From Pluralist To Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First

From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics Putting Practice First CHARLES BLATTBERG OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6DP Oxford University Press is a d e p a r t m e n t of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford N e w York A t h e n s Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai D a r es Salaam Delhi Florence H o n g Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala L u m p u r Madrid Melbourne Mexico City M u m b a i Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Charles Blattberg 2000 T h e moral rights of the author have been asserted D a t a b a s e right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights D e p a r t m e n t , Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication D a t a Biattberg, Charles. From pluralist to patriotic politics : putting practices first / Charles Blattberg. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. Pluralism (Social sciences) I. Title. JA71.B534 1999 320'.01'1 21—dc21 99-045062 ISBN 0-19-829688-6 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddies Ltd Guildford and King's Lynn and the To my mother memory of my father Thus the hearsomeness of the burger felicitates the whole of the polis. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake Preface My country is in trouble. In 1982, then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau ushered in a series of constitutional reforms, the most important of which being the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter—designed, ostensibly, to give greater protection to the rights of individuals—has not only d o n e little to help Aboriginal Canadians, as well as contributing to a revitalization of the separatist forces in Quebec, but it has also led to what some describe as an exorbitant increase in the capacity of the Canadian judiciary to review and strike down legislation, a role which had previously been limited to jurisdictional matters, themselves rarely insignificant. Many of those who supported this vast expansion of the scope of judicial review and the compromising of parliamentary sovereignty that has gone with it justified doing so by invoking a particular kind of political philosophy, one which conceives of Charter-based judicial rulings as taking place from within a realm of decision-making that somehow transcends ordinary politics. According to this approach, judges' rulings, like those of bureaucrats, can and should be 'neutral' as regards the various conceptions of the good life held by the citizenry. The 'whitecoat' political thinkers behind it—those, that is, who would strive for a neutrality in politics which could be represented by the garb of the natural scientist—can thus be said to have combined with lawyers and judges—the 'blackcoats' of the legal profession—to