Pierre Manent’s “Science of Political Form” and Catholic Social Teaching on the Nation

Since the promulgation of the encyclical Pacem in Terris in 1963, Catholic social teaching has recommended the ongoing strengthening of institutions of global government. As political experience limits the idealistic prospects which motivated the postwar project of global government, the Church's social teaching may appear committed in principle to a dubious policy. Engaging the encyclical's invocation of the principle of subsidiarity, this article shows that the relationship of global government to the nation-state laid out in Pacem in Terris suffers from an inattention to questions of political form. I argue that through his "science of political forms," Pierre Manent both provides an account of what social teaching would call the propria of the nation-state, and shows why these propria cannot be maintained within global dimensions. Turning to the inter-war encyclicals of Pius XI and Pius XII, I then retrieve an earlier strand of social teaching which, instead of proposing an ambiguous revision of the nation form, offered points of moral orientation for politics by defending a proper love of nation within the structure of what Augustine calls the ordo amoris. The paper thus shows how political philosophy enables a coherent application of the principle of subsidiarity to the nation-state, and why theological insights present within the tradition of social teaching can support the preservation of the valuable propria of the nation form.