Alexis de La Ferrière is a lecturer of sociology at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Human flourishing depends on the interplay of individuation and communion—on the capacity of persons to develop as individual moral agents while doing so through relationships and shared forms of life. A well-ordered society must therefore protect both the freedom of the person and the associational ecology in which persons are formed, collaborate with others, and pursue shared goods. Religious freedom is particularly important in this respect. It protects not only individual conscience but also the institutions, communities, and collective practices through which persons may encounter and inhabit accounts of the good that are inherited or discovered, independent of the state.

A society concerned with these conditions of flourishing must resist both political indifference and political overreach. It cannot simply leave persons to pursue their preferences within a thin framework of non-interference, because flourishing depends on the social and associational conditions in which persons develop. But neither can public authority determine in advance the form flourishing should take. The ultimate fulfillment of the human person lies beyond politics: it belongs to religion and eschatological hope, however one conceives of these, not to the administrative functions of the state. The state or any other coercive authority cannot manufacture transformative flourishing, and any attempt to do so risks reducing inward transformation to external conformity. The proper task of politics is more limited but no less important: to secure the individual and associational conditions in which persons remain capable of genuine transformation.

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