LIBERAL LEGACY, RADICAL CRITIQUE

...It is still not clear what will replace the traditional political parties as instruments of coalition-building...

...And that perhaps is as much that we as a liberal people can reasonably expect...

...While he devotes the greater part of The Collapse of Liberal Empire to describing the inadequacy of liberalism, in the face of corporate and imperial realities, he is not willing to abandon a central liberal proposition: that power must he balanced by power...

...Bureaucratic structure, technological innovation, the artificial creation of demand through advertising, dependence on government spending--all these, he argues, have changed corporations from independent centers of power into a system whose pa~tern of authority and whose scope cannot even be defined...

...Instead, some would now argue, in eras of widespread dissidence the system's pretense of tolerance is dropped and (in Philip Commonweal: 647 Green's vivid metaphor) we begin to see "Hobbes' ferocious eyes peering out behind tolerant Madison's skull...

...From a reading of American histo.ry at ]east, it is hard not to conclude that polities dedicated to the common good tend to be repressive, and one can appreciate Madison's insight that the rights of conscience are most likely to be protected in a polity premised on self-interest...

...Liberalism, to remind ourselves of Goldstene's interpretation, assumes a perpetual tonsion, between reason and passion within the individual, and between different self-interested'individuals...

...And looking back on the crisis in the very last days of the Nixon Presidency, the journalist Eliz~beth Drew was reminded of James Madison's observation (in .the fifty-first of the Federolist essays) that only by creating a constitutional system in which "ambition must be made to counteract ambition" and "the interest of the man . . . connected to the constitutional rights of the place"--could the government be required to control itself...

...There has been for some time a growing suspicion on the part of these academic critics that our constitutional order, premised as it is on self-interest, tends in practice to benefit the organized self-imerest in the powerful at the expense of the disorganized powerless...

...13 October 1978:654...

...And the aim of promoting virtue has in turn led, theoreticaUy and historically, to the implementation of specific measures, very much the same measures agai~ and again...

...They would accept, one feels, the conditions which Rousseau imposes as necessary for a truly dema=ratic government in Book III of The Social Contract: "a very small state...

...For this reason, if for no other, Goldstene's decision to seek liberal remedies to liberal dilemmas, to rescue liberalism from itself, remains philosophically and tactically sound...

...With a number of modifications, this individualistic framework, established by Hobhes, was transmitted to Che American colonies by John Locke...

...The conceptual framework of many of these critics rests upon the older work of Louis Hartz, who some years ago worked out the implications of the fact that the American colonies were settled at a pa.rtieular point in the evolution of European political culture...

...it must, at some point, engage the deepest sentiments of the people...

...We are helped in this effort by the recent appearance of two finely-argued critiques: Frank M." Colcman's Hobbes and America: Exploring the Constitutional _9 Foundations (University of Toronto Press $12.50, 160 pp...

...What was an emerging liberal ideology in the parent culture, he argued, became in the American "fragment culture" the only ideological tradition...

...IH Among these recent radical critics of American liberalism, Goldstene appears to stand almost alone...

...Therefore, he concludes in the tenth of the Federalist essays, the chief advantage of an extended republic is tha~ aggregates of self-interested individuals will find it difficult to interfere with the right of others to pursue their self-interest...

...Insofar as they reject parties and interest groups as part of the problem, "liberal" aggregates of self-interest within a deeply flawed constitutional order, their remedies never quite match the scale of their indictment...

...Do the ,frightening episodes of the recent past, in other words, represent clear betrayals of the national liberal tradition, weaknesses within that tradition, or (as some of these critics would surely argue) liberalism's fulfillment...

...but, they .would argue, such policy cannot truly he public policy, because as Goldstene Commonweal:~ 649 says, "there can be no publ.ic policy if there is no conception of public interest, and this cannot exist" under a liberal order in which society is seen as "nothing more than the aggregate of individuals comprising it...

...but the self-congra.tula,tory rhetoric of Washington "insiders" notwithstanding, its Continued ability to do so in the future is by no means assured...

...But the decline of the American empire beginning in the mid1960s has led to economic contraction, producing simultaneous inflation and unemployment, and forcing .the corporations to become even more dependent on government spending for war...

...And he was not convinced that virtue would persist without encouragemen.t, so he favored both the institution of censorship ~ to preserve individual morality, and the creation of a simple "civil religion," over and above the various competing faiths, to preserve social unity...

...If for Coleman liberalism is at ~he root of the crisis, for Goldstene it is only part of the crisis...

...It is not only the heritage of abundance that shapes our condition today, he says, but the increasing disparity between the dreams of abundance and confining economic _9 realities...

...This blindness of a liberal society comes from its "need to pluralize the universe" and create separate realms of "politics, economics, and personality, realms held to be distinct in fact as well as in conception...

...Surveying the American experience, it is not easy to find durable communities that meet Rousseau's criteria for "democracy": in the major examples that do come to mind, from the Puritan settlements in seventeenthcentury New England to the Mormon settlements in the nineteenth-century West, social equality was (as he foresaw) linked to ethnic and cultural homogeneity...

...It is odd, for example, to read a pacifist like Staughton Lynd complain that Madison's liberalism helped create "a closed society," when it was Madison who wanted to incorporate directly into the Bill of Rights an amendment that !'no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person...

...A New Yorker editorialist, for example, commented at the outset of the crisis that the republic was being saved :from Presidential tyranny not by any action on the part of the American people but "by the long arm of the Founding Fathers reaching down across two centuries . . . we didn't save the system...

...and Paul N. Goldstene's The Collapse oJ Liberal Empire: Science and Revolution in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press $10.00, 139 pp...

...A call for the creation of new coalitions might seem, in view of the radical indictment of liberal America, an insufficient response, a superficial solution to a grave defect in the system...

...By the time Madison was writing his defense of the Constitution he could regard it as self-evident that "the causes of faction are thus sown into the nature of man," and since those causes cannot realistically be eliminated without destroying liberty itself, only their effects can be controlled...

...eventually, these communities founded to preserve a way of life became aggressive missionaries trying to impose that way of life on the wider national culture...

...Since individuals are perpetually in conflict with each other (as anyone who has ever heard of Hobhes knows) they are led, on the basis of their own self-interest, to delegate some of their authority to "the sovereign" in order to ensure the protection of their common securi~ and Oheir individual pursuits...

...Nevertheless, even the listing of alternatives---~for Goldstone, "conservatism," "liberalism" and "democracy"m can be useful, especiall,y when he implies a contrast between "liberalism" and an essemially~elitist "conservatism...

...For those who accept them as inevitable, these emerging corporate and imperial realities require not only the concentration of decision-making power at the highest levels, but also the imposition of stability on an inherently conflict-ridden liberal order, two needs which contemporary neo-Hamiltonian theorists such as Samuel P. Huntington have clearly articulated...

...and they may in fact have strengthened the corporate system...

...Rather, this critique is nothing less than an indictment of the main tendencies of the civilization of the United States over the past two centuries...

...The probability that, during the shaping of the American constitutional order, represontatives of both groups would therefore disagree with Madison has already been suggested by Cecilia Kenyon, and we can reformulate her argument in the terms we have been using...

...The old Hamiltonian conception of a public interest imposed by an ostensibly disinterested elite is currently 'enjoying a resurgence, for several reasons...

...Even if they did maintain freedom, some might ask, can either the assertion of self-interest or the restraint of power bring us any closer to an ap: proximation of justice...

...For Goldstene the Constitution is "the outstanding work of liberal genius" because it assumes thar since each individual is a creature of passion as well as of reason, each "contains a tyrannical disposition that can only be controlled by the existence of the identical disposition in another," and because it then tries to structure government around such dispositions...

...This, then, begins the contemporary radical indictment of a liberal America: a government which cannot provide justice but can only repress the victims of injustice...

...whom is vested w.i~h a . . . right to act according to self-defined standards of conscience and interest," and second, that the only legitimate function of "the sovereigu" is the preservation of order through the management of conflict between such individuals...

...great simplicity of manners," and "a large measure of equality in rank and fortune...

...When, at various points in the twentieth century, liberal spokesmen began to perceive that the market was not in fact controlling economic power, they could only fall back upon--and the liberal American electorate .would only acceptman attempt to apply the balancing schemes of liberal polkics to the economic realm...

...The major aim of the governmental pursuit of the public interest is thus allied with the subsidiary aim of governmental promotion of individual virtue...

...Sincerely, Hugh Scott United States Senator No one watching the crisis of the Nixon Presidency in 1973-74 could miss this constant invocation of the framers of the Constitution...

...Rousseau may indeed be--as some of his contemporary admirers would claim--the first major "democratic" thinker, but he was more pessimistic about the chances for what he called "democracy" than is often realized...

...Conversely, Goldstene would probably support Coleman's statement that the origins of the problem lie in the consti.t,utional order, or what Coleman terms "a constitutional philosophy" which forms "the consciousness of a whole people through their national inheritance" and "establishes the goals which will be pursued in the national political context...

...but the realm of economies has, ever since liberalism's inception, been placed nearer that of personality, so that economic policy has been more a matter of protecting rights than a matter of containing power...

...For a smaller but not insignificant number of Americans (including, obviously, these critics) those evils are not unrelated but constitute aspects of a single crisis...

...For as Madison himself came to realize, the preservation of freedom cannot solely be maintained by skilled lawyers, principled judges or even competition between ambitious politicians...

...Aware that "the actual structures of power grow ever more into an international system" (in Richard Sennett's phrase), they nevertheless persist in championing localism, with the result that their grass-roots solutions tend to fall behind their worldveide apocalypses...

...But--and this is Coleman's other main point about Hobbes's "liberalism"--the functions of "the sovereign" are limited to the preservation of order...

...because aU who might check the elite are, by dofinition, less than elite...

...The individual political orientations of scientists are irrelevant, Goldstene asserts in good Madisonian fashion...

...Others among these critics would maintain that a constitutional order premised on egoistic individualism eventually produces a society of egoistic individualists, selfmade monsters (to use Garry Wills's image) whose major product is themselves...

...It is moderately pessimistic in its expectations, but (as the logic of Hobbes reveals) also relativistic in its assumptions: individuals are the best judges, indeed the only judges of their self-interest...

...Conservatives," he suggests at one point, believe that as long as "the proper elite is in control _9 . . no interference with its rule should be allowed...

...yet a preoccupation with the most defenseless groups in the population seems ultimately insufficient as a liberal remedy...

...And they would also probably agree with Roussoau's assumption that a consciousness of community must precede attempts at self-government, and some even seem to concur with his view that representative government is a sign of political decay...

...Later that day, the Minority Leader of...

...But in a world in which freedom faces such an uncertain future, such a liberal remedy can help maintain freedom and even extend it ~o individuals hitherto excluded from its promise...

...And the experience of the recent past has even raised questions about what was supposed to be the constitutional order's greatest strength, its protection of diversity...

...It is equally likely that such a disparity will lead to mass passivity and individual neurosis...

...As Goldstene implies, the liberal tradition undoubtedly has sources of authority which will help sustain it in moments of crisis...

...In fact, during the period which saw the shaping of the American constitutional order, from about 1776 to about 1816, "liberalism" hadto struggle for ideological hegemony both with what Goldstene would call "conservatism" and with what other radical critics would call "democracy...

...Michael Rogin puts it lhis way: "groups so different . . . had to be incorporated or mastered, cured or imprisoned, made safe or destroyed" but "they could not be permit...

...For Coleman (and for ma~y other students of political theory) Hobhes is the flint great liberal thinker in the modern world...

...The Madisonian system cannot, in other words, achieve even an approximation of distributive justice...

...a society of fabricated individuals deeply intoleram of alternative cultures...

...two important ways: first, that the "only possible source of public authority is the private need of independentl~ situmed political actors, each of A society of self-interested individuals, reinforced in the pursuit of their self-interest by their "constitutional philosophy...

...The traditional liboral response to power is simply irrelevant, Goldstene coneludes, "when pitted against a corporate octopus of scope and dimension beyond the classical imagination...

...Ultimately, she concluded, it was the selfinterest of congressmen and federal judges in preserving the rights of their branches of government that brought Nixon down, and, she added, that was "how the framers of the Constitution understood . . . it would work...

...As such, it springs from several sources...

...The historical importance of the American constitutional order lies in what Gordon Wood calls its "total grounding of government in stir-interest and consent...

...For both Coleman and Goldstene the liberal constitutional order of the United States, with its structural balancing of power against power and its theoretical foundations in a doctrine of individualism, is directly connected to the crisis of contemporary America...

...In the 1790s Madison, the pre-eminent "liberal" republican, was challenged by what we would call "conservative" defenders of the public interest, "conservative" republicans who agreed with Alexander Hamilton that the public interest could be realized through the decisions of a disinterested elite_9 At an earlier point, in the conflicts preceding the Consti, tution, on the other hand, Madison had been opposed by what we would call "democratic" defenders of a public interest, "democratic" republica,ns who agreed wi~h Thomas Paine that the public interest Could be realized through the participation of the entire communky...

...In its optimistic code this philosophy can assume, as Paine initial: ly seems to have done, that individuals are in fact pursuing the common good, but it is more likely that i.t will be pessimistic and at any given point assume that too many individuals are not pursuing the common good...

...Radical critics other than Goldstene are more interested in contrasting "liberalism" with "democracy," though they, too, are not very specific about what they mean...

...And, as Coleman would add, the constitu.tional assumption that each of those individuals acts mainly out of self-interest "has turned out to be self-fulfilling because the institu.tions designed upon this principle tend to produce the behavior that is predicted...

...It is what we have called "conservatism...

...Those who can most appropriately provide the new element of balance this theory requires are scientists, because "scientific discovery . . . underlies a technological civilization...

...But their specific implication that the individualist philosophy of Hobbes and Locke was traasplanted to the New World and soon became the unchallenged American liberal ideology is open to question...

...They reveal minimal enthusiasm for (and in some cases, actual hostility to) the existing institutions developed to restrain power: not only the framework established under the eighteenth-century Constitution, but also the mass political parties coming from the nineteenth century, and the plurality of interest groups established in the twentieth...

...But even in these truly self-constituted communities what began as a homogeneity resting on consensus soon became a homogeneity resting on coercion and excluSion...

...As the struggle over domestic resources becomes acute, Americans begin to suspect that economic and political power are now merged, partners in domination, and that the old IF October 1978:650 liberal balance has failed...

...the realm of politics is public and its dangers of abuse must be contained...

...In the years of American hegemony in the two decades aft~ 1945, corporate access to foreign markets :was generally perc~ved as producing national economic growth and a rising standard of liv!ng for i, ndividual Americans...

...We can try to answer some o[ these questions by first of all clarifying this radical indictment of liberalism...

...But the historians' preoccupation with a uniquely American "republicanism" leads them to ignore the emerging assumptions of the wider Anglo-American political culture, one of which was the "liberar' element of self-interest...

...Rather, it comes from the Constitution's guiding assumption that only by institutionalizing the self-interest of the leaders, on the one hand, and of the individual citizens, on the other, could such tyranny he averted...

...For thoughtful journalists and politicians close to the centers of power, then--and probably for most Americans---" the system" worked in 1973-74...

...Having portrayed an American society without any real public, however, the authors begin to diverge in important ways...

...Because of its inherent absolutism--its belief that there really is a public interest out theremthis philosophy tends to lead to the conclusion that individuals must be encouraged by the government to pursue the common good...

...liberals" trust no one, neither "the one, the few, or the many...

...3~hus the radicals' alternative to "liberalism," what they call the "democracy" of a selfgoverning community, is not only potentially repressive but is incapable of resisting the systemic tendencies toward social inequality and economic exploitation which concern them the most...

...According to classical liberal doctrine, the realm of personality is private and Rs rights must be protected...

...the United States wrote the following note, by hand, as befit the dignity and antiquity of the proposed recipient: August 9, 1974 The Honorable James Madison Sir: It worked...

...But neither of these developments seems to have had much effect on reducing existing social and economic inequality...

...it was then, and not in the over-publicized Bicentennial celebration of two years later, that Americans rediscovered their eighteenth-century origins...

...Would an America organized on different principles be able to avoid existing evils, or would sttch an alternative presenl~ even greater dangers of its own...

...And such individuals will not tolerate any group which challenges their self-concept, whether racially or culturally deftned...

...Placing this definition of "democracy" next to Goldstene's definition of "conservatism," we might formulate the following statement: "conservatives" trust "the elite...

...Most recent historians have emphasized the evolution of the element of consent, or what might be called the "republican" element, and understandably so, for it was this idea of "governmen~ . . . deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" that was such an innovation in the eighteenth-century world...

...the eighteenth-century fascination with the physical laws of a~tion and reaction produced the American Constitution, the major at.tempt to actually construct a Newtonian polity, to replicate the laws of the universe in the framing of government by balancing power against power...

...but he also assumed that virtue was "the fundamental principle of republics...

...And, after almost two centuries of uninterrupted liberal hegemony, are .there any realistic possibilities for such an alternative...

...And if that is so, then encouraging those individuals to find their self-interest and organize themselves, on the way to entering larger coalitions, is not only logical but fully consonant with the American liberal tradition...

...Fixated on 13 October 1978:652 their "democratic" ideal of community self, government, the radical critics of liberalism offer few comparable alternatives...

...And on still another level, the current social problems that confront America spring directly from the inherent inability of the system to curb individual self-interest: we cannot begin to make our central cities habitable, Coleman maintains, wit.hout overcoming the prevalent assumption that "every American has the right to own and operate an automobile, to own a free-standing house on a half-acre of land, and to be provided with an expressway to his place of work...

...in order to gain a meaningful perspective, we must have some sense of what alternative ideologies might be, of what they would entail in practice...

...in that sense, Madison was clearly the most articulate and poreeptive defender of liberalism at this crucial point in our history...

...If some see the liberal constitutional order as America's salvation, however, others--often younger, usually centered in the academy, admittedly more "radical"-see it as part of America's continuing nightmare...

...Not only is it difficult to implement policy in a government of separate institutions sharing power, a point many others have made...

...That kind of remedy may seem obvious, but any assertion of the necessity for such coalitions must confront a number of recently fashionable solutions to our present dilemmas...

...Urdike other ideologies, Goldstene argues, liberalism assumes an eternal human failure to achieve ultimate harmony...

...At one level, he notes, American history is continualiy marked by agrarian unrest, labor violence, and urban riots, but in each case violence as a form of protest came from individuals who felt that the pursuit of their self-interest was somehow thwarted...

...His second argument is that abundance creates its own forms of discontent, because it challenges traditional assumptions about the scarcity of resources...

...Similarly, his belief that the values of scientists, the resources of the university, and the self-actualizing tendencies of students will somehow come together to challenge the corporate system has a somewhat wistful quality to it, especially in the context of the academic malaise of the late 1970s...

...Undoubtedly both Coleman and Goldstene regard the question of alternatives to liberalism as irrelevant The current social problems that confront America spring directly from the inherent inability of the system to curb individual self-interest...

...The decision to seek liberal remedies to liberal dilemmas, to rescue' 1;heralism from itself, rern,'rlns philosophicallu cmd tactically sound...

...At noon on August 9, 1974, a new President of the United States was sworn in, his predecessor having resigned under threat of imminent removal from office because of his violation of the Constitution...

...His own specific remedy in the final portions of his book, is spun from threads of argument scattered earlier throughout it...

...The anger underlying this radical critique, on the other hand, has its roots in the past decade's widespread perception of deep and apparently intractable evils within Ameri.'ca: persistent unemployment, discrimination, and poverty in the world's richest economy, unrestrained corporate power in a nominally pluralistic society, and a national-security bureaucracy gradually eroding the foundations of a eonsti.tutional republic...

...In the past decade both the erosion of the major political parties and the surge in racial and ethnic group-consciousness have been justified, often by the radical critics of liberation, as part of "a rej~tion of hierarchy," "a search for community," and the result of "an expanded consciousness...

...but it is equally clear that they, like Goldstene, do not regard the American polity as "democratic...

...Suchrepressive tendencies may well be inherent in any attempt ,to construct a polity on the concept of a public interest...

...and Nixon himself the authentic embodiment of liberalism in crisis...

...And, given the human propensity for conflict, a prudent sovereign would be well advised to seek the preservation of order through the management of conflict rather than through its total repression, for such repression might well drive self-interested individuals to calculate the advantages of rebellion...

...But, an optimist might add, it does not follow that the liberal order offers no remedies at all to the problems of inequality...

...It is a world of Kafka . . . . " The emerging corporate system is directly connected to a second reality which liberalism refuses to recognize, that of empire...

...It should be clear that strengthening the liberal order in the face of emerging corporate and imperial realities will require a good deal of effort...

...The sovereign" could not attempt to impose an ideal pactern of values since, according to Hobhes, none exists...

...nor will it create the harmonious community of which many contemporary radical "democrats" dream...

...The two authors just discussed are not ve~ helpful: Coleman because he does not even address himself to the problem of alternatives, and Goldstene because he names them without really describing them...

...Goldstene's book is a reflective essay on the ongoing American crisis and its relationship to the national liberal .tradition...

...It is also difficult to find much historical evidence to support the belief of some of these critics that dissent is compatible with .the kind of polities they would call "democratic...

...Only by confronting "the facts and implications of its own liberalism," can America begin to deal rationelly with its present situation...

...As a result, all of American life has been enveloped in a liberal framework so pervasive that we as a people do not even realize it...

...To rephrase his distinction in specifically political terms, 'both "conservatives" and "democrats" assume the existence of a real public interest...

...Again, this insight is hardly novel: it has formed a central theme in the social criticism of the last ten years...

...The scientists' centrality in technological development gives them potential power...

...Though some of them use an essontially Marxist framework of analysis, the spirit which broods over almost all their political theory is not so much that of Marx as that of Rousseau...

...Abundance produces classes of individuals whose yearning for self-actualization leads them to act on their sense that they are being exploited by concentrations of corporate and imperial power...

...But Goldstene's framework transcends his specific argument and can be used (very much like Madison's, in fact) by groups and institutions he has not considered...

...And that "system" was at bottom a constitutional order associated primarily with Madison, an order classically liberal in its fear of power, in its concern with balancing power, and in its reliance upon individual self-interest to achieve that goal...

...I I since they both assume that America has been and will al~ays be liberal...

...Such a liberal remedy will certainly not reduce conflict, which is precisely why contemporary "conservative" spokesmen view it with such alarm...

...First of all, Coleman argues, Hobhes broke decisively with the older natural-law tradition and made the individual the sole source of authority...

...It .is not necessary to lay at poor Rousseau's doorstep the assorted horrors of twentieth-century totali.tar[an:ism to see in his ideal polity certain repressive tendencies, tendencies best illustrated not by the spawn of charismatic dictators in our own time but by the age-old tendencies of self-governing communities ~ toward the coercive imposition of uniformity...

...In America at present, "opportunity declines _9 . . at the precise instant that the pressure for entry becomes greater, more anxious, and more intense...

...suffers the moral and social consequences of fragmentation...

...Coleman's book is a closely-reasoned analysis of the philosophical origins of the American constitutional order and their implications for American politics...

...That they favor whatthey ealt "domocracy" is clear from even a cursory reading of their work...

...To that question a pessimist might reply that the future is not totally indeterminate, that we as a people are what our history has made us, and that our liberalism probably preclude~ any radically egalitarian policies...

...and the current emphasis on a vague group-consciousness makes all the less likely that assertion of concrete self-interest which participation in any coalition requires...

...One might think that, given(these critics' image of an America dominated by unr~rained power, they would seek to build national institlitions to challenge that power...

...His thesis--that the present disparity between dreams of abundance and the realities of constraint will heighten societal contradictions---is not totally convincing...

...and following in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen, Goldstene believes that technological progress is separable from corporate development and that those who control that technology are more vital to society than those who control the corporation...

...For Coleman the origins of this "liberal" element in the Constitution--the idea ~hat since self-interest is the main principle of human action, even republican governments must he based upon it--are contained in the thought of the seventeenth-century iconoclast, Thomas Hobbes...

...The constitutional system's ability to maintain freedom by balancing official ambition against ambition may have been vindicated by Nixon's removal...

...democrats" trust "the people...

...ted to enjoy a secure and separate existence...

...II However detailed it may be, a critique of liberalism is insufficient...

...For Goldstene, the early modern origins of liberalism are not so much Hobbesian or Lockean as Newtonian...

...For these critics, then, "democracy" is not what most people take it to be, not majoritarian but egalitarian, not representative but participatory...

...One might almost say that for many of them "democracy" is nothing less than the self-government of a community of equals...

...Those who would now argue for the right of homogeneous populations to exclude others from their community might remember that it was similar motivations that culminated in the Know-Nothing movement in the 1850s and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s...

...Liberal America, he maintains, has had its own expansionist tendencies (the "manifest destiny" of the rfinetevnth century, for example), but contemporary American foreign policy is primarily the result of pressure by "enormous aggregates of venture capitat seeking profitable outlets...

...Some of the radical critics who now champion community self-government should be reminded of these expansionist impulses...

...their struggle with the corporate system over the shrinking resources of a collapsing empire gives them the motivation to assert that power...

...This is not the place nor I the author to argue either the validity of these specific perceptions or the more general sense of crisis to which they are related...

...In the first place, as Goldstene (and behind him, J. K. GalbraiCh) has argued, the traditional capitalism which historically arose with liberalism is now dead, having been transformed into a corporate system_9 In the second place, as the continuing revelations about the CIA graphically reveal, our liberal republic has gradually acquired the attributes of an imperial state...

...And he is surely right in arguing that the need to create new balances of power and the need to articulate new kinds of self-interest become more urgent with each expansion of the corporate system...

...And while he believes it a matter of the greatest urgency that Americans accept the fact that they are a liberal people and confront the problems arising from that fact, he doubts whether Americans will ever abandon their liberal tradition to the degree which the radical advocates of "democracy" deem necessary...

...as a result our history has produced both spasms of furious action outside the political system and a recurrent unwillingness to challenge its basic principles...

...The liberal advocates the advancement of reason by placing the improvement and protection of rights in the hands of a state which comprises the greatest danger to rights and hence to reason itself...

...Nonetheless their analyses converge at important points and ultimately complemen,t each other...

...His first argument emphasizes abundance: it is abundance, he maintains, which has sustained liberal ideology and corporate power for so long in America...

...Under their interpretation, the intellectual achievement embodied in the Constitution lies not only in its fear of the tyranny of concentrated power (which goes back to classical antiquity) nor even in its acceptance of the more recent discovery that"the many" in a republic can he as actively oppressive as "the one" in a monarchy...

...On another level, the political system is' continually prone to corruption because a "constitutional philosophy" which bases public order on the private need of the citizens is incapable of protecting public resources from the private gain of the leaders...

...But Goldstene believes that such attempts at balance have failed to recognize that the evolution of the modern corporation has rendered the original liberal calculus obsolete...

...in his view American liberalism is less responsible for shaping present realities than for refusing to recognize them...

...Coleman, for example, shares Goldstene's definition of the problem: "the despair and lost sense of purpose which currently pervade the American order are . . . . manifestations of a liberal logic unfQlding...

...for all these conditions could not exist without virtue...

...But insofar as the current crisis has eroded liberal foundations, a point about which its academic critics have made so much, it is not the discordant set of repressive and egalitarian impulses which they call "democracy" that will most likely replace liberalism...

...It should be clear that this radical critique of liberalism represents far more than a specifte attack on that segment of the Democratic party which, from the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt to that of Edward M. Kennedy, has been labeled "liberal...

...Especially since the 1930s, liberal policy has therefore emphasized the organization of farmers, workers, and (less successfully) consumers into blocs to counter corporate power, "to correct the natural tendency of capitalism to lose its inner balance and . . . to avoid the tyranny which ,must result...

...Goldstene's argument here raises a pumber of questions...

...The American "constitutional philosophy," Coleman believes, agrees with Hobhes in...

...What is novel about Goldstene's analysis is the way he integrates these two arguments on the sources of abundance and on the discontent it produces...

...He assumed, as we have seen, that democracy was dependent on "a very small state," "gre~t simplici...

...This crisis ~calls for a new liberal theory which starts from the premise that traditional capitalism is dead and that the emerging corporate system is incompatible not only with the constitutional order but with the welfare of the American people...

...Goldstene further argues, however, that in contrast with "liberals," both "conservatives" and "democrats" assume the possibility ~af an tfltimate harmony within individuals and between them, whether through acceptance of natural law (in the one case) or the general will (in the other...

...While Coleman is primarily concerned with the individualistic assumptions of the American constitutional order, Goldstene concentrates on the attitudes toward power which result from thorn...

...The current civil-libertarian effort to protect individuals against the abuse of power by petty tyrants in schools, hospitals and prisons (as well as by megalomaniacs in the White House and their agents in the FBI and the CIA) is a significant development in the advancement of freedom...

...Under the original liberal formulation, the problem of power did not exist in the economic realm, because only the market could exert such control in the most immediate sense of determining prices...

...A philosophy which accepts the pursuit of the public interest as the major end of government, in contrast, insofar as i.t operates within a republican framework at all, must assume that the pursuit of the common good (or what the eighteenth century called "vir, tue") is at least a major motivation of human beings...

...Consoling ourselves with the more hopeful aspects of the recent past is not enough...

...But on the whole that is not the case...

...Commonweal: 651 Now students of political theory would agree that a philosophy such as Madison's which accepts the management of conflict as the major end of government also accepts (in fact, stems from) the proposition that the pursuit of self-interest is the predominant motivation of human beings...

...ty of manners,"" and "a large measure of equality in rank and fo~une...

...It structures its argument around the polarities of human reason, which makes the constitutional estsblishment of rights necessary, and human passion, which makes governmental violation of those rights inevitable...

...it Commonweal: 653 is .their self-interest which will lead them to assert themselves...

...For political scientists like Coleman and Goldstene who emphasize this element, how13 October 1978:648 ever, the United States Constitution .takes on added sign.ificance...

...the system saved us...

...Coleman's conclusions are perhaps the easiest to describe: a society of self-interested individuals, reinforced in the pursuit of their self-interest by their "constitutional philosophy," suffers the moral and social consequences of fragmentation...

...But that abundance has been made possible only by modern technology...

...For the most obvious injustices within the American polity may well stem from the fact that too many Americans, disproportionately those from lower-income groups, are either unsure about their self-interest or discouraged from organizing in its pursuit...

...Or, in a more precise liberal formulation, such a defense must appeal to the self-interest of sizable aggregates (or "factions") within the population...

...Communities can preserve their ethnic and cultural homogeneity, at whatever cost to individual freedom, but they cannot so easily preserve their other essential "democratic" condition, social equality, for the sources of inequality come from a system of stratification outside their control...

...What is needed therefore is the remedy toward which Goldstene's framework points us: the creation of new coalitions based on self-interest and directed toward restraining power...

...But within this space we can at least raise the following questions: to what extent are these evils inextricably connected to liberal America, to either the constitutional order or to the society which it reinforces...

...The present corporate reality "is no longer the world of Locke...