Welfare and the Constitution

by Barber, Sotirios A.

• ISBN13: 9781400825837
• ISBN10: 1400825830
• Copyright: 2008-09-02
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Welfare and the Constitutiondefends a largely forgotten understanding of the U.S. Constitution: the positive or "welfarist" view of Abraham Lincoln and the Federalist Papers. Sotirios Barber challenges conventional scholarship by arguing that the government has a constitutional duty to pursue the well-being of all the people. He shows that James Madison was right in saying that the "real welfare" of the people must be the "supreme object" of constitutional government. With conceptual rigor set in fluid prose, Barber opposes the shared view of America's Right and Left: that the federal constitutional duties of public officials are limited to respecting negative liberties and maintaining processes of democratic choice. Barber contends that no historical, scientific, moral, or metaethical argument can favor today's negative constitutionalism over Madison's positive understanding. He urges scholars to develop a substantive account of constitutional ends for use in critiquing Supreme Court decisions, the policies of elected officials, and the attitudes of the larger public. He defends the philosophical possibility of such theories while also offering a theory of his own as a starting point for the discussion the book will provoke. This theory holds, for example, that voucher schemes which drain resources from secular public schools to schools that would train citizens to submit to religious authority are unconstitutional; First Amendment issues aside, such schemes defeat what is undeniably an element of the "real welfare" of the people, individually and collectively: the capacity to think critically for oneself.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Introduction: Every State a Welfare State	p. 1
The Negative-Liberties Model of the Constitution	p. 5
Every State a Welfare State?	p. 8
"Welfare": How Capacious the Term?	p. 12
Charter of Negative Liberties: Arguments from Text and History	p. 23
Is Positive Constitutionalism Ahistorical?	p. 23
Welfare and the Framers	p. 36
Negative Constitutionalism and Unwanted Consequences	p. 42
The Slippery Slope in General	p. 42
Does Welfare Constitutionalism Undermine Negative Liberties?	p. 44
A Benefits Model and Liberalism's Private Sphere	p. 53
Does a Welfare Constitution Reach Too High?	p. 55
Moral Philosophy and the Negative-Liberties Model	p. 65
Is the Benefits Model Unjust or Unfair?	p. 65
Is the Benefits Model Undemocratic?	p. 68
Is the Benefits Model Antiliberal?	p. 71
The Moral Philosophy of Positive Constitutionalism	p. 77
Welfare and Moral Skepticism	p. 79
Moral Philosophy and Intolerance	p. 86
The Instrumental Constitution	p. 92
Some Formal Elements of the Instrumental Constitution	p. 92
Welfare as an End of Government	p. 96
Well-Being in America: A Hypothesis	p. 100
What Constitutes Well-Being?	p. 106
Is the Constitution Adequate to Its Ends?	p. 118
Welfare and Power: Structure and Context of the Question	p. 119
The Constitution's Formal Adequacy	p. 122
Welfare and the Courts	p. 142
Index	p. 157
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