Classical Liberalism #10: Arguments for limited government & expanded civil society | Lauren Hall

Classical Liberalism #9: Two arguments for limited government and expanded civil society

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There are three subsets of civil society: primary, secondary, and tertiary associations.

Rochester Institute of Technology professor Lauren Hall says there are two arguments for expanding civil society and limiting the power of government, and they include elements of efficiency, morality, and coercion.

Ideally in civil society, secondary associations give you more freedom to meet your needs in various ways. If we relied more heavily on civil society rather than government, we'd have more wiggle room to find systems that work for us.

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LAUREN HALL:

Lauren Hall is associate professor of political science at Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Medicalization of Birth and Death (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) and Family and the Politics of Moderation (Baylor University Press, 2014). She has written extensively on the classical liberal tradition, including articles on Edmund Burke and Adam Smith.​

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TRANSCRIPT:

LAUREN HALL: Generally speaking when we talk about civil society we're talking about all the ways that people associate with each other when they're not interacting directly with the state or the political process, and they're not buying and selling things on the market. So in the sort of theory of civil society we generally talk about three different types or sort of subsets of civil society. There are the primary associations, and some people don't put this in civil society at all. And those are sort of friends and family. So the kin relations that we have, the really close friendships that we have. And those are the primary associations that again are sort of quasi voluntary and our families are not always totally voluntary. But those are the really close intimate relationships. What matters more for most civil society scholars are the secondary and to a certain extent tertiary associations.

And the tertiary associations are the kinds of associations that you're a member of but you don't really interact with people in those associations. So if you are a member of, or if you donate to NPR, for example, or the various environmental groups you might send a check once a year, so you're a member in a sort of nominal sense and you give them financial support but you're not really interacting with anybody. It's not what we call a thick relationship.

But when people think about civil society broadly very often what they're thinking about are these secondary associations. And so the secondary associations are all of the situations in which people organize and associate with each other that are not based off of kin and that are not based off of selling or sort of swapping services. So you can think about these as everything from religious associations so the church that you go to, the synagogue that you go to, to the roller derby team that you're on to the group that you meet up with at the library to do puzzles or whatever with on Sunday afternoons. So all of those different ways that you associate with people to fulfill some kind of end.

The major argument for limiting the power of government broadly and expanding what we call civil society, which again we're primarily talking about these secondary associations, but depending on who you talk to there's arguments about really expanding the role of the family, for example, also. But the major argument is, well there's two arguments I'll say. One is a basic efficiency argument and the efficiency argument simply says the government, especially in large nation states is simply too big to know what people actually need and is too big to actually help them in the way that they need to be helped. So this is related to Smith's argument about sort of universal benevolence. It would be really nice if we could take care of everyone, even people that we've never met. But we just can't. We don't have the systems in place to do that. And moreover we're actually more likely to harm them because we don't know what they really need. So imagine that there's some sort of hurricane and you show up with a huge truckload of water and everyone says well, we have wells. What we really need are generators.

Well now you've wasted a bunch of resources bringing them something that they don't need and they're no better off. And so the efficiency argument says we need to try to devolve a lot of services onto the people who know those people the most and again those secondary associations where people have face to...

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