|
|
||
 |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||
|
Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
of Liberty Endure in a Liberal Democracy? by George Irbe
Introduction For many years I have been nagged by the same concern that has preoccupied Friedrich A. Hayek for decades. It is the same concern which was also voiced by James Madison, a prominent member in the group of men who drafted the American Constitution; Hayek considers James Madison to have been philosophically a genuine "classical liberal." Madison wrote: "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." It is the part about obliging government to control itself that has always been an ever-present problem in societies that label themselves as democratic and are governed according to rules set out in a written constitution. I have been a fan of Hayek for decades; my devotion to him began with the reading of The Road to Serfdom, and my absorption of his ideas continued with the trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty (hereafter abbreviated as LLL). I have had occasion to consult LLL numerous times throughout the last twenty years, and make copious use of it in this essay. However, when I decided to gain a deeper understanding of the reasons why the citizens of democracies, old or new, have invariably failed to emplace inviolable and durable constitutional controls on the governments which they have chosen to rule over them, I felt I should also read Hayek's other major work, The Constitution of Liberty (hereafter abbreviated as CL), which he had written some thirteen years before the LLL trilogy. I have found that The Constitution of Liberty contains much useful knowledge. It presents an excellent comprehensive history of the evolution of the ideals of liberty under the rule of law since ancient times. The history provides the reader with invaluable background information on the subject and instills an appreciation of the sacrifice of blood and treasure that men have expended through the ages in order to secure those selfsame ideals of individual liberty. Turning to constitutional democracies of modern times, Hayek compares the different philosophical underpinnings of the two basic systems -- the Anglo-Saxon and the French -- upon which modern democracies have been founded. In The Constitution of Liberty I also learned about the Englishmen who came to be known as the "Whigs." These men carried on a revolution against the monarchy, in a more prudent and much less apocalyptic fashion than did their counterparts in France a hundred years later. The English revolution lasted about 50 years (approximately from 1640 to 1690). The culminating event of it is known as the "Glorious Revolution of 1688." To put it briefly, this revolution was the first struggle in modern times with the same ages-old problem of how to oblige government to control itself. Those Englishmen fought in order to secure what Hayek calls the "Old Whig" ideals of liberty under the rule of law. It was in The Constitution of Liberty that I first encountered Hayek's term "Old Whigs," and his reference to their political principles as "ideals," and their party as the "party of liberty." Hayek's terminology inspired me to construct a most fitting (at least in my opinion) title for this essay. I have deliberately crafted the title in the form of a question that simultaneously conveys the hint that no popular assent of such constitutional measures has ever been sustained for long, and is highly unlikely to be sustained in the future. I also deliberately used the word "Ideals" in the title rather than, say, "principles," or "ideas," because of its weightier significance. By definition, "Ideals" are objectives that we approach asymptotically, but never attain completely. What are the "Old Whig" Ideals? The "Old Whig" ideals of liberty are not listed, as such, in any one single document. Hayek devotes several pages in CL, 11, 3 -- 6, describing their development. He writes,
It became generally recognized that for individual liberty to be preserved it was of the greatest importance that arbitrary actions by government should be prevented. During the revolutionary decades it also came to be recognized, from the events that transpired in the interim, that Parliament was apt to act just as arbitrarily as the king, and that whether or not an action was arbitrary depended not on the source of the authority but on whether it was in conformity with pre-existing general principles of law. The governing principle throughout was that not the king, but the Law should rule. [see CL, 11, 4] The spirit of the times in England is illustrated by a formal declaration of constitutional principles by Parliament, in 1660:
Hayek considers John Locke to be the most influential political philosopher of the English revolution and Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government as outstanding in its lasting influence on the development of "Old Whig" political ideals. He cites at length from the Second Treatise (reference is to the numbered sections in the Treatise):
It can be fairly said that in the above paragraph Hayek has achieved a comprehensive synopsis of John Locke's ideas of how free men should govern themselves. The "Old Whigs" incorporated most of Locke's ideas into their assertions of what a government under the rule of law should and should not do. Elsewhere, Hayek provides a general statement which is useful in that it lists, very concisely, the core values of "Old Whig" ideals:
It can be said, then, that the "Old Whig" ideals have one over-riding theme which can be expressed as: "Rule of Law under a government that is itself restrained by Rule of Law". I have intentionally capitalized "Rule" and "Law" in this statement; the concept of "Rule of Law", applicable to citizen and government, coursed through all of the several reforms instituted during the 50 years of revolutionary change in England. The vulnerability of "Old Whig" Ideals We must turn next to the "villains of the piece" -- i.e., the baser desires in human nature. A living democracy can be likened to a biological organism: Just as there are certain viruses, endemic to a biological organism from birth, which constantly fight the body's immune system until death, so there appear to be the "viruses" born of the baser side of human desires, which have been endemic in democratic politics since time immemorial, and which have never ceased to attack, weaken, and destroy the "Old Whig" ideals that constitute the backbone of a liberal democracy. To carry this analogy one step further: men are still searching for the constitutional constructs - the political "antibodies" -- such that would withstand all attacks by the malevolent political viruses, born of the baser human desires and masquerading as beneficial agents of democracy, and thus ensure that the constitution could never be compromised for the sake of a passing convenience. The ideals and hopes of the men of the "Glorious Revolution of 1688" were soon enough confronted by that old nemesis -- arbitrariness -- which, in accordance with human nature, sooner rather than later, creeps like a thief into a government, be it constitutional or autocratic, be it by king or by Parliament. Only seventy-four years after the "Glorious Revolution,"
Further on, Hayek remarks rather sarcastically:
However, it should be noted that the British Parliament was never subjected to a formal written constitution, whereas other parliamentary systems which have copied the British model usually function, at least in theory, under written constitutional restraints. One must also remember that Hayek wrote most of his political works during the politically darkest decades following World War II, when liberty and liberal democracy were in retreat world-wide, and communism, socialism, and welfare-statism seemed to be unstoppable forces. The serious and immediate totalitarian threats to democracy and individual liberty were, rightly so, of paramount concern to Hayek when he wrote The Road to Serfdom, The Constitution of Liberty, and the trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty. LLL was written in 1973, at the height of Soviet expansion and world-wide proliferation of communist "peoples democracies." Hayek makes a remark about existing democracies of the day which is particularly fitting to the so-called democracies of the Soviet sphere:
Of course, hard-core totalitarian socialism has lost much of its allure since the collapse of the Soviet Union and poses little danger to democracies, at least for the time being. It does look like communism has been consigned "to the ash-heap of history" (to use a popular expression). However, Hayek's over-riding objective has always been much broader than merely confronting the socialist threat to democracy; rather, his has been a search for effective institutional safeguards against the subtle, internally-generated forces of decomposition that have historically plagued democracies and that have, if anything, become stronger in our modern-day welfare-state era. Hayek finds that the history of modern-day democracies and the trends that they currently exhibit, leave little reason for hoping that what we call the "Old Whig" ideals of liberty stand a chance of being preserved in the future. Hayek states in the very first paragraph of the LLL trilogy:
Perhaps intentionally, to make the point that individual liberty and constitutionalism need not necessarily be reserved solely for democratic systems, Hayek avoids using the word "democratic" in this the opening declaration in his seminal work. Hayek seems to hint that securing individual liberty by constitutions has failed, irrespective of the form of government under which it may have been tried. Hayek makes no secret of his distaste for a certain kind of democratic government, as in the following quotes:
That a democracy can degenerate into tyrannical forms was already well known to the ancient Greeks; Hayek was also well aware of the Greek experience which was recounted by Aristotle. Aristotle's dissertation on the five forms of democracy is, in my opinion, so excellent that I feel compelled to reproduce it here in order to inform, or refresh, as the case may be, the reader's awareness of it. The following passage is taken from Aristotle's Politics, Book IV, Chapter 4, translation by Benjamin Jowett:
It is quite plain to see how much alike are the standards of Aristotle's first (and therefore presumably deemed by him the best) form of democracy and Hayek's ideal classical liberal one. Aristotle says that the first form of democracy is "based strictly on equality" and in such a democracy "the law says that it is just for the poor to have no more advantage than the rich; and that neither should be masters, but both equal." Equally similar are Hayek's and Aristotle's democracies that have gone bad; obviously, the fifth (degenerate) form of democracy had evolved in some of the Greek city states often enough by the time Aristotle wrote his Politics, some 2,500 years ago, so that he could describe the reasons that bring about the degeneration in some detail. According to Aristotle, in these degenerate democracies 'not the law, but the multitude, have the supreme power, and supersede the law by their decrees,' and 'the people becomes a monarch, and . . . have the power in their hands, not as individuals, but collectively.' 'This sort of democracy . . . is no longer under the control of law,' and 'the decrees of the demos correspond to the edicts of the tyrant.' The demagogues hold sway in such democracies because the people have unlimited power, and the demagogues persuade the people how to vote. Such democracies no longer deserve to be called constitutional, 'for where the laws have no authority, there is no constitution. The law ought to be supreme over all,' and 'the sort of system in which all things are regulated by decrees is clearly not even a democracy in the true sense of the word.' It must be by design that in the case of the first four forms of democracy Aristotle repeats 'the law is supreme.' He obviously wants to emphasize the point that adherence or non-adherence to the rule of law in a society is the paramount criterion by which one judges whether that society is a constitutional democracy or simply another form of tyranny. It was the same criterion by which the "Old Whigs" judged their government, first under the monarch, later under Parliament, and by which Hayek likewise judges (and finds wanting) our modern-day democracies, reflected in the following comments:
In the above, Hayek pretty well echoes what Aristotle says about the weaknesses that democracies are prone to. It appears, then, that things have not changed much since the time of Aristotle; men have yet to come up with a durable constitutional solution of how to ensure that those who hold power do not trespass laws that protect the liberty of all individuals, regardless of wealth or social status. |
|
Enrich your life with a book about politics and current events... Enrich your political & social life with a politics or news magazine... |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
[Homepage] [Newsletter] [Search] [Support the Academy] [Link to Us] [Contact the Academy] [Citing Articles from Our Website] [Privacy Policy & Disclaimer]
Copyright 1998-99, 2000-01, & 2002-03 by The Radical Academy. All Rights Reserved.