Chapter 3 - Liberalism and the Weberian Dilemma: from restraints on government to restraints on civil society

Summary

Social theorists, not political theorists or philosophers, most fully appreciated by the mid-nineteenth and then early twentieth century the effects that systemic pressures of social change were having on government and civil society. Among social theorists, it was first Karl Marx and then Max Weber who addressed most methodically modernity's negative effects. Marx examined these negative effects in terms of the relationship between capitalism, alienation, and systemic crises, and Weber did so in terms of the relationship between rationalization, bureaucratization, and authoritarianism. In succeeding generations, each theorist responded to dislocations of industrialization that had been accelerating in Great Britain and Western Europe since the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, dislocations that affected the United States and Scandinavia later in the century (Alapuro 1988 on Finland, for instance).

In spite of social theorists' profound analyses of these dislocations, however, constitutional theorists and liberal theorists by no means altered their portrayals of the liberal state and a market economy. It is understandable, of course, that those writing before the mid-nineteenth century failed to address the negative social implications of industrialization. What is curious is that so many influential constitutional theorists and liberal theorists failed to address social theorists' concerns conceptually far into the twentieth century (from Hobhouse 1911 to Friedrich 1941; Lindsay 1943; Loewenstein 1957; Sartori 1958). Today, legal scholars suffer greatly from this major conceptual limitation of their theoretical traditions.