Liberal Constitutionalism as Ideology PSIR 401 Liberal constitutionalism

Liberal Constitutionalism as Ideology PSIR 401

• Liberal constitutionalism: the combination of constitutional devices - separation of powers, checks and balances, civil liberties, and civil rights -that are presumed to protect against illegitimate political coercion against persons and which guarantee public influence over political decision makers.

• There is a broad sense of "ideology" that refers to the fact that laws can effectively establish institutions only if they are accepted as legitimate according to widely held norms and beliefs. • Constitutional protections and guarantees are ideological in this sense if individuals cognitively rely on them to frame their orientations toward the political world.

• In the case of the strongly democratic/Marxist/neo-Marxist usages, however, ideology means something more specific, although it is not inconsistent with the broad use. • There is a negative presumption that an ideology involves symbolic mechanisms that reconcile individuals to unequal relations of power that are neither necessary nor desirable

• The most common way of relating this negative sense of ideology to liberal constitutionalism holds that legal protections and guarantees involve a formalism that masks unequal relations of power.

• Thus, guarantees of private property may apply to all, but they systematically disadvantage those who do not own productive resources. • Everyone may speak freely about public concerns, but only those with access to privately controlled massmedia can effectively influence public agendas. • liberal democracy is nothing but the political form of the rule of capitalists and/or capitalism?

• constitutions as texts that express conventional transformations of power, as texts that signify social relations that are, in part, determined by the ways constitutional concepts are used. • Liberal constitutions "constitute" a public space by means of rule-like guarantees and protections. Within this space, politics is supposed to be carried on by the nonviolent means of deliberation and voting where interests diverge, and by means of deliberation and consensus where they do not.

• By constituting a public space, constitutions also constitute what it means to be a free and autonomous individual: They define particular forms of subjectivity by drawing bound- aries, by allowing coercive powers to enter some spheres of life but not others, and by marking off spheres of intimacy, reciprocity, freedom, and power that interact with and define public space.

• At their best, liberal constitutions transform power, expressing rulelike and normatively regu- lated public agreements, and conceptions of how individuals ought to relate to one another, as well as how they ought to relate to political authority. • At their worst, liberal constitutions produce ideological effects that are parasitic on normative ascriptions of subjectivity. • Liberal constitutions involve both moments: They are linked to one another by dissimulating mechanisms that misidentify social relations in terms of their normative potentials.

IDEOLOGICAL MECHANISMS: JUSTIFICATION, REIFICATION, AND DISSIMULATION • Ideologies justify prevailing distributions of power if, rather than masking, they recognize them for what they are, but identify them as right, proper, and good. • Formalist approaches to liberal constitutionswhich are popular among pluralist political scientists and rational choice theorists cast them as ethically neutral procedures for deciding conflicts between individual and group preferences.

• liberal constitutions produce justifiable outcomes because they allow individuals or their representatives to compete under arrangements that produce optimal equilibria. • The rightness of substantive outcomes stem from the neutrality of the institutional machinery operating within a context of equal voice and equal protection. • Because the process is neutral, whatever inequalities of power and outcome exist are likely to reflect differing efforts and motivations by individuals -that is, differing moral qualifications. • The ideological mechanism here involves recognizing inequalities but justifying them as right and proper.

Naturalize • Reifications misidentify the causal origins of social phenomena in such a way that they are removed from the realm of possible political action. • From this, one may deduce the inevitability of existing arrangements although not necessarily their rightness. • For example, an ideology may convey the idea that a representative democracy with limited mechanisms for popular influence is not ideal, but the best possible, given the (behaviorally observable) inability of citizens to deal with complicated.

• Likewise, although liberal market arrangements may produce skewed distributions of goods, these arrangements are the only ones possible given that humans are (by the axioms of neoclassical economics) motivated by a narrow, instrumental rationality. • Reifications recognize existing inequalities in power and outcomes, but they make rightness irrelevant: What cannot be changed is not an appropriate matter for political discussions.

Dissimulation (masking) • Dissimulating ideologies make promises that cannot be redeemed. • Unlike reifications, dissimulating mechanisms justify situations by misidentifying them, often by equating a single social relation with an ideal, and then abstracting this from the totality of social relations necessary to its realization.

• When, for example, liberal ideology identifies the contractual relation between employer and employee as one of free exchange between equal individuals, it obscures relations of dependence. • When these relations are suppressed, then the ideal -here, the individual as a partner in a free and egalitarian cooperative exchange - seems nonproblematic: It is manifest and realized in the exchange.

• Dissimulations are not lies or falsehoods. • Rather, they obscure because they highlight some kinds of social contingencies and suppress others. • Thus dissimulations involve reifications, but notas in the case where reification is the central mechanism -as a feature of the world to be accepted as necessary, but rather as a guarantee that the ideological goods rest on a firm foundation

• Focusing on dissimulating mechanisms allows one to ask of liberal constitutionalism how and why its promises are associated with mistaken characterizations of social relations in ways that limit and undermine these promises.