A society and a culture in which communities and churches and unions and neighborhoods and civic groups and local theater troupes are vibrant is, as Levin persuasively argues, a healthier society. These intermediate bodies also could, if allowed to flourish, provide an avenue for experimentation in social policy from which the country would benefit, gathering information from the bottom up rather than the top down. That said, I think the critical Catholic readers finds himself agreeing wholeheartedly with what we would call "the holding," if this were a court decision, while objecting too much of "the dicta." The holding is that American society would benefit from greater subsidiarity, from a reinvigoration of the intermediate social bodies that lend human scale to a culture and serve as a check on both the rampant individualism of the age and the linked encroachments of the national state. For starters, Levin is willing to criticize his fellow conservatives and, just so, possesses a key admission ticket for the intellectually honest conversation in the center that our nation so desperately needs. Yuval Levin's new book, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism, is worth the attention of all of us who are more and less Catholic social doctrine fans.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |