The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton
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The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton
320Paperback
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Overview
Originally published in 1974.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691618081 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1798 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.30(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Death of Communal Liberty
A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton
By Benjamin R. Barber
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1974 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07554-9
CHAPTER 1
Political Theory and Swiss Practice
The Political Theory of Freedom
The apparent pluralism and professed heterogeneity of current political thought sometimes lead us to forget its stunning parochialism. Many of our political ideas and most of our political practices have been distilled from an Anglo-American tradition that is as insular as it is fertile, as narrow as it is long, as dogmatic as it is convincing. This tradition takes its theoretic orientation from the psychological hedonism and atomistic individualism of Thomas Hobbes, and relies on terms like power and interest to get at the political. It has been conditioned by the history of constitutionalism, limited government, and natural rights it helped to make. It informs almost everything written today about notions of freedom, democracy, and popular sovereignty. It does not so much offer answers as dictate the framework within which questions can be formulated and posed. It does not, for example, always insist that men must choose private rights over public obligations, but it does suggest that the two are necessarily incompatible. It may not deny that freedom can be construed as something more than the mere absence of constraints, but it will be certain that such constructions tend inevitably to totalitarianism. It is a tradition the spokesmen of which represent a noble lineage from Hobbes, down through Locke, Hume, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, to Bertrand Russell and Isaiah Berlin. Although it has had to compete with philosophical rivals as vigorous as romanticism, Hegelianism and phenomenology, its place in Anglo-American popular thinking and political practice has always seemed untouchable. As a result, whatever inroads fashionable European ideologies like historicism or existentialism may make in academic and literary consciousness, liberal constitutionalism as it has been shaped by British empiricism and American pragmatism continues to dominate the way we think about and practice politics. This is particularly true of two paramount political ideas to which we have already alluded: freedom and democracy. Both notions have had a normal form in our thought; deviations from the norm have generally been understood as aberrant or even pathological. Thus, freedom has generally been associated with a physical-mechanistic model exemplified by Hobbes' well-known definition of liberty as "the absence of external impediments of motion." Any number of sources can be cited that confirm the preeminence of the Hobbesian view. To the eighteenth-century philosophe Helvetius, "the free man is a man who is not in irons, nor imprisoned, nor terrorized like a slave by fear of punishment." Isaiah Berlin concludes that "the fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor." In political terms, freedom as the absence of constraints connotes limited or minimal government. "Perfect liberty is equivalent to total absence of government," writes Bernard Bosanquet, echoing a sentiment with which even Lenin can feel comfortable. "While the state exists," insisted Lenin in State and Revolution, "there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state."
Democracy likewise has been interpreted within the confines of our liberal constitutionalism to mean a system of government founded on popular sovereignty as a fundamental check on political power. The focus has been on controls over and limits on government rather than on public participation in government, on civil rights rather than on civic virtue. Democracy has had for us an instrumentalist flavor. It has preferred to treat public actions as a means to achieving private ends and defending personal rights, where it might have conceived of participation as an end in itself. It has insisted on equality of participation without regard to quality of participation, and has thus acquiesced in the gradual displacement of participation by representation. Where democracy in its classical form meant quite literally rule by the demos, by the plebes, by the people themselves, it now often seems to mean little more than elite rule sanctioned (through the device of representation) by the people. Competing elites vie for the support of a public, whose popular sovereignty is reduced to the pathetic right to participate in choosing the tyrants who will rule it.
Such partial and rather singular views about freedom and democracy are, in philosophical terms, patently something less than inviolate. Classical political thought regarded democracy with considerable skepticism, as the inherently unstable type ochlocracy, unreasoned rule by a populace that was intrinsically passionate; it regarded freedom hardly at all, at least not in the political context. More recently, liberal constitutionalism has had to treat with a rival tradition whose meandering way has been marked by Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and a diverging group of later neo-Rousseaueans, neo-Kantians, and neo-Hegelians whose only common denominator has been a distaste for liberalism and dissatisfaction with the notions of freedom and democracy it has generated. In other words, there is no lack of theoretical challenges to the tradition of politics so firmly entrenched in the Anglo-American consciousness, and it is not a philosophical battle that we propose to join here. That battle has been and continues to be fought and fought well. But even the most successful theoretical advocacy of alternatives to liberal constitutionalism must confront that tradition's ever-present embodiment in Western political life and in the historical process of modernization that has finally been made almost synonymous with liberal constitutional "Westernization." It must contend, moreover, with liberalism's most disquieting charge: that democracy disenthralled from the confines of liberalism is predisposed to totalitarianism, and that liberty when extended to encompass more than the passive absence of external constraints on action mutates into the most perverse tyranny; that, in other words, however sound alternatives to the liberal constitutional tradition may seem in conceptual terms, their manifestation in political life inevitably reveals them not only as deficient but also as profoundly dangerous and ineluctably pathological.
To combat the authority of actual political life, of a tradition that for all of its inadequacies has been a practical success for several centuries across two continents, requires something more than the rehearsal of adversary arguments in the abstract. We need instead the weight of arguments embedded in their own historical traditions, carrying the authority of an actual political experience. If the parochialism of our political thought issues from the potency of our political experience rather than the insularity of the philosophical traditions that inform that experience, what is required to counteract its influence is an alternative experience, not an alternative philosophy.
This book is an attempt to challenge liberal constitutionalism as a philosophy and as a political way of life — to uncover its limitations and to explain certain of its failures — through a sympathetic examination of the political life of an alpine people over the last 1,500 years. The multiethnic people of the once independent Republic of Raetia — now the Swiss canton of Graubünden — have experienced within their mountain communities a form of direct self-government far older than liberal democracy, and completely unassimilable by its categories. Their understanding of the relationship of freedom and communal politics has refused to obey the definitional rules laid down by liberal philosophers. More significantly still, they have pursued their alternative vision of liberty and democracy without either slipping into totalitarianism or being reduced to knavery. Their experience thus becomes a potent vehicle for the reevaluation of liberal democratic thought and a perspective from which the parochialism of Anglo-American political traditions is thrown into sharp relief. In this sense our study is truly comparative, for as Harry Eckstein has said in a study of democracy in Norway, the attempt to "compare a case with a body of theory pertinent to it" is comparative in the richest sense.
Not that this account of Swiss political experience can pretend to establish decisively the philosophical validity of alternative views of liberty and democracy. At best it can suggest the alternatives while disestablishing the claims to exclusivity of constitutional liberals. Switzerland's past may not precisely prove Rousseau's notion of moral freedom, but it seems to indicate conclusively that the predictions made by liberals about its consequences are false. Beyond this, however, there are neither pretensions of nor aspirations toward social scientific "objectivity." By the very nature of our concerns, our approach must remain nonsystematic, impressionistic, and be guided by a normative focus and an engaged passion, which the social scientist, though he will not evade them in his own work, will feel obliged to contemn. Its ideal is the strategy that has been described by Christian Bay as building "not only a bridge but a multilane freeway [to cover] the gulf between factual knowledge and normative study," and that has been so successfully employed by Louis Hartz.
Our normative concerns, then, must guide our inquiries into Swiss life, but Swiss life and the political notions that issue out of it must in turn take precedence over theory. The point is not to compel the Swiss to conform to the theoretical infrastructure precipitated by liberal democratic thought, but precisely to utilize their unique history to precipitate its own theory with which liberal thought can then be compared. Consequently, it does not seem prudent now to anticipate our study with a passive display of philosophical wares whose viability is at the very heart of the questions we need to raise. We will deal with theory, in transit as it were, only to the extent the materials themselves seem unable to speak for themselves. No grand theories will be propounded, no novel ideas proposed. Our task, rather, will be to convey, as unobtrusively as possible, the Swiss vision of political reality that, while it evolved within the familiar framework of Western political history, is strikingly inhospitable to the familiar predilections of Western political theory — at least in its liberal variations.
The Political Practice of Graubünden
"In the mountains: freedom!" exclaimed Schiller in tribute to the nation whose founding legend Wilhelm Tell he enshrined in verse. "Free, the Swiss?" mocked Goethe in response: "These well-to-do burghers in their closed-in cities? Free, those poor devils on their crags and cliffs? Yes, they once freed themselves from a tyrant ... but now they sit behind their walls, imprisoned by their customs and their laws, their pettiness and their philistinism. And there, up in the mountains, where they also affect to speak of freedom, but are trapped like marmots by six months of snow!" In fact, Switzerland has been subjected to a variety of searching inquiries — on nationalism, neutralism, federalism, and pluralism, for example. But its most frequent and controversial role has been as an exemplar or as a counterexamplar of freedom and democracy. Gibbon preferred the "liberty of the Swiss" to all other subjects (exemplar), while Count Keyserling concluded that despite its "self-appointed role as the land of freedom in all of Europe, Switzerland is in truth the most narrow and constricted" (counterexamplar).
Reviled or eulogized, the Swiss Confederation presents a unique profile that sharply distinguishes it from other European lands. It has known some form of republican independence since 1291 when the little forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden broke away from Hapsburg Austria; it has remained neutral in every major European war since the beginning of the sixteenth century. It possesses the most decentralized governmental structure in the Western world — its twenty-two constituent cantons retaining considerably more power than its federal apparatus; its 3,000 communes remaining more autonomous than the cantons themselves; its executive branch constituted by a collegial cabinet of seven ministers among whom the honorific presidency rotates annually. As a consequence, Switzerland's experience of freedom and democracy has shaped its political ideas and political institutions in ways that Anglo-American political thought has a difficult time conceptualizing. For it, freedom and political community have represented antagonistic parameters of an essentially anarchistic scale moving from individualism (freedom) to statism (political community, thus nonfreedom); in Switzerland freedom has been understandable only within the context of community. For it, autonomy has suggested a private right that defines the prepolitical individual; in Switzerland it has been a collective right that defines the self-governing community. The symbol of Swiss freedom has thus been the Landesgemeinden — the cantonal assemblies through which direct participation was assured, and ongoing self-government guaranteed — rather than a bill of rights or a declaration of freedoms. For Anglo-American political thought, democracy has been a servant of equality and an instrument of private and group interests; in Switzerland it has slighted equality (women received the vote only in 1971) in pursuit of a quality participation that would lend to citizenship a sense of public virtue and collective responsibility unknown to representative, pluralist democracies. For it, rationalization has been synonymous with centralization, which in turn has become integral to notions of progress; in Switzerland the spirit of localism (so-called Kantönligeist) has been regarded as an indispensable requisite of democracy and thus, as incompatible with progress only inasmuch as it can be established that progress is inherently undemocratic.
Indeed, the decentralization of Switzerland presents us with a paradox: in attracting us to the land as a fit subject for study, it repels our attentions with the reality that, by the very nature of its diversity and decentralization, it does not exist. That is to say, generalizations about Switzerland inevitably run up against Switzerland's integral diversity, and there they flounder. Switzerland's twenty-two cantons, in at least some cases, have differed more from each other in their historical experiences than they have from neighboring European countries. For centuries the Swiss Confederation was little more than a loosely knit permanent alliance of semisovereign states, and even today it draws together four national cultures (German, French, Italian, and Romansh), two periodically warring Christian confessions, and a range of life-styles encompassing the isolated alpine cowherd and the cosmopolitan Zurich banker. Diversity is Switzerland's essence, drawing our interest, yet defeating our inquiries. In Hermann Weilenmann's words,
there is hardly a single country which, in so confined a space, is so diversified as Switzerland, hardly a people so un-unitary as the Swiss, hardly a state with fewer competences or less power than the Swiss Confederation. Neither national nor historical frontiers, nor any other objective characteristic such as language, have helped to mould these individuals into a people; neither dynastic authority nor centralized government have helped to create from the valleys and towns a common fatherland, from the welter of communes a common state.
The common solution to this overwhelming diversity has been to focus on regions or single cantons of Switzerland and hope that they will provide conclusions about the country at large. The success of this strategy depends largely on the appropriateness of the example chosen. To think that the history of Geneva — an urban, French-speaking, aristocratic town annexed by Switzerland only in recent centuries — may illuminate the nature of Swiss politics can, for example, only result in a major distortion of the Swiss experience. What is needed is a "little Switzerland" that retains much of the diversity of the larger country while reducing its scale and diffuseness to manageable proportions. The canton of Graubünden, once the independent Republic of the Three Leagues, has already suggested itself to many observers as an ideal surrogate. As the historian Bonjour has noted, "the inhabitants [of Graubünden] long exhibited by their diversity, variety, independence and isolation, as well as by their forms of government, a Switzerland in miniature." Even in the eighteenth century it was clear to the German historian Zschokke that "of all the Republics associated with the Swiss Confederation, none is richer in the lessons of freedom than the Three Leagues of free Raetia."
Graubünden, in fact, has often been dubbed die kleine Schweiz (little Switzerland). It is the largest of the Swiss cantons, encompassing roughly one-sixth of the total area of Switzerland (over 7,000 square kilometers of Switzerland's 41,000 square kilometers), although also the least dense (with a population of over 150,000). Its history has followed an independent course for over 1,500 years, converging with Switzerland's only in 1800. It is especially Swiss in its diversity. Most cantons have had culturally homogeneous histories despite the heterogeneity of the country they together constitute. But Graubünden has had a mixed population of Germans, Raeto-Romansh, and Italians throughout its history, saddling it with problems of diversity no less troublesome than those of Switzerland as a whole. Again, where Switzerland is divided by religion — individual cantons tend to be either Catholic or Protestant — Graubünden, on the other hand, has had to tolerate a population which, since the Reformation, has been almost evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants. In many regions, these differences have segmented even the citizenry of single villages. Graubünden's religious complexion has been further complicated by the presence at its capital, Chur, of a Roman Catholic bishopric since the fifth century.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Death of Communal Liberty by Benjamin R. Barber. Copyright © 1974 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Acknowledgments, pg. ix
- A Note on Names and Translation, pg. xi
- Chapter I. Political Theory and Swiss Practice, pg. 3
- Chapter 11. Raetia to 1524—The Formative Years, pg. 21
- Chapter III. Raetia To 1800—The Republic of the Three Leagues, pg. 48
- Chapter IV. The Alpine Environment, pg. 79
- Chapter V. Feudalism and Communality, pg. 107
- Chapter VI. Surviving Independence, pg. 140
- Chapter VII. Direct Democracy in the Communes, pg. 170
- Chapter VIII. Communal Autonomy and Swiss Federalism, pg. 207
- Chapter IX. The Confrontation with Modernity, pg. 237
- Bibliography, pg. 275
- Index, pg. 293