Augustine’s Critiques of Big Government

Augustine says a lot about government, but one comment on the nature of the family actually gives a clear explanation of his first motives. He writes that even a family, ideally the most unified group of people within society is unable to contain their bickering. He uses this to illustrate how deeply broken human nature is, and how even in the best conditions we will turn to selfishness and sin. He then extends this observation to the city: if even the family cannot live peacefully, how much more can we not expect the city to do so. He points to the countless images of human sin and evil within every human city. He recognizes that different clusters of people within a city desire different things that lead them into conflict with one another. Rather than arguing that we just haven’t found the best form of government yet, he actually chooses to state that we should not put our hope in government. Augustine continues this line of thought through much of his writing and makes observations about humanity that show how our evil must be bounded both inside and outside of government and that we cannot look to government to be our ultimate hope. 

Augustine writes that our greatest responsibility is to those near us. Every person cannot have an infinite responsibility to solve the problems of the entire world. This aligns with Hayek’s understanding of the use of knowledge in society. Those far away from a situation cannot understand how best to help. Augustine’s understanding of human limitation allows him to create a form of responsibility that is aligned with our agency. When responsibility, knowledge, and ability to act are not aligned, people naturally feel extremely unhappy. While hundreds of years before Austrian economists, Augustine’s pursuit of the truth, led him to an understanding of the human reach that aligns with Austrian economics. Augustine wouldn’t agree with the Austrians on everything, because most of them were not Christian, or believed that enforcing moral standards in society was counterproductive, but the emphasis on the people proximate to an individual leaves the base layer for a later rejection of centralized control of every element of life.

Augustine saw the effort and loss of life needed to maintain the vast expanse of the Roman empire, and questioned whether it was worth it. He recognized that people from different countries avoided talking to each other, and that some people saw the Roman empire’s cultural and linguistic homogeneity as something that could unify people towards common ends. He saw countless revolutions, border wars, and internal power struggles as resulting from this attempt to centrally control too many cultures with differing visions of the world at the same time. Augustine would question any country that was eager to intervene in foreign affairs while also questioning international organizations like NATO or the world trade organization. He believed that finding common ground for different cultures and nations could be good, but must always be done with a clear understanding of the costs. The natural instinct of large governments is to entrench their power through empire-building or building international coalitions. Augustine‘s comment about the family and the city provides evidence that he would have pushed back on this. Trying to enforce coordination between ever larger-groups of people would only increase the amount of human conflict in the world.

Augustine stood against any big government that became callous to war. While recognizing that poor choices often lead into the situations where war occurs, he still believed that there was such a thing as a just war. Although a war could be just, he believed that only a person who has lost their humanity would go into war without feeling the serious weight of their actions. While he saw war as sometimes necessary, he would advocate for doing almost anything to avoid it. Because he earlier recognized that larger enforced associations have a tendency to create the conditions for war, his aversion to war provides another layer to his critique of big government. Smaller governments have less of a structural incentive to enter into wars, and they’re able to coordinate more effectively, both internally and externally. Although Augustine lived within an empire, he recognized that empire is a less than preferable form of government and it limits human freedom in comparison to a smaller more human form of governance.

Augustine wrote that the purpose of government was to “preserve the natural order and forbid it’s disturbance.” He shares with Hayek a recognition of emergent human group dynamics, and the great mystery that they present to regulators. Rather than trying to reshape human nature, he thought that the role of government should be to punish evil and create the conditions needed for human coordination. There’s debate about what exactly these conditions look like, but his vision of human nature suggests that he would not attempt to build a centralized mechanism for coordination or to use the guise of punishing sin to reshape every part of society. Government must take its rightful place as a mere wall around the garden of human goods. By its very nature, a government that continually grows in size and consumption of GDP must make more choices and disrupt the natural order. While the natural order may not be perfect, it is often the best way for many sinful people to best coordinate with others, and that is something that is very difficult to create from a position of central authority.