| Contemporary attempts to recover "liberalism" from its "communitarian" critics have overlooked much of the nuance and vitality of the tradition of liberal constitutionalism. Reacting to these contemporary philosophical debates, this work identifies multiple strands within the tradition of liberal constitutionalism. Drawing attention to the shift from an earlier, individualistic idiom to a later associationalist rejoinder in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, this study reveals constitutional thinkers to have been engaged in a sustained defense of the preconditions of civility against the dangers of pluralism.; Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and other eighteenth century constitutionalists saw collective engagement as necessarily corrupting of individual reason. In this view, an increased focus on individual instrumentality, privatism and self-interest appeared the best means to preserve constitutional order from the centrifugal tendencies of religious sectarianism and faction. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, however, we find a growing self-consciousness in the figures of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville about the limitations of this individualistic model. Only by recovering the spirit of associational life might liberal constitutionalism resist the individualistic logic of a democratic age.; By calling attention to these two distinct models of political socialization, each worthy of our consideration, this work recalls the problem of pluralism confronting liberal constitutionalism in the next century. Taken together, these rival views of associational life suggest that liberal constitutionalism must locate civility in the middle ground between the extreme poles of violent recombination and individual apathy. |
