Delegating Rights Protection: The Rise of Bills of Rights in the Westminster World by David Erdos
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2011.00873_1.x |
| Author | Simon Halliday |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
‘wish to command and dominate’ held by Machiavelli’s grandi. More importantly,
perhaps, having invited his reader to resist homogeneous accounts of ‘the People’,
the reader in turn is tempted to invite McCormick to resist homogeneous accounts
of the grandi and the popolo and to query whether the s ingular prism of class con-
£ict is the preferable alternative to the singularity of ‘the People’.
Thus having resisted homogeneity in one place, McCormick appears to re-
introduce it others. Doubtless faithful to Machiavelli, some readers will question
whether he is faithful to the citizens of contemporary democracies in doing so.
The same discomfort animates the prescribed remedy of class-speci¢c institu-
tions. It seems to satisfy McCormick that Machiavelli settled on this solution,
but some will searchfor an argument to prefer this remedy to the range of others,
includingreforming electoral systemsor political ¢nancing regulations. But these
are minor misgivings attending to the ¢nal stage of the argument. McCormick’s
journey into Machiavelli’s thought perhaps overreaches in the content of the les-
sons he seeks to draw for‘contemporarydemocracies’, but McCormick does not
overreach in signalling to his readers that lessons can be drawn from a re-reading
of Machiavelli’s Prince and Discourses.
I conclude with one other mi nor, but this time more general he sitation: McCor-
mick makes frequent appeal to ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ in exploring Machiavelli’s
thought, although the reader is never secure in knowing how these terms are
appealed to. Consider, by way of illustration, the following:‘the greater freedom of
action enjoyed by both political and s ocioeconomic elites i n republics . . . is a threat
to the liberty of other citizens’ (137, emphasis added). Situating usage of the terms
‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ within the republican tradition of non-domination could
have clari¢ed this rich and compelling re-introduction to Machiavelli’s thought.
John McCormick’s Machiavellian Democracy provides a welcome challenge to a
series of settled assumptions in political and constitutional scholarship. The read-
ing o¡ered of so controversial a thinker i n the history of political thought is com-
pelling, as are the lessons McCormick’s Machiavelli o¡ers to his readers.This is a
book deserving of a wide readership.
Gre
Łgoire C. N.Webber
n
David Erdos, Delegating Rights Protection:The Rise of Bill s of Rights in the
We s t m in s t e r Wo r l d,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 272 pp, hb d50.00.
In Delegating Rights Protection, David Erdos presents us with a fascinating and sig-
ni¢cant study of the political processes which have brought bills of rights into
being in Canada, New Zealand and the UK. Equally signi¢cantly, he also
accounts for the failure of Australia to do the same (at the federal level, at least).
The aim of the book is to develop an explanatory model which has predictive
qualities. In other words, through the medium of ¢ve bill of rights case studies
(two of which focus on Canada), he develops a thesis about the conditions under
n
Law Department,London School of Economics & Political Science.
Reviews
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r2011The Authors.The Modern Law Review r2011The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2 011) 74(5 ) 811 ^816
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