caa a22 4500 386321302 CHVBK 20180307111627.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130s1988 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0017257X00016997 doi S0017257X00016997 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0017257X00016997 Barber Benjamin Participation and Swiss Democracy [Elektronische Daten] [Benjamin Barber] AS THE GREAT HISTORIAN LOUIS HARTZ TAUGHT US IN HIS remarkable study The Liberal Tradition in America, anyone wishing to focus on the special character of a regime would do well to begin by taking the measure of what is absent rather than what is present. Like America, Switzerland has long been regarded as an exception to many of the conventional rules of historical and democratic development — Sonderfall Schweiz is how the Swiss portray and perhaps boast a little about their national exceptionalism. Switzerland possesses a unique form of democratic government the hallmarks of which are participatory democracy, neutrality and radical federalism (decentrahsm or localism, what the Swiss sometimes call Kantönligeist). These hallmarks give to it a character which stands in stark contrast to traditional Anglo-American democracy. The student of comparative politics will observe at once that a great many of Switzerland's leading political features seem to have no analogue in either the English common law or the American Constitution. Swiss democracy is English democracy minus most of English democracy's salient features: which is to say, it is scarcely English democracy at all. The powerful idea of natural rights as the armour of the individual against illegitimate authority (originally against the illegitimacy of absolute monarchy, later against the hyper-legitimacy of majoritarian tyranny) is largely missing, for example. Missing too is the tradition of an independent judiciary devoted to the protection of wholly private rights against an alien, power-mongering state. When Alexis de Tocqueville, whose liberal premises suited America so well, went looking in the Alps for something like the English liberties, he went astray. Not finding English liberties, he quite misunderstood Switzerland's regime. Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1988 Government and Opposition Cambridge University Press 23/1(1988), 31-50 0017-257X 23:1<31 1988 23 GOV https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017257X00016997 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017257X00016997 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Barber Benjamin NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Government and Opposition Cambridge University Press 23/1(1988), 31-50 0017-257X 23:1<31 1988 23 GOV CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge