ESSAYS ON INSTITUTIONS

Jeremy Waldron, Political Political Theory: Essays on Institutions (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2016) ("Even if our main preoccupation remains with justice, liberty, security, and equality, we still need to complement that work with an understanding of the mechanisms through which these ideals--these ends of life--will be pursued. This is what I mean by political political theory--theory addressing itself to politics and to the way our political institutions house and frame our disagreements about social ideals and orchestrate what is done about whatever aims we can settle on." Id. at 6. "But first, what do I mean by Enlightenment constitutionalism? I mean a body of thought that emerged in the eighteenth century, but originated in England in the later decades of the seventeenth century, about a form of government and the structuring of the institutions of government to promote the common good, secure liberty, restrain monarchs, uphold the rule of law, and to make the attempt to establish popular government--representative, if not direct democracy--safe and practicable for a large modern republic." Id. at 275. "We need to get over whatever snobbery leads us to separate the work of the American framers form the boarder trends of the Enlightenment. Gordon Wood is right when he says in his essay, 'The American Enlightenment' that 'America was the first nation in the world to base its nationhood solely on Enlightenment values.' The Americans based their constitutional structures on Enlightenment principles, they thought of themselves as contributing to the constitutional thought of the Enlightenment, and those on the eastern shores, of the Atlantic whom we unhesitatingly categorize as Enlightenment philosophes thought so too." Id. at 276 (citations omitted). Most unfortunately and sadly, I think, late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century America (and Americans) has strayed from Enlightenment principles and values, embracing both anti-intellectualism and anti-Enlightenment.).