participation in the power of command. A mistake in
institutional design can needlessly damage even utterly
destroy a promising liberal politics. Moreover, no single
blueprint can be expected to function in all social
settings; worse yet, we do not have powerful theories that
explain why some institutional frameworks work tolerably
well in one social setting and fail so abysmally in others
What this means is that, in the liberal state, the power structure has no moral entitlement. Rather, it incurs moral liability, moral responsibility. That is why Richard Nixon's declaration about the moral authority of the presidency where such issues as the war in Vietnam were concerned was so misguided, not to say absurd. By liberal lights, it were better he had spoken of the moral responsibility that the presidency entailed. "Checks and balances," says Ackerman, "are not valued for their own sake but rather as tools to force government officials to talk to the rest of us as moral equals rather than dominating overlords" (1980, p. 307). Elsewhere, he states the sentiment in terms of a political principle that defines the limits and benefits of the liberal state structure in terms of one another:
Liberal government, in the end, is an expression of hope
that citizens, by reasoning together, can domesticate the
power struggle that is an unavoidable part of their social
situation. This aspiration is constantly at war with another
reality that government is itself a central focus of the
power struggle, permitting exploiters to cement their power
over their fellow citizens. There can be no hope for a
"final" institutional solution to this tension between
aspiration and reality. Yet, without the constant effort to
repair and construct liberal institutions of government, the
aspiration will co...