Securing constitutional government: The perpetual challenge

Deepening our understanding of the conditions that make constitutional government possible thus remains an intellectual task of the highest priority. In the past two decades, scholars have done a tremendous amount of work in this regard. My aim in this article is to make a modest contribution along these lines. I argue specifically that nations achieve constitutional government in the sense used in this article to the extent that they realize the following conditions: (1) prevalence of this particular conception of constitutional government as a dominant ideology; (2) an official constitution in written or customary form that adopts this conception of constitutional government; (3) an institutional matrix that sustains the official constitution and translates it into the experience of the people; and (4) a healthy economy that supports the institutional foundation of constitutional government. It is immediately evident that the third and fourth conditions are interdependent, each being a cause of the other. There is nothing unusual in nature or in culture about reciprocal causation. However, it raises important questions about prospects for breaking and reversing vicious cycles that grip countries whose economic conditions undermine institutions in ways that cause further economic decline. I consider some of these questions and propose that the integration of these countries into the market economy and hence into the liberal constitutional order is an unqualified good for both the industrialized democracies and the Third World

Cultural Diversity and Liberal Society

Cultural diversity is an enduring fact of social life. Cultural differences exist within nations, and nations share a planet that is home to many different cultures. Even in the most homogenous of countries, where people recognize common ethnicity, speak the same language, and for the most part share one faith, there are subcultures shaped by conditions such as cast, occupation, wealth, and geography. In many countries, different ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities interact while seeking to retain their group identities. In the history of humankind, it is difficult to find a social system more tolerant of diversity than liberal society. Religious and ethnic minorities live under the protection of liberal institutions, and even groups that bitterly oppose liberalism flourish within liberal democracies so long as they observe the laws of the land. Yet not all cultures are compatible with liberalism in the classical sense, and the failure to recognize this fact may imperil liberal society. The challenge for liberal society is to maintain the greatest degree of freedom compatible with its own existence. In this article, I consider the classical liberal responses to certain key questions that cultural diversity poses. Note that I use the term liberal in its classical sense, not in the modern North American sense