The Leonines and the Libertarians

Are the priorities of the Leonines and libertarians irreconcilable? In a certain sense, they are — Pope Leo XIII’s exhortation to further the “common good” in civic life was a call not merely to private conversion but to a conversion of the state itself. Leo affirms in Rerum Novarum that it is the “province of the commonwealth to serve the common good” and that the “free and untrammelled action” of individuals ought to be tempered by “the common good and the interest of others.” This type of thinking irritates the libertarian, who insists that vesting governments with a telos — other than his preferred telos of secure property rights and the prerequisite conditions for the exercise of his liberty — is a means of extracting a false unity from an otherwise varied people, of conscripting individual participation in a collective organism to which the individual has not consented to belong, and impeding the individual’s pursuit of his own private business. Jacob Marley’s realization that his “business” was “the common welfare” was one that came too little, too late, but the libertarian might take solace in the fact that the state didn’t nudge him one way or the other.