Taming the beast.(Leviathan: The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty)(Book Review)

Leviathan: The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty, by Clint Bolick (Hoover, 208 pp., $15)

IN 1651, Thomas Hobbes presented his vision of the social contract, and of the authoritarianism that he believed would be its natural result. The frontispiece of Leviathan featured a giant king, sword in one hand and scepter in the other, quite literally lording over the city and countryside. The word "Leviathan," in its original Semitic form, referred to a massive, terrifying sea monster, and appears to have been derived from an adjective meaning "twisted" or "coiled," suggesting some kind of dragon or sea snake.

Clint Bolick has therefore made a very thoughtful choice in titling his new book Leviathan. In his telling--which effectively mixes general statistics about state and local governance with compelling cases of political heavy-handedness--individual freedom is menaced by powerful states and localities, coiled around its choke points and ready to strike, as well as by much of the nation's judiciary, which has twisted the original meaning of federalism to subvert liberty rather than protect it.

If the reader picks up this volume expecting a handbook on how to advocate limited government within state and local politics, he will be disappointed. Perhaps someone should write such a book, but Bolick did not. He argues that electoral politics will not likely prove to be the most successful response to state and local tyranny. The political system generates rent-seekers, perfidious politicians, and voters suffering cognitive dissonance. Americans say in general that government is too big and tries to do too much, but then demand in specific instances precisely the transfers and intrusions they oppose in the abstract. "Such is human nature, whose excesses our republican form of government is supposed to curb," Bolick writes. "If the elected branches of government are unlikely to adequately safeguard liberty, where can we turn? For better or worse, the main recourse is the courts."

Conservative advocates of judicial restraint and deference to majority rule will bridle at the suggestion. But Bolick persuasively responds that principled activist courts, assertively defending federal and state constitutional safeguards, would be entirely different from the modern-day judicial activists who invent new "rights" that are little more than unjustified grabs of power or wealth from others. He argues that judges who take seriously the doctrine of enumerated powers, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, the "privileges and immunities" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the natural-rights philosophy enshrined in the Declaration of Independence play an "essential part of the democratic process, for they act to constrain the inherent democratic impulse toward larger government and the invasion of individual rights."

Bolick's Leviathan provides a solid introduction to such ongoing controversies as commercial regulation, racial preferences, property rights, freedom of association, asset forfeiture, and parental choice in education. Particularly instructive is his discussion of how federalism curiously ...