'To Secure the Blessings of Liberty': Liberty and American Federal Democracy

The founding and subsequent development of the United Stateshave been characterized by a tension between two kinds of liberty,which can be called natural liberty and federal liberty. Naturalliberty refers to the freedom of individuals to do as they pleasewithout being shackled by civil society. Federal liberty refersto the liberty to be a partner in establishing the covenantfounding civil society, and then the liberty to live accordingto the terms of the covenant. Federal liberty has taken twoforms in America: one concerning the relationship between individualsand civil society, and one concerning the relationship betweenthe states and the federal government under the U.S. Constitution.Out of the tension between natural and federal liberty, thereemerged two constitutional traditions: the U.S. constitutionaltradition, which has emphasized individualism and the marketplace,and the state constitutional tradition, which has emphasizedcommunity and commonwealth. Since the end of World War II, however,there has been a shift away from historic syntheses of marketplaceand commonwealth. Increasingly, the states have been deniedtheir constitutional powers to support any particular moralorder other than that of the marketplace, and the federal governmenthas undertaken to establish a new morality of equality for thenation as a whole.     

An Inquiry Concerning Liberty and Equality in the American Constitutional System

This essay is an examination of the theory of constitutionalchoice that was used to conceptualize and design the Americansystem of governance as grounded in liberty and justice. Theinquiry is pressed to deeper foundations concerning the methodof normative inquiry and presuppositions about how conflictcan be used to drive a due process of law and a due processof inquiry to achieve conflict resolution in a pluralistic systemof order.     

Imagining the Economic Nation: The Scottish Case

The impending Scottish referendum on independence raises the question: what is a nation? This article addresses this question in terms of ‘economic nationhood’. Tracing the development of the Scottish economy over the last century and a half, it shows how the extraordinarily ‘globalised’ economy of pre‐1913 Scotland slowly evolved into a much more self‐reliant entity. Today, Scotland has a de‐industrialised and substantially de‐globalised economy, with a very large public sector about which key decisions are made in Edinburgh. Scotland has become much more of an economic ‘community of fate’ than ever before in its modern history.     

The Banner of Upright Swiss Liberty

The liberty of the Swiss has not been sufficiently appreciated,by Europeans, by federalists, and even by foreign lovers ofliberty who chose to live there, such as Gibbon. In his Bannerof the Upright Seven, Gottfried Keller of Zürich uncoversthe basis of Swiss federalism, displays the liberty it promotes,savors the well-being it provides, and yet shows how it woulddestroy it if its basis were forgotten. And he does so festively.