How to mitigate the fragility of rights with a shared “moral substance”.

In a famous passage, written nearly fifty years ago, Wolfgang Boeckenfoerde summarized the main political problem of our West as follows: “The secularized liberal state thrives on presuppositions that it is unable to guarantee by itself. This is the great risk it has taken for the sake of freedom. On the one hand, it can exist as a liberal state only if the freedom it guarantees to its citizens is regulated from within, that is, starting from the moral substance of the individual and the homogeneity of society. On the other hand, however, if the state tries to guarantee these internal forces on its own, that is, with the means of juridical coercion and authoritative command, it renounces its own liberality and falls back, on a secularized level, into that same instance of totality from which he had taken away with the confessional civil wars”.