Rediscovering Civil Society, Part I: Mediating Structures and the Dilemmas of the Welfare State

To Empower People: From State to Civil Society was a book published in 1996 and edited by Michael Novak. It is a group of essays which take a retrospective look at the policy recommendations contained in a 1977 book by Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus entitled To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy .

The first chapter of the original 1977 book defines some structural challenges we face in today's society and offers a policy framework for solving some of those problems:

Two seemingly contradictory tendencies are evident in current thinking about public policy in America. First, there is a continuing desire for the services provided by the welfare state...The second tendency is one of strong animus against government, bureaucracy, and bigness as such...

...we suggest that the modern welfare state is here to stay...but that alternative mechanisms are possible to provide welfare-state services.

The current anti-government, anti-bigness mood is not irrational. Complaints about impersonality, unresponsiveness, and excessive interference, as well as the perception of rising costs and deteriorating services - these are based upon empirical and widespread experience...At the same time there is widespread public support for publicly addressing major problems of our society in relieving poverty, in education, health care, and housing, and in a host of other human needs...

...The alternatives proposed here...can solve some problems...become the basis of far-reaching innovations in public policy, perhaps of a new paradigm...

The basic concept is that of what we are calling mediating structures...defined as those institutions standing between the individual in his private life and the large institutions of public life.

Modernization brings about a historically unprecedented dichotomy between public and private life. The most important large institution in the ordering of modern society is the modern state...In addition, there are the large economic conglomerates of capitalistic enterprise, big labor, and the growing bureaucracies that administer wide sectors of the society, such as in education...All these institutions we call the megastructures.

Then there is that modern phenomenon called private life...

For the individual in modern society, life is an ongoing migration between these two spheres, public and private. The megastructures are typically alienating, that is, they are not helpful in providing meaning and identity for individual existence. Meaning, fulfillment, and personal identity are to be realized in the private sphere. While the two spheres interact in many ways, in private life the individual is left very much to his own devices, and thus is uncertain and anxious...

The dichotomy poses a double crisis. It is a crisis for the individual who must carry on a balancing act between the demands of the two spheres. It is a political crisis because the megastructures (notably the state) come to be devoid of personal meaning and are therefore viewed as unreal or even malignant...Many who handle it more successfully than most have access to institutions that mediate between the two spheres. Such institutions have a private face, giving private life a measure of stability, and they have a public face, transferring meaning and value to the megastructure. Thus, mediating structures alleviate each facet of the double crisis of modern society...

Our focus is on four such mediating structures - neighborhood, family, church, and voluntary association. This is by no means an exhaustive list...

Without institutionally reliable processes of mediation, the political order becomes detached from the values and realities of individual life. Deprived of its moral foundation, the political order is "delegitimized." When that happens, the political order must be secured by coercion rather than by consent. And when that happens, democracy disappears.

The attractiveness of totalitarianism...is that it overcomes the dichotomy of private and public existence by imposing on life one comprehensive order of meaning...

Democracy is "handicapped" by being more vulnerable to the erosion of meaning in its institutions...That is why mediation is so crucial to democracy. Such mediation cannot be sporadic and occasional; it must be institutionalized in structures. The structures we have chosen to study have demonstrated a great capacity for adapting and innovating under changing conditions. Most important, they exist where people are, and that is where sound public policy should always begin...

The understanding of mediating structures is sympathetic to Edmund Burke's well-known claim: "To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle...of public affections." And it is sympathetic to..de Tocqueville's conclusion...[about] Americans: "In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made."...

...Emile Durkheim describes the "tempest" of modernization sweeping away the "little aggregations" in which people formerly found community, leaving only the state on the one hand and a mass of individuals...on the other...Today Robert Nisbet has most persuasively argued that the loss of community threatens the future of American democracy...

...Liberalism...has tended to be blind to the political (as distinct from private) functions of mediating structures. The main features of liberalism...is a commitment to government action toward greater social justice within the existing system...Liberalism's blindness to mediating structures can be traced to its Enlightenment roots. Enlightenment thought is abstract, universalistic...The concrete particularities of mediating structures find an inhospitable soil in the liberal garden. There the great concern is for the individual ("the rights of man") and for a just public order, but anything "in between" is viewed as irrelevant, or even an obstacle, to the rational ordering of society...

American liberalism has been vigorous in the defense of the private rights of individuals, and has tended to dismiss the argument that private behavior can have public consequences. Private rights are frequently defended against mediating structures...Similarly, American liberals are virtually faultless in their commitment to the religious liberty of individuals. But the libert to be defended is always that of privatized religion. Supported by a very narrow understanding of the separation of church and state, liberals are typically hostile to the claim that institutional religion might have public rights and public functions...liberalism has a hard time coming to terms with the alienating effects of the abstract structures it has multiplied since the New Deal. This may be the Achilles heel of the liberal state today.

The left, understood as some version of the socialist vision, has been less blind to the problem of mediation...The weakness of the left, however, is its exclusive or nearly exclusive focus on the capitalist economy as the source of this evil, when in fact the alienation of the socialist states...are much more severe than those of the capitalist states...

On the right...we also find little that is helpful...Both the old faith in the market and the new faith in government share the abstract thought patterns of the Enlightenment...today's conservatism typically exhibits the weakness of the left in reverse: it is highly sensitive to the alienations of big government, but blind to the analogous effects of big business...

The argument of this essay...can be subsumed under three propositions. The first proposition is analytical: Mediating structures are essential for a vital democratic society. The other two are broad programmatic recommendations: Public policy should protect and foster mediating structures, and Wherever possible, public policy should utilize mediating structures for the realization of social purposes...

The analytical proposition assumes that mediating structures are the value-generating and value-maintaining agencies in society. Without them, values become another function of the megastructures, notably of the state, and this is a hallmark of totalitarianism. In the totalitarian case, the individual becomes the object rather than the subject of the value-propagating processes of society.

The two programmatic propositions are, respectively, minimalist and maximalist. Minimally, public policy should cease and desist from damaging mediating structures....

The maximalist proposition ("utilize mediating structures") is much the riskier...there is a real danger that such structures might be "co-opted" by the government in a too eager embrace that would destroy the very distinctiveness of their function...

It should be noted that these propositions differ from superficially similar propositions aimed at decentralizing governmental functions. Decentralization is limited to what can be done within governmental structures; we are concerned with the structures that stand between government and the individual...

The theme is empowerment. One of the most debilitating results of modernization is a feeling of powerlessness in the face of institutions controlled by those whom we do not know and whose values we often do not share...The mediating structures under discussion here are the principal expressions of the real values and the real needs of people in our society. They are, for the most part, the people-sized institutions. Public policy should recognize, respect, and, where possible, empower these institutions...

Upper-income people already have ways to resist the encroachment of megastructures...Poor people have this power to a much lesser degree. The paradigm of mediating structures aims at empowering poor people to do the things that the more affluent can already do, aims at spreading the power around a bit more - and to do so where it matters, in people's control over their own lives...

Michael Novak has these words to say in the Introduction to the 1996 book:

One reason for the widespread acceptance of the Berger-Neuhaus approach may be as follows. In modern political thought, two tersm have until recently tended to dominate discourse: the individual and the nation-state...these terms are modern arrivals on the stage of history. But these terms apply...only to the two extremes of social life, excluding the "thickest" parts of social living in between.

The rise of the nation-state came about as heretofore separate petty kingdoms were brought to unity in new and larger national units, as in Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century...Almost as if in echo, there arose, as well, the sharp awareness among more and more individuals...that each is an atomic, lonely, and poignantly vulnerable individual...

Never before had nationalism...exercised so broad and highly organized an appeal upon human hearts. Never before had individuals felt so detached from kin and neighbors. Until recent generations, most loyalties had been local, feudal, personal...rather than abstract, legal and systematized in the new modern style of rationalized bureaucracies, conscripted armies, and impersonal welfare dependencies...

The Arrangement of the New Edition

...the idea of mediating institutions...[is] much easier to talk about...than actually find ways of realizing it, especially through the agencies of government...

...Mediating structures...do not at all fit the patterns of bureaucratic rationality. They require a more prudential, case-by-case form of reasoning...

In recent years...under the pressure of the new "rights regime," distant authorities began indeed to drive out local control and thus to crush these local "mediating structures."...the pressure brought by certain progressive elites to nationalize formerly local institutions and...to do so with the full weight of a new interpretation of the law...

...even the great philanthropic foundations, once thought of as an "independent sector," have slowly been drawn into an indecent liaison with government...foundations have frequently been co-opted by the seductive techniques of governmental agencies...

...The concept of mediating structures is not a simple one, since mediating structures come in all shapes, sizes, and forms, and their relations to the larger society, and even to government, are many and various. This concept is closely related to three others powerful in the world of ideas today: the principle of subsidiarity, the law of association, and civil society...

...We think that the political party that best makes mediating structures the North Star of a new bipartisan agenda will dominate practical politics for the next fifty years. Those who cherish the preeminence of the little platoons and associative networks of civil society over the bureaucratic state are more deeply rooted in the original ground and genius of the American experiment...

...it is never wise to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. It is also unwise to trust the state excessively. And it is usually prudent to place your bet on human liberty. Men are not angels, and on this earth we will never create an earthly paradise...the approach to public policy through mediating structures is not paradise, but only a significant and more humane alternative to the tangle of pathologies our nation now experiences...