caa a22 4500 388108002 CHVBK 20180307125345.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199909 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0008423900013925 doi S0008423900013925 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0008423900013925 Lusztig Michael Southern Methodist University Canada's Long Road to Nowhere: Why the Circle of Command Liberalism Cannot Be Squared [Elektronische Daten] [Michael Lusztig] A school of thought has emerged within constitutional and political theory that a middle road exists between liberalism and anti-liberal communitarianism. This road, which the author terms "command liberalism” permits societies that follow it to bypass the obvious inequities of liberalism while still enjoying the benefits of liberal democracy. The existence of this middle road would be but a piece of intellectual trivia were it not for the fact that for the past two decades it has formed the normative basis for constitution-making in Canada. It has been a root cause of constitutional conflict, intergroup animosity, constitutional paralysis and, potentially, the break-up of the country. Command liberalism is well represented in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In addition, largely as a consequence of the Charter, it was the raison d'etre of the ill-fated Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. For the most part, those who seek to travel this road in Canada do so with good intentions; they point to the appalling conditions of Native reserves, blatant examples of gender discrimination and institutionalized racism and homophobia within liberal democratic society as evidence of the need to construct more pluralistic means of collective representation. But good intentions do not square the circle of command liberalism. Indeed, the problem with this middle road is that it is circular, leading us back to where we started. Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1999 Canadian Journal of Political Science Cambridge University Press 32/3(1999-09), 451-470 0008-4239 32:3<451 1999 32 CJP https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423900013925 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423900013925 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Lusztig Michael Southern Methodist University NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Canadian Journal of Political Science Cambridge University Press 32/3(1999-09), 451-470 0008-4239 32:3<451 1999 32 CJP CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge