Walter Berns, a political scientist and philosopher who rebuked liberalism with an impassioned conservative view of American democracy, constitutional government and patriotism, died Saturday at his home in Bethesda, Maryland. He was 95.
The cause was pulmonary failure, said his wife, Irene Berns.
Berns was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank in Washington, and a former professor at Georgetown University, where he attained emeritus status in 1994. In 2005, President George W. Bush awarded him the National Humanities Medal, an honor recognizing Berns’s decades as a constitutional scholar.
Part historian, part political scientist and part philosopher, he sprinkled his writings with references to the Bible, Shakespeare, Camus and Lincoln. Much of his work, the legal scholar Jeremy Rabkin wrote in an overview of Berns’s career, “reflects the classical view that democracy depends on the character of the citizens, so their opinions and beliefs, their personal habits and degree of self-discipline — in a word, their virtues — will matter to the prospects of democratic government.”
Berns argued against unbounded individual rights and for restrictions on pornography, which he believed eroded self-restraint.
“Those who are without shame,” he remarked, “will be unruly and unrulable; having lost the ability to restrain themselves by obeying the rules they collectively give themselves, they will have to be ruled by others.”
During public debates over the morality of capital punishment, he maintained that the United States should continue to impose the death penalty.
“If human life is to be held in awe, as it should be,” he wrote in an academic journal in 1980, “the law forbidding the taking of it must be held in awe, and the only way the law can be made awe inspiring is to entitle it to inflict the penalty of death.”
Berns’s books included “Freedom, Virtue and the First Amendment” (1965), “The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy” (1976), “For Capital Punishment” (1979), “In Defense of Liberal Democracy” (1984), “Taking the Constitution Seriously” (1987) and “Democracy and the Constitution” (2006).
His 2001 book “Making Patriots” drew attention, particularly in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that year. Berns wrote the book “not to address academics,” he said on PBS’s “NewsHour” program, “but to address the general population, especially young people, and give them good reasons why they should love this country, because this country deserves to be loved.”
Berns did not argue for unquestioning patriotism, but rather for an enlightened form of the virtue.
“Citizenship implies public-spiritedness,” he wrote, “and it is in this sense that it cannot be taken for granted; like patriotism, it has to be cultivated. They have to be cultivated because no one is born loving his country; such love is not natural, but has to be somehow taught or acquired.”
Reviewing the volume in The Washington Post, book critic Jonathan Yardley wrote that Berns’s “argument is indeed strong, and it deserves careful, respectful scrutiny, not merely among the intelligentsia who reflexively recoil from expressing love of country but also among those for whom patriotism is a synonym for jingoism, imperialism and similar forms of arrogance.”
Berns emphasized that one could disagree with one’s country and still be a patriot.
“I favored the war in Iraq and I still have some hopes for it,” he said when he received the humanities medal. “But I can understand how someone who loves his country could be in profound disagreement with the war in Iraq, and I would not accuse him of being unpatriotic, and I part company from anyone who does.”
Walter Fred Berns Jr. was born May 3, 1919, in Chicago. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1941 and served in the Navy during World War II in the Atlantic and the Pacific.
He received a master’s degree in 1951 and a doctorate in 1953, both in political science from the University of Chicago, where his instructors included the political philosopher Leo Strauss, whose ideas helped shape modern conservative thought.
Berns taught at Louisiana State University and at Yale before joining Cornell in 1959 and becoming chairman of the government department.
During the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, Cornell became embroiled in controversy when armed black students occupied the student union in 1969. Berns sharply criticized the administration for capitulating to the students despite their use of force and resigned amid the upheaval, describing what he viewed as the “destruction of academic freedom and the essential purpose of a university.”
He later taught at the University of Toronto and other institutions before joining Georgetown in 1979.
Survivors include his wife of 63 years, Irene L. Berns of Bethesda; three children, Elizabeth Fradkin of Potomac, Maryland; Emily Heyser of Munich and Christopher Berns of Winchester, Massachusetts; and six grandchildren.