The Polycentric Republic: A Book Against Authoritarians

The Polycentric Republic: A Theory of Civil Order for Free and Diverse Societies, by David Thunder (Routledge, 220 pp., $43.99)

“The modern sovereign state, though it may not exercise perfectly supreme or comprehensive control over the civil order, is animated by a deeply problematic ideology of order that drives officials to exert disproportionate influence over the citizens and associations within their orbit.” With these words, David Thunder concludes his elegant book The Polycentric Republic: A Theory of Civil Order for Free and Diverse Societies, which won the Joseph Ratzinger Vatican Foundation’s 2025 Open Reason Prize this September at the Holy See. The book sketches Thunder’s vision of a republic that values pluralism and categorically rejects monism—the idea that the state can resolve irreducible civil pluralism in the name of sovereignty.

Polycentrism is basically another term for the idea of “plurarchy,” developed by the Italian thinker Luigi Sturzo in 1935 during his exile in London. Sturzo described polycentrism-plurarchy as “the formation of different centers of social coexistence, with their own autonomy and mutual contact, sometimes tolerant, sometimes combative.” Civil society is essential to the polycentric republic, serving as a bulwark against absolutist claims and cultivating a critical mindset that disposes citizens to resist any faction’s hegemonic ambitions.

Civil society consists of various territorial and non-territorial communities, social formations, and economic, social, and religious entities. If we treat these groups as radically and intractably differentiated, we see the need for both “horizontal” and “vertical” forms of subsidiarity. “Horizontal subsidiarity”—the principle under which the state and other governing bodies encourage the autonomous initiative of citizens to carry out activities of general interest—ensures a balanced distribution of tasks and responsibilities between state and private entities. “Vertical subsidiarity”—the principle that administrative functions should be conducted at the level of government (municipal) closest to citizens—properly allocates powers and functions among the different territorial levels of state administration. Together, these forms of subsidiarity offer a path for harmonizing interests and integrating government with governance, grounded in a bottom-up dynamic.

Thunder criticizes the modern idea of the state—or, at least, its most ideological expression, the totalitarian state. At the heart of this modern conception of political authority is a presumed right of rulers to administer a comprehensive civil power. Such a totalitarian or “monistic” state acknowledges no reality that cannot be traced back to itself, subsumes all of civil society, and proclaims its own “sovereignty” in the name of the “people.”

To counter this ideology, Thunder maintains, one must fundamentally challenge the narrative that produced it: social contract theory, the notion that social order arises from a contract among perfectly free and equal individuals. This idea underestimates people’s rootedness in associations and nonstate bodies and wrongly treats civil society as irrelevant to the formation of political order and the distribution of power.

Rooting the state’s authority exclusively in the will of the “people”—understood as a shapeless mass of isolated and uncommunicative individuals—eliminates the power of intermediate bodies, what Edmund Burke called “little platoons.” These bodies constitute civil society, where human personality is formed. Denying their existence strengthens the state’s ambition to operate without constraint in the name of the “sovereign people.”

When intermediate bodies are excluded from the narrative of how authority is formed in democratic societies, Thunder says, they cannot effectively claim freedom and autonomy for the people within them. Their claims inevitably collide with those of the state—an entity as artificial as it is powerful that ostensibly operates in the name of the “sovereign people” but in practice serves the interests of the elite in power. Thunder contends that the most troubling aspect of the state paradigm, rooted in social contract theory, is not merely that the state accumulates excessive power over its citizens, but that it is inherently unable to recognize the sources of autonomy and the legitimate claims arising from the many intermediate groups under its authority.

Thunder’s book aims to achieve three objectives. First, it seeks to highlight the damage caused by the notion of sovereignty as outlined above; second, it seeks to develop a theory of civil order that favors the lives of individuals, the sole holders of status publicus (public condition), in their spontaneous communities: family, business, school, university, municipality; finally, from this theoretical perspective, it tries to enrich the body of federalist theories, implementing them through the use of nonterritorial associations. In demonstrating the weakness of a paradigm based on centralized power management—a weakness increasingly evident when we consider the degree of complexity of civil society—Thunder achieves these objectives.

Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre, F. A. Hayek, and Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, Thunder sets his polycentric republic against every form of centralism. Subsidiarity governance—entrusting tasks and decisions to the most appropriate level of government or organization—gives citizens a real share in authority by letting them take part in decisions that shape their lives. The principle of subsidiarity offers a way to order and manage the many institutional centers that no modern society can reduce to one. Above all, it stands against monism—the belief that a single faction, convinced of its own truth, can claim the power to bend competing interests into a uniform whole.

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