Freedom of Association

Freedom of association is important, but this essay strikes me as a typical libertarian/liberal exposition of that freedom. We can agree that there is a freedom of association, or a right of association, which cannot be infringed upon by some [higher] political authority.

Public Discourse: Reviving the Freedom of Association by Nathanael Blake

Blake builds upon this book from Kansas University Press: Why Associations Matter: The Case for First Amendment Pluralism by Luke C. Sheahan.

Associations have rights that are not reducible to the rights of their constituents. Therefore, First Amendment jurisprudence should acknowledge, in addition to the state and the individual, a plurality of rights-bearing associations. And it must recognize that, as they pursue their various purposes, these rights-bearing associations have legitimate authority over their members in ways that the state does not.

Drawing on Nisbet, Sheahan explains that a “group functions meaningfully by being able to uphold the central tenets and enforce the prescribed practices of the group, which are the very conditions under which the individual offers allegiance to the group in the first place.” These tenets and practices will differ greatly from one group to the next, but all associations, by their very nature, must exercise authority over their individual members. The extent of this authority will vary, as will the vigor of enforcement. Some chess clubs are strict, some churches are lax, but every association must be able to enforce compliance with its core function and principles. Even a group as nominally tolerant as the Unitarian Universalists would, presumably, exclude evangelical Christians who kept trying to proselytize during meetings.

Again, what of the power to exclude? Without the power to exclude, there can be no "voluntary association." And I find it dubious that a substantive meaning of voluntary association, one that is tantamount to a political community, can be read into the First Amendment, and it shouldn't be. Blake himself limits his discussion to "voluntary associations," like clubs or churches, but in his attempt to reconcile the possibility of community with the state (or a centralized National Government), but his weaker sense of community presupposes the weak state of voluntary associations as being normative. Why should a religious community not have the means to discipline its members without resorting to the state and its courts? Because Blake agrees that the state has a monopoly on coercion or violence, and he is mistaken that this should be normative. Hence he thinks that a member who doesn't play by the rules can just be expelled and allowed to find his fulfillment in some other group. His voluntary associations can be permitted to exist so long as the wider social arrangement of atomized mobile individuals is left untouched, and voluntary associations are subject to the power of the state or the oligarchy.

The authority of voluntary social groups is not like that of the state, which carries with it the power of coercion. Instead, the former “authority is consensual, interactive, and grounded in a variety of associational locations. Consent is essential to the exercise of authority.” Voluntary associations exist through the consent of their members, who may attempt to change those associations if they are unhappy. But in the end an individual who chafes at the rules of a group and the authority that its leaders exercise can leave. The individual’s right to exit is “an absolute check on any illegitimate exercise of authority by anyone in the group hierarchy.”

This is not to say that leaving is always easy—it is often difficult to abandon a group with which one has identified and worked. But the intensity of such attachments also makes associations indispensable to human flourishing. A life of loose attachments to bland associations that lack real distinctions or principles would be insipid. Human flourishing requires life in a community. Community life, in turn, requires particularity and exclusivity—this good rather than that, these beliefs and practices rather than those. The communities with which we identify offer fellowship in a shared way of life.

Coercion in the case of the state is also linked to the threat of punishment for failure in performing one's duties or malfeasance. A political community is consensual, to a point, in so far as members should be free to leave if they disagree with the community and their debts to the community have been forgiven or otherwise dismissed or excused. (Arguably the debts of a member to the community can never be satisfied fully.)

Moreover, there is a limit to the function of consent in the legitimate exercise of authority - in so far as a member or a family has been living as a part of a community, they have already consented. Consent is not as important as a just distribution of political authority, which includes a participation by all men who are qualified, though their participation may differ or be unequal in accordance with differences in virtue. When there is a lack of just distribution, it can be said that there is a violation or absence of consent. Consent is not as important as solidarity, mutual trust and accountability, and having some participation in political authority.

What is to be done about those who are not qualified in whatsoever manner to participate in political rule? Is it possible for someone to reach that state of character without some sort of intervention by his family or the community? I am thinking here specifically of abuse or negligence of children by their parents. While moral education starts first with the family, the community also has a role. It is questionable whether a community in which families live far apart and have little interaction can be said to be a community. Now it may be possible that someone grows up to be vicious despite the best efforts of his parents and community, though I have difficult imagining how this could be so. But if he is a danger to the well-being of the community, he may be expelled.

Blake also ignores the natural bases for identity and along with those the possibility of a community being closed to people who don't share that identity. A community may have an obligation to offer hospitality to one who asks for it, but it has no such obligation to make such a person a member of their community.


Related:
RJ Snell: Alone Together, or Just Alone? Social Conservatives Are Right