Majoritarian and Consociational Systems of Governance: Paradigms in Conflict

• Author: Selwyn Ryan
• Pages: 175-194

Paradigms in Conflict 175

Do institutions matter more than agency or political culture?1 Do kings

make constitutions or is the reverse the case? If the latter, what kind of

institutional arrangements best facilitate good governance? Should powers be

separated, or should one opt for institutions which share power as obtains in

the American political system? Political systems come in many institutional

varieties. Amidst the institutional welter, one discerns two broad paradigms. In

the one, power is concentrated while in the other, power is shared. These two

broad paradigmatic expressions of political power are informed by “visions”

and epistemic assumptions about the nature of political man and his capacity

for justice and good governance (Sowell 1987). One view is that man is basically

good, that he is not the enemy of other men and that he or his political

representatives should and could be entrusted with power. As such, one should

not try to fetter man, and by extension his political institutions, with too many

“iron cages” or checks and balances. Man, Rousseau complained, “is born free

and is everywhere in chains”.

Others, like William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, shared the

dominant Enlightenment view that man was basically good and capable of a

great deal of human understanding. Natural man was not to be confused with

existing man who was corrupted by prejudices, artificial passions, social and

religious customs and institutions. Godwin felt that man was perfectible, and

that the task at hand was to “wake the sleeping virtues of mankind”. Good

governance does not therefore require prudential “trade-offs” between men

with conflicting and mercenary interests which have to be reconciled. Godwin,

Condorcet and Rousseau thus envisaged a political system in which the interests

of each would become identified with the interests of all, i.e. the “general will”.

Man will act in the interest of the collectivity and not in response to some

ulterior motive or in terms of the workings of some invisible or hidden hand as

Adam Smith claimed (Sowell 1987:25).

The competing paradigm held that political man was egotistic and driven

majorItarIan anD consocIatIonal

systems of governance: paraDIgms

In conflIct

SELWYN RYAN

CHAPTER ten

176 GOVERNANCE: THEORETICAL ASPECTS

by selfish appetites, and that the political system and its formal expression in

the state should be informed by this understanding of man’s true nature. This

view of man was best articulated by Thomas Hobbes and later on by the American

authors of the Federalist Papers. Hobbes’ formula for dealing with man in what

he called a “state of nature” as he understood it was to create an absolutist state

in which the sovereign was the “Mortal God” and all powerful. The sovereign

“Leviathan” combined in his person the roles of the executive and the legislature

and, in effect, defined what the consensus was. His role as sovereign definer

was to maintain order and create the environment in which men went about

the business of amassing wealth. He created civil society and not the other way

around. He determined what was truth and what was false and subversive.

Truth was contextual and nominal, not essential or foundational. For Hobbes,

peace and order were the sine qua non for good government. If there is no one to

wield the sword coercively, neither civil society nor state was possible.

Covenants without the sword are but words. . . The bonds of words are too

weak to bridle man’s ambition, avarice, anger, and other passions without

the fear of some coercive power . . . without which there is neither state nor

civil society but only a headless multitude . . .Nothing less than the chains

of despotism can restrain men from destroying one another (cited in Frisch

1970:62).

The fathers of the American Constitution, like Alexander Hamilton and

James Madison, were in the main heirs to the Hobbesiam tradition in terms of

how man was imagined. Unlike Hobbes, however, they opted for a system of

governance which sought to control both man and the sovereign. They sought,

as Madison put it, to find a “republican remedy for the diseases most incident to

republican governance”. They were thus consensual as opposed to authoritarian

or majoritarian democrats. Alexander Hamilton, for example, did not consider

political man to be perfectible or driven by concerns for the public good. This

notion, he felt, “was more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected”.

One thus needed political systems in which ambition could checkmate ambition,

and in which greed would neutralise greed. As Hamilton put it:

it may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary

to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the

greatest of all reflections on human nature.

If man was good, if he was the angel he was said to be, government would not be

necessary. As Hamilton asked rhetorically:

why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men