The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (Future Perfect: Images of the Time to Come in Philosophy, Politics and Cultural Studies) by John Milbank & Adrian Pabst

Author:John Milbank & Adrian Pabst [Milbank, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
Published: 2016-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Mixed Constitution Alternative

1. RENEWING MIXED GOVERNMENT

We have seen that, in order to meet the metacrisis of liberal democracy, Western politics needs to return to certain older themes of its constitutionalist legacy, but for radical and not reactionary reasons.

A mixed constitution outflanks in advance the tendency of liberal democracies to oscillate between debased popular will on the one hand, and the power of the executive allied to the oligarchic interests of a few, on the other. Even today, despite much erosion of the West’s best traditions, freedom under the law and public cooperation offers resources potentially to create a polity that pluralises politics and extends the public realm beyond the modern duality of the state versus private association. Such a civic covenant might encompass the peoples and nations within and across different countries, in a double refusal of both autonomous nationalism and suppression of regional identities and self-government.

As we have seen, what is missing from liberal democracy is the crucial mediation of ‘the few’ – virtuous inspirers and architectonic leaders that act honourably and lead by example in all sectors of society, in natural alliance with the diverse corporate groups that they tend to embody. For the problem is not exactly ‘elitism’, but rather our dominance by technocratic and monopolising elites. What we need, instead, is more genuine elites (at every level and in very field) who operate not through the attempted manipulation of individuals, but, rather, via the educative influence of persons and groups who are, thereby, inducted into the further exercise of their own creative capacities. Freedom is not a given, but, instead, a gift that can be provided for all and in diverse ways through the right processes of formation.

So an enhanced role for ‘the few’ does not merely concern that of virtuous, rather than corrupt, elites. It also concerns the relative self-government of regions, minority groups and free associations. This should occur not just in their own interests and in terms of their own natural rights, but also in terms of what they can, thereby, contribute by example and influence to the political whole. For this whole is properly thought of as a dynamic synthesis rather than as a given totality or top-down imposition. Its architectonic rule should emerge and be elicited from the subordinate diversity itself, rather than being abstractly forced upon a passive or recalcitrant social body.

For this reason, mixed government involves not the separation but, rather, the organic cooperation of powers at the centre. Whereas separation only compounds the dominance of the executive, while yet sterilising the potency of the centre, organic cooperation involves a balancing of central with local power. But such balancing provides a mutual check without eventual state usurpation only if there is also the sense of a symbiotic shared operation.

In its current predicament, Britain and other Western countries require new constitutional settlements that recover the natural link of mixed government with modern traditions of sovereign pluralism and federalism. Whether at the level of over-centralised states such as the

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