State of Exception in the Anglo-American Liberal Tradition

This essay identifies conceptual and institutional approaches within the Anglo-American liberal tradition for meeting security challenges without compromising constitutional and ethical principles. From its seventeenth century beginnings, political liberalism has confronted the problematic of the ‘state of exception,’ and has elaborated a repertoire of ideas and institutions for governing exigencies that remain instructive. In the first half of the twentieth century, responding to Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberal insufficiency, liberal thinkers, especially in the United States, sought to show how liberal polities can govern emergency situations within the scope of law. Following historical and political developments since the mid-twentieth century, the solutions proposed by such figures as Carl Joachim Friedrich and Clinton Rossiter no longer seem adequate to present conditions of prolonged emergency. Fresh institutional imagination is needed. The article concludes by offering four broad guidelines for allaying today’s tensions between security and liberty.