- 3 The Liberal Constitution
But how well do the institutions of a country perform? Do they meet the liberal
commitment to evoke the powers of the free mind, while also guarding against
its risks? The institution charged with this comprehensive task is commonly
called a constitution. You might say that any government has a constitution,
insofar as it displays some regularity in how it exercises power and what for. And
so the term is sometimes used merely to refer to a frame of government, a
pattern of government, a political system. But constitutionalism means more
than that. It also means that this regularity in behavior is intentional, conforming
to a body of rules which regulate and authorize the rules embodied in the various
subordinate institutions of the political system—in short, an institution of
institutions.
The primary task of the liberal constitution is to foster creative advance.
Encourage that pluralism. Put the First Amendment to work in all spheres.
Cultivate incentives for the assertion of a variety of ideas and interests. Yet this
basic commitment of liberalism has its inherent dangers. They are twofold. First,
that very pluralism may be self-defeating. This consequence, however unintended,
has been denounced by the champions of hierarchy as the inevitable penalty of
democracy and analyzed by modern game theorists as ‘‘the multi-persons’
prisoners dilemma.’’ The vice lies not in the ill-will of the actors, whether
individuals or groups, but in the structure of the situation which, because of its
dispersion of decision-making among so large a number, virtually compels
participants to act against their common long-run interest. The incoherence
and immobilism of so overly responsive a democracy frustrates creative advance.
The liberal constitution averts this risk by its provision for coordination. This
function dominated my study of British and American institutions from the mid-
1940 s to the mid- 1960 s, the main focus being on political parties and party
systems as the institutions which aggregated the pluralistic plenty of the free
mind.
The liberal constitution may open the way to a far greater evil than the incoher-
ence and immobilism of pluralistic stagnation. My generation experienced this
possibility when the chaos of the Great Depression brought on the totalitarian
response. The ideologies of fascism and communism which lay siege to the political
culture of modern freedom were themselves the product of that freedom. What this
attempt of self-destruction intended, and in some places achieved, was a coercive
unity based on race or class, not the social union which fulWlls creative advance in
liberal nationalism. That positive achievement was the main concern of my work
from the mid- 1960 s to the mid- 1990 s.
encounters with modernity 701