It doesn’t limit the scope of state power at all; it expands it. This isn’t just because rulers can get away with a lot more so long as they keep up the myth that they aren’t really imposing anything on anyone else but are merely the conduit by which people govern themselves. It’s also because the modern notion of self-government tends to assume homogeneous selves — that is, while older evolved systems of government tended to take into account the diverse interests of society (church, nobility, king and courtiers, peasantry, etc.), contemporary notions of self-government usually acknowledge only a single, general public interest. Today it would be difficult even to say what different interests should be represented in government — small businesses? multiple churches? universities? — since this way of thinking is very much out of fashion, and in any case which interests were represented in government in the Middle Ages were a function of power, not design. Kings had to deal with nobles and the Church, whether they wanted to or not.

The U.S. Constitution at least tries to give representation to the interests of the several states, and there are in any event many unofficial channels (good and bad) by which the interests of other sectors of society can be represented. But in thinking about politics, it’s a good idea to keep the unreality of the singular public interest in mind. (That’s not quite the same thing as saying that a singular “national interest” is unreal — a lot of British classical British conservative thought, going back to Burke and Coleridge, is concerned with representing the interests of the whole without subverting or overriding the interests of the parts. There’s an element of that in the U.S. Constitution as well, of course.)

Conservatives should accept this readily enough. Libertarians may balk at first — surely individual rights are all that mater? — but in practice the modern state has used individual rights as a pretexts for its own powers. The old, explicit division of interests had the advantage of being a bit more transparently power-driven. The nature of the state was somewhat more clear then, as opposed to now, where a great many people think they are, or should be, the state. (And as I’ve argued before, the problem with that view is again not just that they are more easily dominated if they believe they are the dominators but also everyone begins to think his “values” should be represented in government, which results in an ongoing low-intensity war for power.)

As Noel O’Sullivan puts it in the book mentioned below:

Since reason and conscience convey different but equally convincing messages to even the most sincere and intelligent of men, the result is that the theory leaves democratic government perpetually exposed to the terrorism of groups which acknowledge only their own self-imposed principles. The ideal of self-imposed limits used to defend the democratic conception of self-government, in short, is as readily available for the subversion of constitutional government as for its defense…

But …. instead of legitimizing terrorism and creating a constant threat of anarchy, it may equally well be used to defend despotic government. It can be used for that purpose because the democratic ideal of self-government (or popular sovereignty) shifts attention away from the exercise of power to its source. … Consequently a modern government may, without absurdity, defend any policy at all, no matter how inimical to law, liberty and the security of property it may be, by merely claiming that it acted on behalf of the people, or in fulfillment of some electoral mandate.

Filed under: Conservatism, Philosophy