What Is Government For? Subsidiarity, Solidarity, and the Limits of the State
Federal and state elections in Australia are routinely fought on a single axis: is government doing too much, or too little? More spending or less; more regulation or less; a bigger safety net or a smaller one. Thomistic social philosophy doesn’t refuse to answer that question, but it insists on asking a prior one first — not how much government, but what government is actually for — because without settling that, “more” and “less” are directionless.
The classical answer is that political authority exists to secure the common good: those conditions of social life — peace, justice, sufficient material provision, the possibility of genuine human flourishing — that individuals and smaller communities cannot fully secure alone. This immediately rules out two popular but opposed simplifications. It rules out the purely libertarian view that government exists merely to protect individual liberty and enforce contracts, since that account has no room for the state’s positive responsibility toward the vulnerable, or for goods — like a functioning system of justice or public health — that are inherently communal rather than merely aggregated from private choices. But it equally rules out the view that the state is the primary or default agent for meeting every human need, since that account collapses the many communities that stand between the individual and the state — families, parishes, unions, local associations, charities — into mere administrative extensions of central government.
That second point is the principle of subsidiarity, and it is frequently misunderstood as simply a conservative brief for smaller government. It is not. Subsidiarity holds that a higher or larger body should not take over a function that a lower or smaller one can perform adequately on its own — not because smaller is inherently better, but because a community closest to a problem usually understands it best, and because absorbing every function into the central state atrophies the smaller communities’ own capacity to act, which is itself a loss to human flourishing. But subsidiarity has a positive as well as a negative form: the state has a genuine duty to intervene, and even to expand its role, when a lower body genuinely cannot secure the common good on its own — a family cannot build a hospital system, a local charity cannot regulate a national economy, an individual employer relationship often cannot on its own correct a serious imbalance of power. Subsidiarity is not an argument for a minimal state; it is an argument for the right state, active exactly where it’s needed and restrained exactly where it isn’t.
The complementary principle, solidarity, is what stops subsidiarity collapsing into mere localism or a excuse for indifference. Solidarity holds that the members of a political community have real, binding obligations toward each other precisely because they share a common life — the wellbeing of the unemployed, the sick, and the elderly is not merely a private concern of their own families but a genuine claim on the whole community, mediated appropriately through both civil society and, where necessary, the state. A social philosophy that takes solidarity seriously cannot be satisfied with a government that merely enforces contracts and otherwise stands aside.
Put together, these principles don’t hand Australian politics a ready-made answer to any specific policy dispute — how generous an unemployment payment should be, or how centralised health funding ought to be, remains a prudential judgment resting on facts these principles alone cannot supply. What they do is reframe the debate away from a single axis of “more or less” and toward the actual question that axis obscures: is this particular function best exercised by families, local communities, and voluntary associations, or does it genuinely require the scale and coercive authority only the state can bring — and either way, is the community as a whole actually being bound together by it, or merely administered?