Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic.

• Author: Palmer, Tom G.
• Position: Book Review

Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic Edited by Peter Berkowitz Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, 2003

What kind of citizens are necessary to sustain a republic based on individual liberty and limited government? And is such a republic likely to nurture such citizens and thereby preserve itself?

Thinkers in a long tradition have argued that public liberty rests on the maintenance of civic virtue--that the freedom of a polity, state, or country is a matter of self-government, and that such self-government is best understood in terms of the self-control exercised by individual persons. If that is so, it may be that the only way to maintain liberty in a state is for the state to exercise its power to restrain the impulses of the persons who make up the state. As Quentin Skinner (1998: 33) described that view, "if civic virtue is to be encouraged (and public liberty thereby upheld), there will have to be laws designed to coerce the people out of their natural but self-defeating tendency to undermine the conditions necessary for sustaining their own liberty." If that is true, then public liberty can only be sustained by deliberately inculcating self-control through the exercise of coercive power.

In contrast, advocates of liberal republicanism have seen the good of public liberty as James Madison did, when he proposed that the Constitution be amended as follows:

That there be prefixed to the Constitution a declaration, that all power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from, the people. That Government is instituted and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right of acquiring and using property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety [Madison (1789) 1981: 164]. If the public good is defined as the enjoyment of life and liberty, that would tend to rule out coercive state measures to produce the public good, for such coercion would be incompatible with the nature of the public good itself. There would have to be, then, some other means to generate the virtues necessary to sustain a commitment to the public good--that is, the very liberal republican order that makes possible the enjoyment of life and liberty.

Liberal republicans have looked to the resources of free societies and studied how they generate self-reinforcing virtues. Liberals have argued that personal responsibility tends to produce sobriety, probity, punctuality, and other virtues conducive to the production of wealth and social progress. The harder question for modern advocates of liberal republicanism, however, is whether free societies can generate sufficient passion on the part of a sufficient portion of the public to maintain limited government and the rule of law (i.e., the public good). If not, liberal republics will decay, for there is no dearth of private interests that are at variance with the public good. As Adam Smith ([1776] 1976: 145) pointed out,

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. Given the ubiquity of such private interests contrary to the public interest and the willingness of persons to use the state for rent seeking, liberals must address the problem of how to generate countervailing interests in or attachments to the public good sufficient to overcome those private interests that undermine it.

Peter Berkowitz of George Mason University Law School has assembled an interesting mixture of what one would generally call "conservative" approaches to such questions. The quality of the contributions varies, but all at least pose interesting problems. Besides varying...