Liberal Democracy and Social Control*

Andrew Hacker

American Political Science Review, 1957, vol. 51, issue 4, 1009-1026

Abstract: Liberal democrats, like all those who elect to paddle in the placid waters of liberalism, show a charming imperviousness to the existence of power. It is the ingenuousness which permitted the ideology of individualism to flourish for well over a century in the Western world. But all chickens—political as well as others—eventually come home to roost; and the failure to imbibe the home truths set down by such ungentlemanly characters as Thrasymachus, Machiavelli, and Pareto now accounts for the dilemmas, reconsiderations, and tortured defenses of liberal democracy which we see abounding on all sides.Liberal democracy—that uneasy compromise which was never a compromise at all—is, from the moral standpoint, the worthiest of political creeds. It can arouse the enthusiasm of the humane, the heretical, and the responsible: in short, of all men of good will. But the tenets of liberal democracy can only be a guide for governors and governed in a community if there exists a halcyon situation in which the traditional status system is placidly taken for granted by all in the community.

Date: 1957
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