipsed by Novak’s continued commitment to a form of individualism. For he cautions that too often those who invoke the ideal of “community” really have “collectivism” in mind. This certainly seems true of those whom we could call the left-communitarians, whose roots are on the conventional left and who are inspired by Rousseau. For these critics of American individualism, intermediate associations are viewed with suspicion as potential distractions from the common good, which is identified with a single solidarity — the tie to the “whole community” represented by the sovereign state and its liberal legal framework. Those associations which directly advance the collective good are valued, but if they do not conform to a standard of personal freedom and social equality, they are subject to censure. The left-communitarians are thus quite willing to see the state intervene against groups and authorities which do not exhibit the requisite openness, equality, and democratic decision-making.
But Novak’s criticism of the champions of “community” does not address those whom we could call right-communitarians, the traditional conservatives inspired by Burke and Bonald. In this vision, the diversity of human associations is celebrated for mirroring the divine plenitude. Since only God is God, and only God is sovereign, there is no call for the creation of that “mortal God,” the great Leviathan, here below. Properly speaking, no association is sovereign in the sense of Rousseau’s general will, for the common good is pursued exhaustively by no single human authority. The rich diversity of groups in society is itself a good; intermediate associations therefore are not judged by any instrumental criteria unless, as with criminal gangs, they positively contradict the common good. The right-communitarians are ever alert to any action which would threaten to “rationalize” the complex social structures which Providence has built up through history.
In his essay, it often seems that Novak is himself working toward a right-communitarian position, for a “third way” which stresses the role of intermediate associations has long been a staple of continental Catholic conservatism. But Novak is not yet there, and where he holds back, right-communitarians must be critical. Novak is so hostile to statism that he seems to understand anything which is not the state as undifferentiated “civil society,” the realm of the “voluntary” associations. But civil society may be understood in two distinct ways, and these must be discriminated. Using the conventional terminology of Ferdinand ‘ninnies, civil society may be understood as Gesellschaft, a realm where groups are formed voluntarily on the basis of instrumental market relations (self-interest properly understood is still self- interest). Or civil society may be understood as Gemeinschaft, a sphere of non-instrumental human association where groups simply exist which pursue no utilitarian end. While all human groups exhibit aspects of both these polarities, the ideal-type of Gesellschaft is the “strictly-business” business partnership and the ideal-type of Gemeinschaft is the family.
Tönnies observed that in the modern world Gesellschaft was spreading at the expense of Gemeinschaft, and that this phenomenon was directly experienced as alienation. Right-communitarians have long been committed to fostering Gemeinschaft as an element of the human good; indeed, much of their politics is predicated on precisely this end. What the traditional conservatives have repeatedly argued, with which Novak seems to disagree, is that Gemeinschaft can be threatened as much by the market (Gesellschaft) as by the state. While it is surely true that the logic of state solidarity can metastasize in social democracies into a stifling totalism, it is also true that the logic of market relations—contractual, voluntaristic, instrumentalist—can metastasize into the very different but no less stifling kind of totalism we increasingly know in America. It is the totalism of Gesellschaft (Charles Taylor calls it “the galloping hegemony of instrumental reason”) which yields the consumer materialism now regularly condemned by John Paul II.
Novak is right to seek to protect society’s little platoons from co-optation by the state. But if the little platoons are considered only as “voluntary” associations, the product of a free “contract,” then they have been misconceived, and practical consequences follow. If “society” is understood primarily as the voluntarist realm of Gesellschaft, then any state intervention which seeks to reinforce a declining social form (such as the family today) would be no more legitimate than an intervention to prop up a failing business concern. For right-communitarians then, “the main agent of social justice” must not be understood as Gesellschaft, opposed to the state, but rather as Gemeinschaft, opposed both to the state and to the market. Because many of the institutions of Gemeinschaft do often fare poorly “on the market,” this distinction necessarily affects social policy.
Novak begins to address these themes in The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. One hopes that his attempt to reconceive welfare policy also marks the beginning of his reflection on the political steps necessary to maintain the institutions of Gemeinschaft in a democratic capitalist world.