One argument you periodically get out of Christian libertarians (of a stripe; there are degrees here) is that government is essentially unjust because it involves the control/domination of some people by others. Augustine is often cited as an authority here, as he says at one point that governance arises out of sin and did not exist before the fall, wherein all people were equal. Curiously, this is Reinhold Niebuhr’s reading of Augustine. I’ve excerpted a piece of a paper of mine below to respond to this odd reading, for the curious.

In his reading of Augustine’s discussion of the justice available to earthly states, Niebuhr demonstrates his attachment to the notion that the virtues expressed in the processes of earthly governance are nevertheless only reflections or translations of Christian virtue. “Augustine’s realism prompts him to challenge Cicero’s conception of a commonwealth as rooted in a ‘compact of justice’,” Niebuhr writes, “Not so, declares Augustine. Commonwealths are bound together by a common love, or collective interest, rather than by a sense of justice; and they could not maintain themselves without the imposition of power.” Niebuhr next quotes Augustine as saying, “‘Without injustice the republic would neither increase nor subsist. The imperial city to which the republic belongs could not rule over provinces without recourse to injustice. For it is unjust for some men to rule over others.’”[1] By Niebuhr’s reading, Augustine does not see states as capable of operating justly in the strictest sense; rather they can only operate with some qualified level of justice because it is inherently unjust for men to have dominion over one another. In other words, Niebuhr takes Augustine to agree with him: whatever virtue governs states must necessarily be qualified, because the “realities of power”[2] do not permit the reign of pure virtues. But this reading of Augustine’s opinion of the expression of Christian virtue in politics as inherently doomed is rather skewed by Niebuhr’s own belief that Christian virtue must be limited to proximal expressions in politics. Given a more sensitive reading, Augustine’s disagreement with Cicero over the nature of the commonwealth rather argues the reverse of what Niebuhr supposes.

Augustine’s engagement with Cicero in book 19 of City of God is complicated; it is not a head-on rebuttal of a supposed claim on Cicero’s part that the commonwealth is rooted in a compact of justice. Rather, Augustine firstly notes that Cicero has agreed with Scipio’s definition of a ‘republic’ in Cicero’s De Republica, with that definition being “a weal of the people.”[3] Augustine then explains that the Roman republic was never actually a true republic by that definition because, by Cicero’s lights, “the people…is an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgement of right” and also “a republic cannot be administered without justice. Where, therefore, there is no true justice there can be no right.”[4] In other words, Augustine has launched a definitional argument against Cicero and Scipio. If a republic relies upon a common assemblage of people specifically bound together by their common acknowledgement of the right and therefore justice, then those bound together by anything other than a genuine acknowledgement of the right and justice are no people at all, but rather “some promiscuous multitude unworthy of the name of people.”[5] For how could the Roman pagans ever have assembled themselves around the acknowledgement of the right and pursuant justice without having first acknowledge what is for Augustine the only true source of rightness, that is, God? Augustine wonders: “where, then, is the justice of man when he deserts the true God and yields himself to impure demons?”[6] Augustine’s turn is an extraordinarily clever one: if a commonwealth is an assemblage of people with a common acknowledgement of the right, then no commonwealth ever existed among the pagan Romans insofar as they never actually acknowledged the right, but rather a pale facsimile. The only right for Augustine is the truth of Christ; no other apprehension, no matter how virtuous in terms of pagan reason, can actually produce justice. Therefore, he concludes, operating from the definitions offered by Cicero’s offering of Scipio, no Roman republic ever really existed.

But that no Roman republic ever really existed due to a pagan misapprehension of the true good does not mean for Augustine that no commonwealth ever could exist or that no republic ever could express a legitimate justice; it merely means that the pagan facsimiles of the past were unsatisfactory. Niebuhr’s reading of Augustine’s challenge to Cicero imagines Augustine’s objection to be rather more prima facie, arguing that a commonwealth could not exist among the Romans because all state power requires the imposition of injustice. But Augustine’s argument is not nearly so categorical; he does not claim that no commonwealth ever could exist, but merely that one did not[7]. This same analysis applies to Niebuhr’s Augustine quotation concerning the relationship of injustice inherent between the imperial city and the republic to which it belongs; Augustine concludes not that it is inherently unjust for some people to be ruled by others – “to some,” he notes, “servitude is useful” – but rather that the imperial Roman state subsisted on injustice because it did not serve God: “there is nothing advantageous to those who live godlessly, as everyone lives who does not serve God but demons, whose wickedness you may measure by their desire to receive the worship of men[8] though they are most impure spirits.”[9] All of these flaws with the Roman state do not necessarily persist in other states; Augustine’s project here is certainly to contradict forms of pagan civic religion which idealized a non-Christian antiquity. The possibility of a commonwealth formed by genuine love is left very much open by Augustine, suggesting again that the potential of Augustine’s political theology is vastly underutilized by Niebuhr.