The Principle of Subsidiarity
Who is responsible? How is that responsibility exercised? To whom can the responsible party look for help? These questions structure the concept of subsidiarity, which we may define as the proportionate provision of aid to enable flourishing in accord with the nature and organization of each individual and organization. Aid, it must be known, is not a substitution of agency—it is not the authority doing the task for you—but that which makes it possible (or easier) for the proper agent to accomplish its good and fitting goal.
Oftentimes, subsidiarity has been explained in negative terms: that is, as though it is nothing more than the self-restriction of powerful entities from interfering in the affairs of the less-powerful. On the one hand, it is true that such restraint is necessary in following the principle of subsidiarity. But so, too, the principle requires the offering of help where and as needed. The proportion of this help—how much and of what kind—stems from the nature of the work being done and the capacities of the higher power to offer it. Thus, there is a kind of asymmetrical but nevertheless mutual relationship of responsibility observed in the principle of subsidiarity. As Pope Pius XI wrote in his 1931 Papal Encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno [79]:
Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.
And as this is expounded by the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church [186]:
On the basis of this principle, all societies of a superior order must adopt attitudes of help (“subsidium”) — therefore of support, promotion, development — with respect to lower-order societies. In this way, intermediate social entities can properly perform the functions that fall to them without being required to hand them over unjustly to other social entities of a higher level, by which they would end up being absorbed and substituted, in the end seeing themselves denied their dignity and essential place.
Subsidiarity, understood in the positive sense as economic, institutional or juridical assistance offered to lesser social entities, entails a corresponding series of negative implications that require the State to refrain from anything that would de facto restrict the existential space of the smaller essential cells of society. Their initiative, freedom and responsibility must not be supplanted.
Most especially is a principle of subsidiarity needed to maintain human dignity in the social order. Two opposed errors, common today—namely, individualism and collectivism—often strip this dignity away from us and our pursuit of the good.
Subsidiarity, Education and the Lyceum
Among these key dignified goods, education greatly benefits from a society ordered by the principle of subsidiarity. Like love, friendship, and justice, education is not a matter of material gain or loss—or at least, concerns such gain only incidentally—but of personal virtue and relationality. Friendship is not quantifiable; and neither should be education. We turn each into a good for purchase or sale only by stripping away its nature.
While some education, undoubtedly, can be provided without expert instruction, the highest levels of learning require dedicated teachers and scholars, students themselves steeped for the entirety of life in study—dedicated to improving their minds and demonstrating to students through the truths of reason.
These support for these educators and the institutes that enable them to best foster a life of intellectual virtue should come from those with the means to provide. It is for this reason that the Lyceum charges only maintenance fees for access to its platform and programs, and asks for the rest of our financial support in the form of donations, gifts which support the dignity of education.
