To elide this distinction is to distort the most critical component of the federalist concern to establish a constitutionally limited government, a republic in which strong wire protects the hens from the foxes. For Madison as for Plato before him, the question "Who will guard the guard ians?" is central to the craft of political construction. It is not resolved by the happy thought, "Well, they can guard themselves." Representative democracy is, one may agree, a form of government than which no better has been invented, but that does not sanction playing fast and loose with ambiguities latent in the term "self-government."
If Holmes's development of the second theme is a bit slipshod in places, the third is thor oughly ramshackle. There is a specter haunting Passions and Constraint; it is the specter of liber tarianism. Although I don't usually speculate about the biographical minutiae that may have played a role in shaping an author's manuscript, these essays convince me that Holmes is chafing under the burden of being taken by detractors and sympathizers alike to be a singer in the liber tarian choir.
And why should they not? The evidence is substantial. Holmes has made a career of vigor ously, unapologetically, and confidently smiting philistine antiliberals with their own asinine jawbones. Surely, someone might reasonably conclude, no such intrepid champion could arise from the crop of diffident, desiccated, demoralized welfarists who nervously skitter away from contagion by the "L-word." Who other than a libertarian promotes such a muscular liberalism? Some of us would wear such an identification as a badge of honor. But in the academic circles in which Holmes travels it is otherwise. Quite otherwise. And so to protest his innocence he inserts gratuitous antilibertarian sneers wherever in the text he finds an aptor not-so-aptoccasion. I counted well over a dozen. This amounts to more than a moderate haunting; it verges on posses sion.
By way of performing an exorcism, Holmes undertakes to redeem the soul of the liberal tradition for the democratic left. The legitimate inheritor of John Locke is, he contends, not Hayek or Milton Friedman or any of their ilk but rather John Rawls. An authentically classical liberalism suitably retooled for the circumstances of the late 20th century will, Holmes insists, be markedly egalitarian and redistributionist. If he can pull this argument off, it will be a major breakthrough for welfare liberalism, and in "Welfare and the Liberal Conscience," Holmes hauls out his biggest guns in service of these revisionist claims.
They misfire. First Holmes implausibly attempts to recast
conflicts in liberal thought between freedom and equality as
oppositions between different kinds of freedoms. If this were right
it would conveniently transform egalitarian-inspired fetters on
liberty into promotions of (other varieties of) liberty. Next he
maintains that the liberal tradition defends "sovereign, cen
tralized, and bureaucratic authority" for its "important
trust-busting functions," inverting the traditional liberal
critique of the state as the creator and sustainer par excellence
of monopoly.
Finally, bringing this stage of the argument to what he takes to be triumphant closure, Holmes cites welfare liberalism's favorite passage from Locke (First Treatise of Government, 42): "We know God hath not left one Man so to the Mercy of another that he may starve him if he please....As Justice gives every Man a Title to the product of his honest Industry, and the fair Acquisitions of his Ancestors descended to him; so Charity gives every man a title to so much of another's Plenty, as will keep him from extream want, where he has no means to subsist other wise." Concludes Holmes: "That this passage enunciates a universal entitlement to welfare cannot be denied" (italics in the original).
Has he succeeded after all in paving an impeccably Lockean road to the welfare state? I have often cautioned my students to be on guard when an author labels a result "undeniable" or "incontrovertible"; most likely they are encountering something that begs to be controverted. This paragraph is a paradigm of the genre. With breathtaking nonchalance Holmes utterly ne glects the qualifications that Locke carefully attaches to claims for relief from indigence.
First, such claims are directed only against "another's Plenty"; no basis whatsoever is admitted for redistributing goods away from those whose stock is less than plentiful. Second, transfers are justified only in the case of "extream want"; no global principle of promotion of equality in holdings such as the Rawlsian Difference Principle can be inferred from it. Third, alms are explicitly said by Locke to be a last resort; they are forthcoming only to he who "has no means to subsist otherwise." Fourth, the entitlement is only to so much as is required to lift the beneficiary out of desperate indigence to a level of minimal subsistence. Fifth, the title is said to be one of "Charity"and not, for example, justice or rights. But charitable provision is by its very nature voluntary, the free gift of a donor prompted by compassion or fellow-feeling. Claims to charity, accordingly, are not difficult to distinguish from a few thousand pages of IRS code or
Department of Health and Human Services regulation. If we are looking for a proposition that really does not admit of being denied, this is an exemplary candidate.
What, then, does the "universal entitlement to welfare" come to? Simply put, it morally obliges the fortunate to exhibit generosity toward those who are distinctly less fortunate. The gap between th
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