From the last period of the XIXth Century on, state intervention has been needed to compensate for the general disregard for justice and human solidarity that prevailed during the early phases of the industrial revolution. State legislation with regard to employment and labor is in itself a requirement of the common good. And without the power of the State – the democratic Sstate – how could a free body politic resist the pressure or the aggression of the totalitarian States? The growth of the State, in modern centuries, as a rational or juridical machine and with regard to its inner constitutive system of law and power, its unity, its discipline; the growth of the State, in the present century, as a technical machine and with regard to it’s law-making, supervising, and organizing functions in social and economic life, are in themselves part of the normal progress.
Such progress has been entirely corrupted in totalitarian States. It remains normal progress, though subject to many risks, in democratic States, especially as regards the development of social justice.
We may dislike the State machinery; I do not like it. Yet many things we do not like are necessary, not only in fact, but by right. On the one hand, the primary reason for which men, united in a political society, need the State, is the order of justice. On the other hand, social justice is the crucial need of modern societies. As a result, the primary duty of the modern State is the enforcement of social justice.
Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1998), 19-20.
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