On May 30, 2016, about a year and half after I retired, an event was held in Calgary to celebrate my  work. That so many friends thought I merited this honour surprised and moved me. At the end of the day I tried, inadequately, to express my gratitude. In those concluding remarks, I also attempted a brief summary — reproduced below — of my academic preoccupation.

I want especially to thank Peter Russell for coming today, and for taking us all the way back to the beginning, to my PhD dissertation, In Defense of Liberal Democracy — which is also how I have entitled these concluding remarks. When Peter says he was more my student than my doctoral supervisor, he sells himself short. He taught me a lot then, and has continued to be a valued teacher and mentor ever since. He taught me especially — and certainly through his own character — the meaning of reasoned and reasonable disagreement. He has, in my eyes, always modelled the essential virtues of a liberal democrat.

Which brings me to the abiding concern of my intellectual life  — the nature and fate of liberal democracy. I see this modern regime as

• an astonishing departure from the world-historical norm;
• a  regime of what Tocqueville called “small parties,” which miraculously give way to each other when they lose electoral contests;
• a fragile regime because it runs so dramatically counter to powerful dimensions of human nature.

Liberal democracy runs counter to human nature especially by asking us to be neutral between the “great party” claims raised by traditional regime politics— i.e., publicly relevant claims about the best route to salvation (in either or both of its other-worldly and this-worldly senses). It is difficult to banish those questions from the public sphere.

But, of course, liberal democracy is not, and cannot be, neutral about its opposition to salvation-oriented regime politics. The dispute between “small party” and “great party” politics is itself a “great party” dispute. Liberal democracy is its own way of life — its own regime —with its own commitments and virtues. It has its own character, including a liberal democratic citizen character — the kind of character exemplified by Peter, and also by the late Walter Berns, one of my other teachers at the University of Toronto.

We’re talking about the kind of character that makes possible a regime oriented to liberty. Yes, this does involve some public neutrality, but that way of putting it is rather  insipid and unsatisfying. One can proclaim “give me liberty or give me death” in a way one could never proclaim “give me neutrality or give me death.”

The need sometimes to utter the first of those proclamations — “give me liberty or give me death” — is one reason why the liberal democratic use of commercial self interest to lower the temperature of politics cannot be the whole story.

 
It also can’t be the whole story because political ambitions constantly work to raise the temperature even in commercially based small-party regimes. My favourite formulation of this is James Madison’s in Federalist 10:

So strong is [the] propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

Jonathan Swift makes the same point when he has Gulliver report the six rebellions and thousands of Lilliputian lives lost over the dispute between Big-Endians and Small-Endians (i.e., the clash over which end of an egg to break).

A system of institutional checks and balances is one of the ways — though definitely not the only one — in which liberal democracies counter these problems.

One of the truly indispensable checks is an independent judiciary with its inescapable and beneficial policy influence. (I have never maintained — or thought it possible — that courts should just apply the law as opposed to making it in important, policy-relevant ways.)

Entrenched constitutional rights take this judicial check to a new and trickier level, but I’ve always conceded that judicial power under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms can make a “valuable contribution to the counter-majoritarian checks and balances we need,” so long as that power is “liberated from the assumptions and rhetoric of oracular finality in constitutional interpretation” (Knopff 2003, 218) — i.e., so long as we steer clear of complete judicial interpretive supremacy and preserve some space for “coordinate interpretation.”

That seemingly small qualification has itself turned out to be something like a “great party” heresy, sufficient to kindle unfriendly passions and excite intense — if not quite violent — conflicts.

In wrapping up, I can think of no better way of characterizing a career’s worth of thought than the way I concluded my dissertation decades ago. In the final pages of that study, I reflected on “a weakness or blindness in the liberal solution,” namely, that the apparent “‘realism’ of that solution, in attempting to ground politics on the universal bedrock of lowly self-interest, appears not to be sufficiently soul satisfying,” and hence not altogether “realistic.” This deficiency animated the rebellion against liberalism by even more modern thinkers — especially Rousseau and Nietzsche (but many others as well).

By rejecting nature as a standard, however, these later waves of modernity abandoned moderation. So, I wondered, should we perhaps go back to the more soul-satisfying — yet moderate — ancient philosophers? We must certainly consult their thought, I concluded, but there was no possibility of returning in practice to anything remotely resembling the kind of polis they envisioned.

On the last page of the dissertation, I quoted George Grant as follows:

The capitalism of the English speaking world was stabilized by being founded on a conception of human nature. The doctrine of human nature of Locke and Smith may be inadequate compared to the classical teachings, but it is less destructive of humanity than the later doctrines, which assert that men are completely malleable to perpetual conditioning.

Then came the final sentence of the dissertation:

One suspects … that were Aristotle alive today, he too would raise his voice in defense of liberal democracy.

I still see it that way. And if it’s good enough for Aristotle, it’s good enough for me.