- 4 Constitutions for Deliberative Democracy
How does the liberal constitution cope with self-defeating pluralism? What does
the British/American comparison tell us? In Britain the collectivist polity which
emerged in the postwar years was a marked economic and political success.
Building on prewar foundations, successive governments created a welfare state
and managed economy which provided proximate solutions to some of the worst
problems of industrial capitalism. Although marred by miscalculation and
misfortune, the overall economic record was, in the words of Professor James
E. Meade, ‘‘an outstanding success story for a quarter of a century.’’ The political
success was that the radical program initiated by the Attlee government, although
originally enacted by a partisan majority, was substantially accepted and developed
by the opposition, signifying that this great program of reform had won the assent
of the British nation as a whole. Majoritarianism had been transformed into
convergence. I do not say ‘‘consensus’’ as that might well be taken to mean that
the contending public philosophies of the two main parties, Labour and Conser-
vative, had become identical. That did not happen. DiVerences in values, revolving
around questions of equality vs. inequality and public choice vs. market choice,
persisted, but, so to speak, in the background, capable of forcing their way into
strong, open electoral and parliamentary conXict at a later date. In the meantime,
however, party preferences on both sides had been suYciently transformed to
produce a convergence in policy which led to a mid-century period of relative
party peace.
Convergence is no small achievement. Although majority rule must be accepted
in order to get decisions in elections and legislation, majoritarianism can be
tyrannical. Even if by chance some sort of rotation in oYce gives each minority
the power for a time to rule in its interest, one can hope for a more comprehensive
and stable outcome. In postwar Britain both parties went through phases of
revisionism moving them toward acceptance of the welfare state and a managed
economy. Labour had to give up its old socialist pursuit of equality through
common ownership (read: nationalization) in favor of the redistributive spending
of their massive new social programs, which would now be nourished by an
admittedly capitalistic system embracing private property and moved by
self-interest. For the Conservatives, who inherited their party’s prewar reassertion
of state control, including theWrst steps in nationalization, the great and fateful
concession was the further step of accepting the huge budgetary burdens of the
Keynesian and Beveridgean commitments. That diYculty was eased when
‘‘Mr Butskell’’ appeared, his presence being noted in theEconomistof February
13 , 1954. The new Wscal methodology facilitated not only the revisionist
egalitarianism of Labour, but also the revival of the graded paternalism of the
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