Passions and Constraint (book) #1

Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy is a book on political theory by Stephen Holmes. I had not heard of the author and there are no reviews on Amazon, so I decided to try it. The publisher's description and the book's sections are here.

It says that classical liberals such as Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill did not regard humans as wholly rational egoists, and that human motives are commonly passion, custom and impulse. These liberal theorists recognized such motives in their political theories. They feared tyranny because of the latitude it gives to unconstrained passions. They did not identify freedom with unconstrained capacity. Passions often result in factionalism. Factionalism was a great worry of James Madison, as The Federalist Papers shows.

"As our list of representative liberal theorists suggests, liberalism should not be considered principally an antistatist philosophy of limited government. The fact is, liberals were as wary of anarchy as of tyranny. They advocated not merely freedom from government, but also order through government. Security is impossible without a state monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. ... [S]overeign power, organized on liberal lines, is an indispensable instrument of freedom" (p. 241).

Markets do not provide everything people need. The vital public goods of law and order and "stable political frontiers" (it wasn't clear what that term means) are not found there. The absence of these leads to factionalism and even anarchy, rule by mobs and widespread rights violations. The liberal-democratic solution is constitutionalism. It is meant to solve the problems of tyranny and anarchy within a single and coherent system of rules determined by deliberation. It is implemented by elections and by separation of power with checks and balances within government.

The USA's Founding Fathers aimed not only to prevent tyranny, but also to create an energetic government with the capacity to govern, rule effectively and "promote the general welfare." They devised the US Constitution after a period of frustration with a weak central government under the Articles of Confederation.

One chapter is about "gag rules," a term not commonly used. It means rules that "exclude certain emotionally charged and rationally irresolvable issues from the public agenda."