Milk Street Society Hosts Lecture by Dr. Andrew Willard Jones | Thomas More College

Milk Street Society Hosts Lecture by Dr. Andrew Willard Jones

By Brendan McDonald ’25

Andrew Willard Jones, The College of St. Joseph the Worker

Last semester, Thomas More College’s Milk Street Society hosted a lecture by Dr. Andrew Willard Jones on the topic of subsidiarity. A political theologian and author, Dr. Jones is the Director of Catholic Studies at the Franciscan University of Steubenville and the academic dean at the recently founded College of St. Joseph the Worker.

Dr. Jones spoke to Milk Street Society members, faculty, and students about the relationship between the political and the economic, various New Right answers to the distinction between public and private institutions, and the consideration of subsidiarity—a principle of Catholic social teaching asserting that decisions regarding societal actions should be made at as local a level as possible. The broad theme of subsidiarity was chosen to guide the Milk Street Society’s conversations during the academic year; supporting texts read by the group included two essays by Dr. Jones.

During the lecture, Dr. Jones said that subsidiarity is often reduced to being a mere “policy recommendation” to ensure more effective governmental action. The original meaning—and how the Church understands the teaching—has much more depth. “The term ‘subsidiarity’ is widely known among Christian democrats and Catholics of various stripes,” Dr. Jones told the audience, “but the original meaning of subsidiarity rests on an anthropology and a metaphysics that have largely been lost—and so the concept is sometimes rendered as a simplistic axiom that ‘smaller is better.’” He continued, “Subsidiarity is no mere axiom or principle of governance. It is an alternative, integral social form with deep roots in the pre-modern Western tradition.”

One question Dr. Jones pursued throughout the lecture is how one discovers this meaning of the principle. He argued that a Catholic understanding of the “common good” most properly unlocks the complete meaning of subsidiarity. This understanding posits that society is genuinely unified in its pursuit of happiness and virtue. The different levels of power within a society are not at war with one another; instead, they accomplish different tasks that are directed toward the same goal.

“The hierarchy of levels of association is the form of the common good itself,” Dr. Jones explained. “The just society, the society pursuing happiness, is, then, a society ordered according to subsidiarity…. This is the very heart of the tradition’s understanding of social justice: each level of association is at home in the whole; each is freely given what it needs to be itself even as it freely gives itself to each other level of association. Each is rendered his due as each renders everyone else his due. This is what justice means.”

Dr. Jones used an image to illustrate this understanding of subsidiarity: the father and his son. It is the father who possesses the moral authority necessary to guide his son to live a virtuous life. The state has the same goal as the father, but accomplishes it differently—negatively, by allowing the father to perform his task unimpeded.

Now, as the father—and the family—possesses the moral authority to raise his children, he does not possess the power to be completely self-sustained. He needs a city to produce necessities and provide a common defense. The bonds that make this city possible are not artificial; they are the natural state of man. What are these bonds called? “The tradition calls the relations that make up a just—and so, happy—polity ‘friendship,’” Dr. Jones stated. “True friendship, we might say, simply is the experience of the common good.” The conclusion is that subsidiarity is not merely a policy recommendation but a demand from within human nature itself.

The Milk Street Society is a student-run political philosophy discussion group that hosts lectures related to the year’s theme for students and faculty. Dr. Jones’s visit to TMC was made possible by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

 

For further reading:

Milk Street Society Welcomes Pater Edmund Waldstein to TMC

Accepting the Call to Heroic Virtue: Dr. Joe Wurtz Visits TMC

 

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