Government versus society

Justice requires social reform as well as economic reform. Individuals cannot flourish, indeed they cannot hope to survive in any meaningful way, apart from the rich lattice of relationships, families, and associations commonly known as civil society. This is a realm that exists apart from the state and independent of its authority. Here, in families and churches, schools and clubs, individuals make something of their lives and truly exercise their capacity to govern.

Yet government has been consuming civil society for years. Like their leftist counterparts around the world, American liberals distrust the social sector as moralistic, unequal, and hidebound. The “little platoons” of family and neighborhood too often stand in the way of making citizens truly equal. Churches and local communities too often impose obligations on individuals that keep them from pursuing happiness. Consequently, since the early part of the last century, Progressives have sought to replace society with government by absorbing the social sector’s teeming variety of voluntary associations into the state.

Thus Joshua D. Hawley