Constitutional History and the Present Crisis of Constitutionalism
Authors: McIlwain C. H. 
Published: June 2006

No one can deny that the present struggle is one of the most profound and certainly the most far-reaching in the recorded history of the world. There is not a corner of the globe, civilized or uncivilized, that will not see the effects of it in the everyday life of every man, woman, and child. The outcome will affect every one of us as it will even the native tribes of Africa and Borneo.

We, on our side, are usually said to be defenders of democracy against the foe of totalitarianism. We usually define our position as the maintenance of democracy. But I think we are defending something more fundamental and even more important than democracy. Democracy may be the form of government best suited for that defence. We think so, and we are maintaining it for that reason. But this democracy is only the means—we hope and trust it is the best means yet found—of ensuring something far deeper and far more important than this democracy itself. That something is the sacred right of a man to be a man. It is not the fashion any more to speak of the “rights of man,” but nevertheless, under whatever new name we put it, it is that for which we have always fought, for which we must fight now, and for which we shall have to fight in the future. Under totalitarianism the state is all and man is nothing. Every member of the state is moved from above. He has no rights, not even the right to his own thoughts if they could be known. It is a system of compulsion and terror, of force and of despotic power. It is only half the story, then, if we say we are fighting for democracy-it is far less than half of it. We are fighting for the right to be men, and we are fighting against a despotic form of government which denies us that right. To put this more concretely, we are struggling for limitations of despotic will, to secure our freedom as individuals in all those things in which this freedom does not encroach on that of others. We are battling for limited government and against unlimited governmental authority; for we want government to leave some corners of our life to ourselves in which we may speak and act and worship as we please. In short, we do not want citizenship to be a synonym for slavery. If democracy is likely to secure this, then we are for democracy; but freedom is far more precious than self-government, and self-government must prove itself able to maintain that freedom or it may turn out to be a failure. So I should prefer to call our present world struggle rather a struggle to maintain constitutionalism than a mere struggle for democracy. It is a life and death fight to maintain some limits to arbitrary will; it is a contest between will and law. Totalitarianism rests on the assumption that some men or some races are by nature so much better than all others that the good of the whole requires that these men or these races alone shall rule and shall regulate the lives of all the rest as slaves. The present connection in Germany between totalitarianism and the tribal myth of German superiority is by no means an accident. Some such myth, even one as fantastic and historically false as this, must be assumed if total domination is ever to be justified. This is why I have ventured to give the title of constitutionalism rather than democracy to the opposition to totalitarianism about which I propose to make some rambling remarks.