Barber Welfare and the Constitution

Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2583-7
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 49, 192 Seiten, EPUB

Reihe: New Forum Books

Welfare and the Constitution defends 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barber, Sotirios A.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Systeme Staats- und Regierungsformen, Staatslehre

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments ix

Preface xi

CHAPTER ONE: Introduction: Every State a Welfare State 1

The Negative-Liberties Model of the Constitution 5

Every State a Welfare State? 8

"Welfare": How Capacious the Term? 12

CHAPTER TWO: Charter of Negative Liberties: Arguments from Text and History 23

Is Positive Constitutionalism Ahistorical? 23

Welfare and the Framers 36

CHAPTER THREE: Negative Constitutionalism and Unwanted Consequences 42

The Slippery Slope in General 42

Does Welfare Constitutionalism Undermine Negative Liberties? 44

A Benefits Model and Liberalism's Private Sphere 53

Does a Welfare Constitution Reach Too High? 55

CHAPTER FOUR: Moral Philosophy and the Negative-Liberties Model 65

Is the Benefits Model Unjust or Unfair? 65

Is the Benefits Model Undemocratic? 68

Is the Benefits Model Antiliberal? 71

The Moral Philosophy of Positive Constitutionalism 77

Welfare and Moral Skepticism 79

Moral Philosophy and Intolerance 86

CHAPTER FIVE: The Instrumental Constitution 92

Some Formal Elements of the Instrumental Constitution 92

Welfare as an End of Government 96

Well-Being in America: A Hypothesis 100

What Constitutes Well-Being? 106

CHAPTER SIX: Is the Constitution Adequate to Its Ends? 118

Welfare and Power: Structure and Context of the Question 119

The Constitution's Formal Adequacy 122

Welfare and the Courts 142

Index 157

Über Autor(innen)

Sotirios A. Barber is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of On What the Constitution Means and The Constitution of Judicial Power, and coeditor of Constitutional Politics (Princeton).