My name is Jason
Canon from IHS, welcome.
Our lecturer is Jacob T. Levy,
and he is the Tomlinson professor
of political theory at McGill University.
He's the author
of the books, "The
Multiculturalism of Fear"
and "Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom",
as well as numerous
articles in the academic
and popular press, he's
the political theory editor
for "The Journal of Politics"
and his own research
is on federalism, freedom of
association, indigenous peoples,
constitutional theory, and
enlightenment political thought.
And I love this note, it's been 30 years
since his first IHS summer seminar.
This lecture, his first
of three at this seminar
is titled "The Crisis of
Constitutional Democracy,"
and Professor Levy, I'll
hand it over to you.
- Thank you very much, Jason,
and thank you to all of you
whom I cannot see in
this new awkward format
but I'll do my best to speak
to you as if you're there.
My talk today is not going
to be the presentation
of something like a
liberal theory of politics
or liberal theory of government.
It's rather going to address
some combination of theoretical
and historical issues in
the government and politics
of liberal societies.
And it's partly a talk about questions
that we've learned to ask, not
questions that we've learned
how to answer yet and
ways in which traditional
inherited theoretical rules about what
a system of government for
free society could look like
have proven to be
unsatisfactory and have left us
with challenges that we
don't yet really know
completely how to address.
Now academics like to laugh
when a student begins a paper
by talking about
something that's been true
since the dawn of time and
then political theorists
always turn around and
say, well, since Greece,
that's where I'm going to start.
Well since Greece, the
ancient Greeks developed ideas
about what kinds of governing
options were available,
that have given us vocabularies
that we use to this day,
their central distinctions were
among government by the few,
the one or the many.
In the most traditional
version of that distinction
between the many democracy,
the few aristocracy
and the one monarchy.
These were all viable positions
among the Greek City states.
In the world of (mumbles)
there were cities
that were governed as democracies
that is ruled by the many
from among the free citizens
and the free citizens
wasn't everyone, it didn't include women
and did it include foreigners,
it didn't include slaves,
but it included a great many people,
a much larger proportion of
the population then was true
in the systems that called
themselves aristocracies
to say nothing of those that
called themselves monarchies
rule by the few understood
normally to mean the wealthy
or the one understood
to be the most powerful.
Ancient Greek politics was
marked by serious ideological
and political conflict
among would be democrats
would be aristocrats
and would be monarchs.
There was ideological conflict
among the Greek city states
famously between Athens
and its allies and Sparta
and its allies and there was
serious ideological conflict
within the Greek city states.
Many of which at one time or
another fell into civil war
between especially advocates of democracy
and advocates of aristocracy.
Now all of these were
understood as ways of organizing
a whole political system.
When the democrats won
a fight in one of these
ancient Greek city states
that wasn't understood to be
one party taking power for awhile.
It was understood to
be complete reformation
of the governing system of that city.
So while yes, the Democrats
as a group were most often
in control in ancient
Athens in particular,
Athens was also understood
to be a democracy
and those two thoughts were
not kept neatly distinct.
There was no way within democratic Athens
for the aristocrats to
sometimes take power
and then leave it again.
For the aristocrats state
power was to transform
Athens into an aristocracy.
Now, when the ancient Greek
political philosophers
began their serious work of
thinking about the question,
what form of government is best?
They did a couple of things.
One is they introduced new distinctions
besides the distinction
among the one, the few
and the many that was
common in political practice
and public political debate.
They introduced more or less distinction
between those versions when they're good
and those versions when they're bad.
There was rule by the
one, the few and the many
when conducted according to
law and government by the one,
the few and the many
when conducted lawlessly,
or there were other
versions of characterizing
that good, bad distinction.
In the most famous version
of that distinction
we saw in Aristotle, monarchy
that is lawful rule by one,
distinguished from tyranny that is lawless
or despotic rule by one.
Aristocracy, lawful rule by the
few, and here it's important
that the few mean the excellent Aristotle
literally means the
excellent and oligarchy,
rule by the rich, which tended
to be lawless and despotic.
The bad law was rule by many,
well (mumbles) democracy.
And then there was a hypothesized form
of good rule by the many,
lawful, reasonable, stable,
rule by the many.
This Aristotle gave the name,
politeia, polity, which
was also as he noted
the generic name for the
Greek city states themselves.
And what was also not
neatly distinguishable
from the idea already in common parlance
of mixing the various kinds of government.
Aristotle became one of the originators
in Western philosophy of the idea
that the best form of government
would be one that mixed
in some under specified
way, rule by the many,
the few and the one.
The general population
would be able to signal
popular acceptance.
The few, the excellent
would be able to reach
actual governing decisions
when those were difficult to reach.
And the one, the monarch
could lend unity and stability
and reach urgent decisions
when urgent decisions were needed.
That left behind a vocabulary
that outlived the era
of the ancient Greek
city states themselves,
and that we have with us to this day.
We no longer talk very much about politeia
but democracy, aristocracy, oligarchy,
those are all still words in common use.
Monarchy, tyranny, those
are words that we use
and politeia gave way to
something like constitutional.
Constitution not a Greek word,
constitution is a Roman
word, a Latin word.
And when the ancient Romans took on much
of the philosophical work and the history
of the Greek city States
that they encountered
when they conquered Greece and
absorbed its cultural legacy,
the Romans came to see their
own inherited governing order,
one that they had developed
piecemeal and through struggle,
not by conscious design.
but again, to understand
their own political order
as being a mixed regime,
one that included the
many, the few and the one.
The Roman Republic had
been founded when the few,
the aristocrats, the
wealthy military elite
overthrew a monarchy that they accused
of behaving lawlessly.
They replaced the monarchy, the one,
with decision making power by two.
Two people who would jointly
reach the key decisions
over the course of a year, and
then would step down again.
They sought to limit the power date
associated with the
monarchy and so they created
a two person limited
term substitute for it.
After not too many decades,
the general population of Rome,
the people demanded its own place
in the governing structures,
arguing the military
elite, the aristocracy
was not giving them their due voice
or respecting their
traditional privileges.
And so the version of
the Roman constitution
that endured through most
of the Roman Republic
was explicitly mixed.
It was mixed between the Senate of Rome,
probably the most powerful body
through most of this period of time
and that's the aristocratic
body where the military elite
generated an aristocratic wealthy elite
over the course of generations.
The Senate, the people,
the popular assembly,
and those two elite leaders
who served for a year,
who took the place with the old models.
That hybrid constitution, the
Senate, and the people of Rome
generated in Latin the acronym
SPQR which was emblazoned
on the shields of the soldiers
of the Roman Republic.
It is, they went into battle
with a visible reminder
that what they were fighting
for was the Roman constitution,
a constitution that after they
absorbed Greek philosophy,
they came to describe as
being so good and so effective
precisely because it
fulfilled these demands
that Greek had identified
for a mixed regime,
in which all different parts
of society had their place.
Now, if Aristotle had under
specified institutionally,
what that could mean, he didn't
really tell us what the few,
the many and the one would do.
The Romans who were very
procedural and legalistic
gave a great deal, more
institutional shape too,
in ways that we went on
to inherit to this day.
Most obviously to
Americans the upper house,
the place where the
aristocrats sat was the Senate.
Why Senate?
Senate has the root of
the Latin word for old,
the same root word as senile.
Why is the Senate made
up of those who are old?
Well, because it's made up
of the heads of families
and to be the head, the pater familias
of one of the great aristocratic
families of ancient Rome,
that means you've outlived your
father or your grandfather.
You've come to take headship of a family.
You don't get elected
to the Senate by being
a clever young thing, you
take your seat in the Senate
by virtue of inheriting it from
your father upon his death.
So the Senate is where the
old and as it would come
to be self understood, the
wise, would get together
to make the most important sets
of political and ethical decisions.
The popular assembly,
which for a great deal
of the Roman Republic history
was primarily in-person
attended by the masses of Roman citizens
of the city of Rome, a vast,
vast assembly that cheered,
gave vocal acclamation in
order to say what it approved
or didn't approve of.
Served as an ongoing check on the Senate,
limiting the ability of the
aristocrats to overreach
and serving to give honors
and to give dishonor.
And the two consoles who
headed the system occasionally
for one year, the dictator, the one person
who added the system in times of emergency
had a kind of command
of the military forces
and a foreign questions.
Those subject always a
great deal of supervision
by the Senate.
That understanding the mixed regime
as the Roman constitution,
providing evidence
through the long life
of the Roman Republic,
that it was a very good
kind of constitution,
that was to exert a tremendous
influence on the memory
and the imagination in the
West of what good government
of a Republican free
society could be like.
The Roman Republic falls, it is succeeded
by the Roman Empire and
then the empire falls.
Jumping ahead those thousand
years, the 500 or so years
of the empire and the 500 or so years
after the empire falls.
In the early middle ages,
the emergent kingdoms
of Western Europe began to
piecemeal and haphazardly
create a new form of mixed government.
They didn't do so in order
to emulate the Romans
and they didn't do so because
Aristotle told them to,
they did so because rule is always easier
with the cooperation of
those who have ruled.
To some degree rule
requires the cooperation
of those who have ruled
only to some degree
and at least some of those who have ruled.
A monarch really can't
rule entirely by himself,
he relies on the cooperation
of important elites,
represented in the military,
representing economic productive power
and in medieval Europe,
representing religious power.
The monarch needs their
help relies on their sense
that his rule is legitimate.
They in turn can't rule the population
that is entirely unwilling
to be ruled, more than that,
to the degree that they want
to extract material resources
from the large group of
people over whom they rule
and that's one of the things
that rulers always want.
So really if they want to
extract material resources,
they need some cooperation.
Functioning political
societies cannot exist
in a state of nothing but
war between those who rule
and those who are ruled.
Over the course of the early Middle Ages,
first, there was an
institutionalization or formalization
of cooperation by the
few with the monarchs.
From 500 to a thousand years
or so a system had come up
that we've come to notice feudalism
in which Kings had a little bit of power
or (mumbles) which had a lot of power
over subordinate, nobles,
or knights or serfs.
What changes in the 11th
century, the 12th century
is that instead of the King treating
with nobles individually, the
King started to call together
at least some subset
of the higher nobility
often along with members
of the higher priesthood
as a kind of regularly meeting counsel.
This becomes the House of Lords in England
and to become parallel bottoms,
the First Estate in France
and similar kinds of bodies in Spain
and elsewhere in Western Europe.
At the same time, wealth
is beginning to grow
in new commercial cities over the course
of the specially 12th and 13th centuries,
the cities are becoming very
important sites of wealth.
Monarchs would rather
get some of their wealth
from the cities than from aristocrats
because aristocrats are always
potential military threats
to them and eventually
monarchs come to realize
that they need the wealth from the cities.
There's too much wealth growing
there to be able to rely
entirely on the material
support that nobles provide
by supplying their own armed forces.
And so the monarchs start
to call representatives
of the cities demanding that
they consent to be taxed,
which is to say that they
cooperate in being taxed.
The idea taxation without
representation is tyranny,
a slogan that was to be influential
during American Revolution
and which drew on a tradition
in English political practice
that was by then a few centuries old.
It finds its roots in the basic fact,
that taxation is very much
easier with representation.
The King could call
representative of the city
to meet together in
what becomes eventually
The House of Commons or The Third Estate
demand that they agree
to, maybe negotiate some
about the limits of, but
demand that they agree to
a new tax, which they would
then go back to their cities
and explain I've authorized
that we will pay this.
We see the one, the few
and the many recreated
as a hybrid system.
Now it was true to some
degree in Rome is true
to an even greater degree in
this medieval constitution.
The one, the few and the many don't occupy
clearly distinct institutional rules.
What comes to be known
as The Theory of English
and then British Sovereignty,
is that the sovereign
is the King or Queen in parliament.
It is the hybrid body, the
one, the monarch, the few,
The House of Lords and the
many, The House of Commons
acting together in concert can
pass any law can do anything.
There are particular traditions
about which of those groups
can do what, when they're
not acting together,
but there are clear rules,
there were sufficiently
unclear rules that Britain,
that England rather
fight a civil war over it
in the mid 17th century
and there are sufficiently unclear rules
that the equivalent bodies,
the estate's general
and its parallels elsewhere
on the European continent,
breakdown as monarchs become
more and more powerful
over the course of the
16th and 17th centuries.
The idea however was in
place and it was in place
in what was understood to be a recent way
that the best constitution was
that which had come together
haphazardly, but which turned
out to share these features
with the ancient Roman constitution
and with the ancient Greek
philosophical system.
It's not until the late 17th
or arguably the 18th century,
that all of this become
joined to what we think of
under the phrase of the
separation of powers.
There's a little bit in John Locke
from I'm going to skip talking about today
because I'm gonna want to talk
about Locke and Locke tomorrow.
But the fullest statement
of theory is assembled
by Baron de Montesquieu, a French theorist
who speared the laws in 1748.
Looked the English
constitution of his day,
identified it as the freest in the world
and attributed that freedom to the way
that powers were separated.
He's the first one who identifies
the powers of government
as legislative, the
making of laws, executive,
the carrying out of laws
and judicial the application
of laws to particular cases
and the interpretation
of laws.
Montesquieu looks at England and he says
the legislative power sits
in The House of Commons,
which by 1748 was substantially true.
The Glorious Revolution
had more or less settled
that legislative initiative
it didn't sit with the King,
the right to initiate taxes
didn't sit with the King.
The House of Commons was coming
to be the most powerful part
of the British constitution,
but it was not yet a system
with a relatively powerless
monarch, as it is today,
the monarch still had fundamental power
to appoint a government,
to appoint ministers
and through the appointment of ministers,
really significant control
over military affairs
and foreign affairs.
So the executive, the site
of rapid decision-making,
the executive was to be
found in the monarchy
and the judicial power
Montesquieu awkwardly placed
in The House of Lords.
Now, here are things that were
true of The House of Lords
by this time, a number
of judges sat by right
in The House of Lords.
They were known as the Law Lords
and they made The House of Lords,
the court of highest appeal in Britain.
Mostly the high aristocracy
didn't take any part in this,
The House of Lords as a whole,
generally didn't sit as a court,
but The House of Lords housed
the court of highest appeal.
And moreover, The House of Lords
was the key site for impeachment trials.
It was where ministers of
the King could be impeached
or also other members
of The House of Lords
could be impeached for
serious misconduct in office.
Montesquieu maintains
that because the few,
the many and the one have a kind of
natural, social attachment
to their respective
standing and status, that they will fight
to keep those powers distinct.
And it's keeping the powers
distinct from all skew
is the key to maintaining
freedom in a governed society.
If you don't have the powers separated,
then the monarch is always at
risk of throwing his enemies
in jail for no reason other
than being his enemies.
If the monarch can legislate and judge,
then the monarch will
legislate against opposition
to himself and we'll
judge in particular cases,
you are my enemy into The
Tower of London you go.
England had slowly overcome
that kind of thing,
France very much less so,
and this was of great concern
to Montesquieu and a great
deal of why he's writing
all of this in the spirit of the laws
is to argue that France is
losing what liberty it had
because the powers are
insufficiently separated.
And the French monarchy was at
risk of becoming a despotism
'cause it didn't have a
proper separation of powers.
But the key thing for our
purposes Montesquieu says,
"The separation of powers
is strong in England
"because they've lined up the powers
"with the old social classes."
This is not the vision of
harmony of the King in parliament
of all three acting together as one.
It's not really division of harmony
than what we find in
ancient Greek philosophy
or that we found in
idealizations of Roman practice.
It's a theory of the
one, the few and the many
in a kind of structured
ongoing institutional conflict.
A few decades later as
the new American Republic
is trying to form a government
drawing on the whole history
of Republican thinking
about what makes for good, effective
constitutional governments
of free societies
and what immunizes them
against eventually collapse
into rule by the one?
The founders looked a
great deal to Montesquieu,
when they were deeply concerned
with the separation of powers.
Their problem was that unlike
England, unlike France,
the new United States, hadn't
no aristocracy to say nothing
of a monarchy sitting around.
How could it be that the
powers would remain separated
if they weren't attached to
social classes that were trying
to stand up for their
separate social status?
The founders' theory as articulated
in "The Federalist
Papers" was that a belief
in the status one (mumbles)
to the job one occupies
in government, an attachment
to Congress or court
or presidency will be enough.
Ambition must be made
to counteract ambition.
The way that will happen
is because of course,
Congress will never give
the president the power
to overturn the constitutional order.
Of course, Congress will
never give the president
the power to make himself dictator
because Congress is concerned
with Congress status.
So you give each of the
institutions enough power
to effectively check and limit the others.
And then you can have separation
of powers in a Republic
without an aristocracy, without a monarchy
where even the Senate isn't
really understood anymore
as being the body
representing the wealthy.
It is to a certain degree it's understood
as representing all the age requirement
to get in the Senate is higher
than that to get into the House,
but the electorate is the same.
The people at large vote
for the House, the Senate,
the president and equivalently
for houses, senates,
and governors in the States.
The belief is that judges will stand up
for the progressives of judges,
Legislators will stand up
for the progressives of the legislators
and executives will stand
up for the progressives
of executives and the system
will thereby retain its balance.
This is Republican in the Roman Central,
Republican constitution
making at what turns out
to be its high point.
Because very rapidly, the circumstances
that underlie Republican
theory, were eroding.
One of the key thoughts of
Republican political theory
throughout all of the
intervening centuries
from Rome till 1787 was
the serious danger posed
by faction or party.
It's okay to have different institutions,
but they must all be
aiming at the common good
and republics will inevitably collapse.
They'll collapse into
the kinds of civil wars
that broke up the Greek city states.
and that broke up many
of the Italian cities
that were republics in the
middle ages and the Renaissance.
They'll break into civil war
if they have political parties.
It's only a handful of years
after the American constitution
was ratified, that
parties begin to emerge.
The Federalist and Democratic,
Republican parties,
each operating as they
understand defensively
because the other side is conspiring
against the constitution.
We must organize until they're defeated
and then it will go away
and then we'll get back
to good Republican common good government.
Turns out they were wrong
and they were wrong in a way
that has had enduring consequences
for how we understand representative
and constitutional democracy
in liberal societies.
And here I'm emphasizing
liberalized distinct
from the Republican
anti-commercial agrarian common,
good orientations that some
of the founders had inherited
from earlier ideology.
For the government, a liberal societies,
governed democratically in the modern era,
we now know as the
American founders didn't
because they couldn't, we
now know that you can't do it
without political parties.
There is no case of ongoing
democratic government
in a large state, in the modern world,
in which elections are
not primarily organized
around partisan competition.
This is a crucial way of
restraining the ambitions
of any one executive, it's
a crucial way of restraining
the greed of any one
generation of legislators,
because the party has a longterm interest.
The party has a longterm
interest in restraining,
truly catastrophic or
scandalous or calamitous
kinds of rule.
If you discredit the party,
then the party will suffer.
You'll retire or die,
but the party will go on
paying the price and therefore
the "American Constitutional
Order" badly enough designed,
they had to rewrite the rules
for electing the president
and vice president within a
generation badly enough designed
that it could take no real
account to political parties,
but able, once they made that change,
the election of the president,
and the vice president,
able to stumble on, despite
the advent of parties
made enough room for partisan competition
to do the real essential work
of providing mutual accountability
in an ongoing democratic society.
Parties are not powers, the
competition between parties
is not the separation of powers.
The competition between
parties is each party,
always watching the other for
when they do something wrong,
able to then go back to the
electorate at the next election
and say, look at the
catastrophe that this government
has provided, vote us into power
and vote them out of power.
Not only is the separation
of parties not the same
as the separation of powers,
it exists really awkwardly with it.
And this is true in both
of the major varieties
of constitutes of
democracy that have gone on
to govern liberal
societies in the 200 years,
since the American founding.
In parliamentary systems,
which are easier in some ways
to understand, the
executive, the prime minister
and the ministerial cabinet just are drawn
from the majority party
or majority coalition
in the larger or lower house apartment,
The House of Commons, The
House of Representatives.
The prime minister is
the leader of the party
that commands a parliamentary majority.
That makes it difficult for parliament
to hold the prime minister to account.
Prime ministerial
mismanagement isn't something
that the parliament wants
to draw attention to
because the prime minister
is of the same party
as the majority of parliament.
And so there has been a
tendency for parliaments
to let ministers and
especially prime ministers,
more and more off the hook for scrutiny
for their misconduct.
In a presidential system
where the president
is elected separately
from the legislature,
in the American case from Congress,
then we have two different
possible outcomes.
In one outcome, the president
is of the same party
as the majority of Congress.
This is very often the case in
at least the first two years
of a presidential term.
And when that's true,
the founders turn out
to have been wrong.
Simply saying, I'm a member
of Congress, I'm a Senator,
I'm a representative doesn't
give people so much pride
in their office that they were determined
to hold the president to account.
Instead they say I'm a
member of the same party,
the same team as the
president, we are going to run
on a shared ticket, we
are not in the business
of holding the presidential
account of limiting
the unlawful use of
presidential power or authority
of preventing presidential
self enrichment,
of preventing presidential
abuse, of military authority
or command over the
bureaucracy or what have you.
It might seem to be easier
when the opposition party
controls one or both houses of Congress.
But when they do it can be easily argued
and it inevitably is
argued that any attempt
to hold the presidential count
is just more partisan competition.
And so Congress will seek to hold
members of cabinet accountable,
will demand oversight
over expenditures, will demand oversight
over whether congressional statutes
have been appropriately
followed and carried out
by the executive branch
and the executive branch
belonging to the other political
party will shout and scream
that this is nothing but partisan warfare.
And sometimes it is.
In neither system, in other arrangement
when Congress belongs to the
same party as the president
or Congress belongs to the
opposite party of the president,
do we have the kind of
clear self enforcing
separation of powers checking one another
that was hoped for by the founders
and idealized by Montesquieu.
People's sense of belonging
to the same political team
in a party is crucial to
the survival of democracy
in large states, but it badly undermines
the ability of those states to carry out
what Montesquieu and the
founders agreed was crucial.
Republican democratic
constitutional governments
don't have the one, the few and the many.
They inherited an institutional
structure from the Romans
from Republican thought,
from Greek philosophy
and from medieval and early
modern European practice.
They inherited these
institutions that no longer have
the same social class meaning
that Moscow attributed to them.
And the founders hoped
that they could get away
without the social class,
meaning has proven (mumbles)
are too important to the
good functioning of democracy
and parties are too incompatible
with the good functioning
of the separation of powers.
All of that is a set of challenges.
It is not yet, but my title
promised, which is a crisis.
Constitutional democracy
has however, an ongoing set
of very serious risks
associated with this mismatch
between institutional form and the reality
of partisan competition.
I talked about the degree to
which Republican ideology,
including the ideology
of the American founders
for the most part distrusted
party, distrusted faction
believed in the unity of the people acting
for the sake of the common good.
The reality of liberal
society as it was coming to be
at the end of the 18th
century and came fully to be
over the course of the
19th is of a society
that is so pluralistic and differentiated,
partly due to the division of labor,
partly due to the proliferation
of different religions
and religious worldviews,
partly due simply to the advent
of a wide variety of political ideas.
Liberal societies are too pluralistic
for that Republican vision to be viable.
And yet we still have an ongoing normative
and rhetorical attachment to
the idea of being a unifier
to the idea of the common good,
to the idea of the
people standing together.
That is the same in the United States
and not only the United States,
I think this is a common feature
of constitutional
democracies around the world.
We are uneasy with how
important parties are,
with how much we depend
on political division.
That uneasiness lends itself
easily to the voice of someone
who says he can speak in
the name of the whole.
The whole people, the whole nation,
let us overcome our differences,
let us come together as one and follow me.
Why me?
Why is it always the one?
Well, it's always the one
for a couple of reasons.
One simply that legislatures
on courts are pluralistic.
You look at Congress,
you see people fighting,
you look at a president or a
governor or a prime minister,
and you see one person with one voice.
If he can tell a convincing story
about why the will of the
nation manifests in his will,
his decisions, and I'm
using male pronouns here,
really advisedly and
determinately overwhelmingly
what we find is that this is a phenomenon
of male chief executives,
so of course, most of them
had male chief executives
in the world in any case.
The one who can say I speak
in the voice of the whole
has a decisive rhetorical
advantage over those
who well necessarily don't,
like judges and legislators.
Moreover, the many can
very often be tempted
into an alliance against the few.
If this was true for the poor and the rich
and ancient Greece, it remains
true in a variety of ways
in our pluralistic societies to this day.
An important line of political rhetoric
is always that I will
stand with you the people,
against they, the elites.
This goes in multiple political
and ideological directions.
They, the elite might be the
wealthy, they, the elites
might be the cultural and academic elites
associated with Hollywood or universities,
they might be foreign elites,
they might be bankers,
they might be Jews who often managed to be
the shared ideological enemy of populace
of the left and the right,
they are the wealthy and the intellectuals
and the cosmopolitans altogether.
But there's a temptation
on the part of large parts
of the electorate to respond
to a rhetorical appeal
from the person who holds
the power of the one
saying I will take your side against
the sides of the elites,
the judges, the lawyers,
the professors, the bankers, the wealthy,
the actors, the foreigners,
the minorities, or whatever.
Add that to the fact that
the power of the executive
is the hardest power to constrain
in constitutional
democracies to begin with.
The greatest concern that Montesquieu had
and a very live concern
for the American founders
was that the executive
had control of the police
and the military.
If there's a danger to free government,
the first foremost danger of
it is that someone would use
his distinct control of armed force
to attack the legislature,
to shut down the free
secondary institutions,
to intimidate the courts,
to imprison or torture
or kill his enemies.
The command of the
police, the secret police,
the intelligence
services, and the military
makes the executive
unparalleled in his power
compared with the other branches.
The ability to join that
to the ideological appeal,
I speak for the many against the few,
I speak for all of us together
against partisan division
means that there's a real
ability for executives
or candidates for the executive office
to commit to demagoguery and populism
as a rhetorical strategy,
enabling authoritarianism in office.
This, by the way like what I said earlier
about the problem with
separation of powers
and separation of parties,
this is true in presidential
and parliamentary systems alike.
There are some particular
dangers associated with each,
but the general phenomenon
that you can have a president
or a prime minister say,
I don't speak for a party
I speak for the nation, therefore,
when I use the military,
the police and the secret
police, you should trust
that I do so for the
sake of the common good.
There's the risk of serious crisis
to constitutional democracy.
It's not the case that the
three branches are equal,
there's not even the case
that the governing party
and the opposition party are equal
because the opposition
party must always emphasize
a division, the governing
party can pretend
that there's no division
and that it and it's leader
speak for the whole.
This introduces a fragility
into constitutional democracy,
into the marriage between these Roman
and medieval institutions
and our modern discovery
about how to run democracies
based on partisan electoral competition,
a tension between them that
we have not yet fully learned
how to resolve and there
are some structural reasons
that will admit of permanent resolution.
The asymmetry in power between
executive and other branches
and the rhetorical appeals
speaking for the whole
against the parts when we need parties,
those are likely to be enduring features.
And those are features
that put the survivability
of the constitution democratic
government that we've found
to be the most effective kind
of government for the survival
of free societies at a
kind of permanent risk.
Thank you very much.
- Okay, thank you, Professor Levy.
So our graduate students are going to head
to breakout groups,
everyone else will have
a 30 minute break, and then we
will return here at 6:00 p.m.
for the Q&A.
So in the meantime, feel
free to drop your questions
into the Q&A box here, I
will be gathering those,
collecting them where
there's some overlap,
and then we will have
a rapid fire response
from Professor Levy in
half an hour, so thank you.
Okay, and we are back for the Q&A,
we have so many great questions far more
than we would be able
to cover in half an hour
or an hour's worth of Q&A,
so we're gonna keep this
pretty quick and get through
as many as we can, but
we won't be able to get
through all of them but thank
you for submitting these.
All right, so the first one
is, is crisis overstating it?
The system of government
that we have in the West
that seem to endure past problems,
so is this a new level of dire?
- There's a tendency that
political scientists talk about
of for democratization and
liberalization to happen
in waves or by contagion.
And to some degree, we don't know whether
that's because similar historical forces
are operating on lots of
countries at the same time,
or because countries are
influencing one another.
And we think it's probably some of both.
There is there's some clear evidence
that in the post financial crisis,
post 2008 world the wave of liberalization
and democratization that was associated
with the fall of military
dictatorships in Southern Europe
and Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s,
the democratization of East
Asian countries in the 1980s
and into the early 1990s,
and then the liberalization
and democratization of
the post-communist world
of the then communist world
has crested and fallen back.
And some of what I want to do is identify
some of the common features
that we're seeing across liberal
or relatively liberal democratic,
or relatively democratic societies,
because I think there
are very common features
that we can spot from the
United States to India,
to Hungary, to Israel, to Brazil,
Britain to a lesser degree,
Austria to a considerable degree,
there's a wave of something happening.
That doesn't mean that
all of those countries
or that any of those countries
will necessarily suffer
a complete breakdown of their
constitutional democracies.
But it does mean that I think
we want to be able to talk
in terms of things sometimes being worse.
And I do think we have good
historical reason to think
this is a sometimes worse moment.
And if you'll do me the favor
of then subsequently asking me
the immediately proceeding
question about the founders
of the American system,
then I can talk a little more about why.
- Sure, great, so even if the founders
didn't anticipate parties,
didn't their system pretty easily
accommodate them?
- Great, and a good objection
but the answer is basically no.
'Cause the American party system has been
a very strange creature over the course
of two and a quarter centuries.
It has very rarely been the
case that there were actually
two parties fully competitive
at the national level.
After the election of
1800, when Thomas Jefferson
swept into power, the Federalist
Party was never again,
a serious challenger for
power at the national level.
For generation some remnants
of the Federalist Party
became a weak party that was
very important in the Senate
and important in some
states was never (mumbles)
under control of the
House of Representatives
and the presidency, which are
the more powerful branches.
The weak party collapses over slavery,
a Republican Party forms of
its ashes, after the Civil War,
the Republican Party enjoys
almost unchallenged rule
for decades and has really
only challenged occasionally
when the Democratic Party then understood
as the party of the
Confederacy and the losing side
in the Civil War crept very
close to the Republican platform
for one term or two terms,
and so on and so forth.
The post new deal era was
not a competitive era.
Now, part of this for the
whole post Civil War era
was because of the cross cutting cleavage
as a party embrace.
The parties did not
neatly ideologically sort
because there was in
the post new deal era,
a party that included the
Southern Confederates,
Southern whites and blacks nationwide.
The Republican Party as the
party of Northern white liberals
was at a structural disadvantage there
and when the parties weren't
ideologically well sorted.
Political scientists talk
about a realignment and sorting
of the American political parties system
that really only reached
its full form in 1994,
as recently as that.
Since 1994, the American political parties
have been more closely
competitive for longer
than was ever portrayed
in American history.
For quarter century now,
control of the house of representatives
has gone back and forth,
control of the Senate
has gone back and forth,
control of the presidency
has gone back and forth.
And two presidential
elections have been decided
by hare sprints.
Associated with that, we find that there
was a dramatic polarization,
and so some of the things
I was talking about,
ways that relationships
between an opposition
controlled Congress and a
presidency could be strange
to the breaking point.
They often didn't happen
in the pre 1994 era
because the parties were
so ideologically strained
and regionally strange
because of this distinctive
post Civil War mixture
having to do with race.
The post 1994 parties have had
two presidential impeachments
in 25 years, which is
as many as in the whole
of American history up until that time.
They've had a tremendous
upsurge in serious fight,
serious jurisdictional
constitutional fights
when the president and Congress
are controlled by opposing parties.
So there's a degree to
which the American system
lucked into being able to survive parties
through accidents that
had no real relationship
to the advental parties.
And there's a way in which now post 1994,
we're seeing the party system
fully developed at last
and we're seeing the kinds of strain
that it can put on the system at last.
- How has the growth of what we want
from government changed this dynamic?
- So at the very beginning, I
said, I'm not going to offer
a classical liberal or
liberal theory of politics,
I'm going to offer a theory of politics
in liberal societies.
Questions like these are
part of what I have in mind.
There's one important strand
of classical liberal scholarship
that treats the demand
for government or the demand
for government services
or the demand for size
and scope of government
as being the key independent
variable and political facts
as then being the dependent variables.
As a political scientist
that's not how I think.
I think that the demand for
control over the mechanisms
of rule is a pretty permanent fact
and is much more fundamental
than demands for redistribution
at the level of two or three or 4% of GDP.
The competition to be the
one in charge of the army,
the competition, to be the one in charge
of the ideological apparatus,
telling people what to think,
the competition to be the one
whose heirs will survive rather
than the ones whose heirs
will be killed because
there's a violent contest
for political power.
Those are really enduring facts of human,
political organization
and political order.
And all kinds of struggles
that we saw talked about
in ancient Greece, talked
about in the Middle Ages,
talked about in Rome, they
just treated this general fact
that political competition
was present as permanent,
even though in even the most
redistributionist democratic
of ancient Greek city states,
actual public control of the
economy was very much less
than it's true for any modern
constitutional democracy.
Just as a matter of subsistence,
when you're much closer to subsistence,
a society cannot afford 20 or
25 or 30% of its total produce
being taken away from the basic project
of feeding the population.
Richer societies can
and richer societies do
and there's not tremendous
variation across
modern constitutional democracies,
or modern constitutional democracies.
That is to say all of the
societies that have been marked
by liberal commercial society,
by liberal capitalism,
by the kind of economies that supporters
of market liberalism celebrate.
All of the constitutional democracies
that govern societies like that
have government share of GDP
much closer to each other,
than they do to any of
the ancient systems.
And I don't think that
we see any real variation
that's driven just by
level of redistribution
as a predictor of the kinds
of crisis I'm talking about
because level of redistribution
isn't what determines
whether people wanna be in
charge of the military or not.
- So while we're on
the subject can you say
a little bit more about the relationship
between democracy and liberalism?
- Yes, so here's a quick
plug for the pieces
that I posted online,
the piece of writing.
this is something that
I've been working on
in my academic research for a while.
There are long-standing reasons
for distrust of democracy
and democratic politics that run through
classical liberal political
theory in particular
and liberal political theory in general.
One of my chief influences as
a liberal political theorist
is the theorist Judith Shklar,
who famously said that, "Liberalism
"is permanently, monogamously
married to democracy
"but it is a marriage of convenience."
Democracy and liberalism
are of the same idea
that people should live their lives freely
is a separate question,
logically a separate question
from the question of how
shall government be organized,
however much government we have.
It turns out however that they
are not so distinguishable,
empirically, historically,
sociologically as they are
at that formal level.
And I think there's been an
excessive amount of attention
paid in liberal political
philosophy in general,
classical liberal political
thought in particular
to the formal distinction,
I desire to say,
well, since we live in
democracies and it's democracies
that keep passing these
laws, we don't like,
therefore democracy's
the enemy of liberty.
No, democracy is a system of government
that any system of government
is going to at one time
or another threaten
liberty to some degree.
It is however, the case that
for these liberal, commercial,
capitalist societies for
the extended market orders
of the last two centuries.
Their fit with constitutional
democracy as a method
of government has been very
much closer, very much better
than to other alternative
methods of government.
That doesn't mean we allow
sheer majoritarianism,
it doesn't mean we prefer
untrammeled democracy
to constitutional democracy,
but I think that it's important
to recognize the real
historical contribution
that democracy made to
the emergence of liberal,
legal and economic and social systems.
The equalization of legal
status, we all can own property,
we all can enter into contracts,
we all have equal legal rights
has a very strong affinity
with the equalization of political status.
We can all form political
parties, we can all vote,
we can all run for office.
And when one of those is lost when say
incumbent property owners and the wealthy
restrict access to the franchise,
restrict political competition,
suppress political parties of the left,
they at the same time,
reconfigure the economy
in ways that are no
longer free open liberal,
competitive market orders, but are instead
rent seeking protections for
incumbent property owners.
There's a stronger affinity
between democracy and liberalism
that is often recognized
and those pieces of writing
I put on the website have more
to say about those things.
- Okay and by the way,
for everybody listening,
those essays are available
on the participant website,
so you can download those and
read them at your leisure.
So just have time for a
couple more questions.
Very briefly why are the
"Articles of Confederation"
flawed by granting too
much power to the states?
Do we actually need the
greater executive power
that the constitution granted?
- (mumbles) but it combines
two different thoughts.
Arguably the articles were
flawed in both those dimensions
and the founders in 1787
thought the articles were flawed
in both those dimensions, but
we could distinguish them.
One of the ways in which the
federal government was weak
was that it didn't have a
meaningful executive power.
It didn't have the ability
to effectively carry out
a shared military or foreign policy
and suspicion of monarchical
power was so strong
that there wasn't
meaningfully an executive
with an independent capacity to act.
I think it could have been the case
that there could have been a
replacement for the articles
that strengthened the executive
branch at the federal level
without so much strengthening
the relative balance
between the center and the states.
I don't know how that
would have worked out,
it might've looked like a
constitution that on paper
I would have liked better,
but part of the kind of story
that I'm telling about
how things turned out
is that systems either adapt
or don't adapt for reasons
that are hard to predict at the outset.
From the perspective of 1787,
I think we would certainly say
the federal government needed to have
meaningful executive
power, which it didn't.
And we might well have
said that there was cause
for some greater federal
power over the states
from almost any ideological
perspective, classical liberal,
or a civic Republican, or what
have you that for example,
the states didn't have a free
trade zone with one another,
that the states were
carrying out more or less
independent foreign policies,
that the states were carrying out,
definitely independent military policies.
All of those were real
threats to the viability
of the Republic at that
stage even if one looks
at the actual 1787 constitution says,
I wish they hadn't given
Congress that power
and that power or the president
that power and that power.
- Sure okay.
And the last question very
quickly, just because it's so fun
and combines a couple of
questions that we got,
is the solution to this crisis
some sort of a spontaneous
emergent order and is that answer anarchy?
- Yay, now it's an IHS seminar,
it's never really an IHS
seminar until you get
the anarchy question.
So I've been stressing in
these answers even more
than in my talk a kind
of permanent character
of political life.
And I really think that,
that's a true thing,
just not the only true thing
about human social orders,
there are true things having
to do with resource scarcity,
there are true things having
to do with social status,
there are true things
having to do with tribalism
and collective (mumbles).
One of the true things
is that violent power
collectively organized is a
very powerful background fact
and it's a background
fact that we're always
struggling to manage.
As a political scientist,
I'll fall back on that again,
as a political scientist,
I look at the reality
of political societies
as a fixed feature and anarchy
as being not meaningfully
an answer to political questions.
It tells us to imagine a way,
the fact of collective control
of the means of violence,
but as soon as we've imagined them away,
they are going to reassert
themselves in fact.
And so we face an ongoing
political problem,
how to secure a space for
freedom against the problem
that there are people who want to rule us,
there are going to be means of ruling us,
there are going to be
aspirations ruling us,
there are going to be violent
competitions over ruling us.
We cannot say, well, we'll abolish ruling
and therefore there will
be nothing to compete about
because they'll remember the possibility
and they can bring it about again.
- Professor Levy thank you so much,
we will see you again tomorrow
for everybody who's watching,
thank you so much for joining us.
We will see many of you
and hope to see all of you
at the 7:30 p.m. keynote
by our president and CEO,
Dr. Emily Chamlee-Wright.
Thanks again for attending
I'll see you soon.
