Chapter V of Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli Tutti. On Fraternity and Social Friendship is dedicated to fraternity as a political technique aimed at achieving social friendship, which is capable of constructively and creatively managing conflicts within societies. Democracies that emerged from the two great modern revolutions are essentially based on the combination of freedom and equality, which were exclusive rights of the nascent commercial and entrepreneurial bourgeois classes. Therefore, fraternity seems to be the great forgotten of the Western democratic experiment.
Furthermore, equality and freedom are individual rights that have shaped an insular subject without social ties or passions. Fraternity, on the other hand, is directed at the collective, allowing us to maintain the meaning of the values expressed by freedom and equality (Rawls). The rediscovery of fraternity in the late modern period, intended as a corrective to the domination of the free and equal who have (and therefore are bearer of rights) over those who have less or nothing, has clashed with the difficulty of incorporating it into the legal and political systems typical of modernity.
According to Francis, today’s neo-liberal societies, subject to the techno-financial injunction of the new digital powers, «speak of respect for freedom, but without roots in a shared narrative» (FT 163). In Pope Francis’s thought, the theme of the «common» refers to the category of people that lies at the heart of his ecclesial and social vision. This category of people is often criticized and frequently misunderstood. By it, Francis means that if «society is more than a mere aggregate of individuals, the term “people” proves necessary» (FT 157). In other words, social bonds, human relationships, and common interactions are not mere accidents among subjects who are perfectly self-sufficient. The personal character of human beings is generated precisely because of their equally original «common» being—and therefore, they are the bearers of rights that exceed the purely individual sphere.
For Pope Francis, the stability of democratic living together depends on the political capacity to reactivate its popular and fraternal dimensions. This reactivation implies much more than a simple adjustment to the democratic order produced by Western modernity because it is based on fraternity as operative agency for freedom and equality.
Being part of a people—that is, being more than an isolated individual—means being «part of a common identity» (open and dynamic), made up of social and cultural bonds that are ready to expand thanks to encounters with the various cultural practices common to all of humanity. «This», writes Pope Francis, «is not something automatic, but rather a slow, difficult process… of advancing towards a common project» (FT 158).
Linking fraternity to the cultural dynamics of a people in order to develop a shared project and reaching a common goal means understanding fraternity as a «fraternity of purpose» — that is, the fraternity resulting from shared practices of the social body that effectively promote the well-being of all involved.
According to Pope Francis, a people’s cultural narrative implies an open dimension of practices leading «to a new synthesis through its ability to welcome differences» (FT 160). Thus understood, the fraternal social body does not close in on itself and wear itself out in internal conflict, but rather, it is open to the decentralized hospitality that the polyhedron represents. According to Pope Francis, the polyhedron is an image of a society in which every voice is heard and every conception of life finds its place—without totalization, but in interconnection with other visions and styles of human life (cf. FT 190).
«The polyhedron reflects the confluence of all parts, each of which preserves its distinctiveness. It is the union of all peoples who, in the universal order, preserve their peculiarities. It is the convergence of peoples who, within the universal order, maintain their own individuality; it is the sum total of persons within a society which pursues the common good, which truly has a place for everyone» (Evangelii Gaudium 236). By maintaining these parts, the polyhedron neither denies social antagonism nor seeks to nullify the conflicts that constitute human society. Rather, it channels these forces into constructive processes of the «common» that concern everyone. The polyhedron does this because it is imbued with the awareness that uniformity leads us to «cultural devouring one another» (FT 191).
Fraternity, as a hospitable socio-political force of the many, implies conflict among narratives. It asks these narratives to recognize their partiality in order to transform this antagonism into the fabric of living together, without eliminating the originality of each narrative. Today, democracy urgently needs this fraternal force to avoid the authoritarian temptation of a definitive solution to conflict by locating the negative in a social group or political actor. Eliminating this group or actor would supposedly guarantee a society without conflict (made only by equals subject to the messianic sameness of the last days’ king).
Democracy’s originality lies in its dissolution of the link between power and a body (that of the king, tyrant, or social group). This leaves the site of power empty: it can be only temporarily occupied, yet it cannot be definitively occupied. From this point of view, Christianity is the most radical form of democracy because, with the death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s place and power are not only unincorporable by any worldly power but also it cannot never be occupied, even only temporarily. Therefore, fidelity to democracy means enacting policies that preserve the empty site of power while temporarily occupying it. In other words, one should inhabit it not as one’s own property, but as the «common» that is unavailable to the will to power of some over others.
From this perspective, the polyhedron, as a confluence of parts that prevents totalization and disposes them to work together to create a common narrative, takes on an exquisitely political meaning in the sense of Simon Critchely’s true democracy. True democracy consists of «working together to control the place from which one speaks and acts, working together in a situation as a political subject committed to a plan, place, space, process, or event. It is a question of the political articulation of these spaces into a common front.»
Politics of Fraternity and Constitutionalism Realized
Politics of fraternity, when understood in this way, are often derided and deemed impossible in the name of Realpolitik and a sort of naturalization of the economic reasons’ hegemony over political practices. Today, the modern bourgeoisie’s heirs affirm the impossibility of a second «democratic revolution» (Yannis Stavrakakis), which they were once the main architects of. Even Realpolitik was sometimes forced to bow to the force of the politics of fraternity.
The birth of the Italian Republic is due to the confluence of various political and cultural practices that collaborated to draft the Constitution as a shared founding narrative. Today, it would be interesting and politically necessary to read the works of the Constituent Assembly (1946–1948) through the lens of the politics of fraternity. This would reveal a vision capable of reactivating the best of the democratic tradition and leading to true democracy, which is attested in its partial implementations but «it is always yet to come» (Jacques Derrida).
Catholic jurists’ contribution to the Constitution, particularly the «fundamental principles» in the first twelve articles, seems to be one of the highest achievements of the “better politics” Pope Francis describes in Fratelli Tutti. With great political intelligence, they combined the power of fraternity with the reasons of Realpolitik.
In the Constituent Assembly, different political actors collaborated to draft a constitution faithful to the country’s social reality and capable of transforming the social body’s political antagonism into a constructive element of Italian citizenship. Catholics participated in this process not by seeking to fill the entire legal space with Catholic doctrine but by introducing the guidelines of a fraternal humanism rooted in the Gospel. They worked together with other cultural and political traditions. The aim was to establish the Republic as a concrete unity not imposed from above; therefore, its constitutional charter had to reflect the existing connections within Italian society. Giorgio La Pira pointed out three architectural principles of the Constitution that were drawn from Italian society, not created in a laboratory: personalism, organicism, and pluralism. Consensus could be gathered around these principles, which were placed as the cornerstones of the Constitution being drafted.
Aldo Moro argued that it was important to explicitly state the ideological reference point common to the entire Assembly and its political constituents to avoid a new totalitarianism and give the new Republic an anti-fascist foundation. «This basic ideological substratum, on which all of us who believe in democracy can agree, is precisely linked to our common opposition to the long fascist oppression of the values of personality and social solidarity.» Moro went on to say that the new Constitution was born from the rejection of fascism to affirm the «supreme values of human dignity and social life.» Here, Moro highlights the constitutive link between the originality of human existence and its practice within social bodies, including the state.
Rejecting fascism also meant leaving behind a certain conception of the state, as La Pira repeatedly emphasized in both the subcommittee and the General Assembly. The goal was to create a new state that, through the primacy of the Constitution, would prevent regression into totalitarianism and authoritarianism. «These principles [later expressed in the first twelve articles] are the cornerstone of our Constitution. Truly, creating a constitution means crystallizing the dominant ideas of a civilization, expressing the formula for coexistence, and establishing the guiding principles for all future state activity. This immutability has been authoritatively affirmed by a master such as Congressman Calamandrei and can be given tangible expression by placing these principles in the Constitution as rules of law, making them superior to and unattainable by ordinary law. The legal effect is to bind the legislator and require future legislators to adhere to these supreme criteria, which are permanently valid. This establishes the Constitution’s superiority over ephemeral parliamentary majorities» (Aldo Moro).
This insight shaped not only the new Italian state but also its character as a constitutional state, preserving its fundamental principles not only from ephemeral parliamentary majorities but also from an understanding of democracy as merely the will of the people. Thus, the Constitution asks every generation of the Italian people, as their first political task, to find a new «formula for coexistence» amid historical contingencies — that is, to exercise social antagonism within the constitutional framework of fraternity policies.
Thus, the conception of the new Italian state was conceived in this manner, opposing the view that saw the state as «the only substantial unity» and not a relational unity. According to La Pira, this Hegelian state makes it impossible to affirm the anteriority of the human person to the state itself. Therefore, the human person is subject to the state in terms of its rights, which are merely reflections conferred by the state’s power and can be revoked at any time. La Pira emphasized that this state «eliminates human freedom at its root» and reduces people to means at the disposal of the state’s will. Therefore, it was necessary to pursue the idea of the state as «an essential, fundamental form of human solidarity» (Aldo Moro).
In search of a term capable of expressing the fundamental rights of the human person as original rights, not derived or conferred, La Pira drew on the anthropology of the great Scholastic tradition. This tradition allows us to affirm the «transcendent value of the human person over the social body.» Only in this way can we affirm rights that are original to the person, prior to the state, which will be called upon to recognize and protect them. It should be noted that Catholic personalism is not monadic individualism, a concept to which modern thinking about the subject tends to lead. In the same speech to the General Assembly, La Pira affirmed this when he recalled the Aquinas’ and scholasticism’s notion that the person is simultaneously in «real relationship with others» — that is, the person is inherently relational and this relationality is not dependent on the individual’s will and is organically articulated in social bodies (including the state).
In fact, in the Summa contra Gentiles, Thomas offers an even stronger notion of relationality: the subsistent relationship, which causes the subject to exist. This real/subsistent relationship links the human person to the social body as well as to the intermediate bodies in which his or her personality develops organically. La Pira’s strong demand for the inclusion of social rights in the Italian Constitution indicates that this is the horizon he intended.
This marks a shift from the democratic monism of modern American and French constitutionalism to the realm of social constitutionalism characteristic of the Italian Republic and other post-World War II constitutions. La Pira asks, «Should we limit ourselves to affirming the natural rights of equality and freedom (civil and political) enshrined in the American and French constitutions? Or should we also affirm the social rights that are just as essential to the human person as the former? The answer is clear: the serious gap found in previous constitutions must be eliminated. Without the protection of social rights—the right to work, to rest, to assistance, etc.—the freedom and independence of the individual are not effectively guaranteed» (Giorgio La Pira). Without the recognition of social rights, individual rights can only be affirmed in theory and not enjoyed in practice by citizens of the Italian Republic.
According to La Pira, constitutionally protecting social rights implies «structural changes in legal, economic, and political systems […] These social changes — which are required by a substantially democratic conception of the state — will allow for the implementation of social rights and thus make the autonomy and independence of the individual, including political independence, effective.»
Therefore, there is an organic relationship between the human person and the social body. La Pira developed the idea of introducing a reference to intermediate bodies into the Italian Constitution based on this relationship. He pleaded the case of «Accepting the organic conception of society, which sees natural communities organically and progressively interposed between individuals and the state, through which human personality develops in an orderly manner. So that the integral system of personal rights must also include the essential rights of these natural communities.»
La Pira returned to this matter at the General Assembly in March 1947. Moro referred directly to La Pira’s speech to reaffirm the «concept of social and legal pluralism» that would characterize the nascent Italian Republic. According to Moro, La Pira «clarified this characteristic view of society, which is neither unique nor monopolized by the state, but rather unfolds freely and in various unpredictable forms, especially in those fundamental forms that most fully correspond to the needs of the human personality. It is the dignity of the person considered in the social formations in which he or she expresses and fulfills himself or herself […] . The human person, the family, and other free social formations have their own consistency, even when they develop with the cooperation of society. There is no truly free and democratic state policy that can ignore the fundamental and delicate problem of establishing boundaries, areas of respect, and connections between personalities and social formations, on the one hand, and the state, on the other. I insist on this point of connections because when we speak of the autonomy of the human person, we are clearly not referring to a person isolated in selfishness and closed off from the world. We do not intend to attribute to them an autonomy that represents splendid isolation. We want connections; we want these realities to converge, while respecting each other, into a necessary social solidarity.»
Pope Francis’s vision of fraternity policies in Fratelli Tutti seems to be an invitation to renew, dealing today with profoundly changed geopolitical contexts, the practices bequeathed to us by the Italian constituents who established the twelve principles of the constitutional framework. Francis clearly understands the need to create a new political subject that can conceive the connections Aldo Moro spoke of through shared fraternal practices and imagine a world order that honors the original dignity of every human being, which is both individual and social. «Good politics will seek ways of building communities at every level of social life, in order to recalibrate and reorient globalization and thus avoid its disruptive effects» (FT 182).
I owe to my students in Reggio Emilia the insight into the relation between politics of fraternity and constitutionalism. This article brings together the work we have done on this topic.
