A Modern Puzzlement

There is no good human life outside of a state, and the good state enables us to live well together. Your personal good and the common good of your political community are constitutive of one another and, in designing our institutions, we also give ourselves an identity and, in that sense, constitute ourselves. So says “constitutivism,” the theory of government developed in this book.

Constitutivism is a new theory built on ancient foundations. While contemporary philosophical liberals wonder, with Margaret Thatcher, “Who is society?” and whether there even is such a thing, Aristotle defined human beings as political animals. We are creatures, he thought, that can only be happy as members of a political community.

Between Aristotle and Thatcher, a number of world-historic events and intellectual developments took place, one of which is commonly referred to as “Enlightenment.” Philosophers like Thomas Hobbes began to conceive of practical rationality as the ability to maximize one's personal utility. Applied in political theory, this idea results in a picture of the state as a joint business venture or, rather, an insurance scheme. To form a political community now means to pool resources with others so as to fund an institutional infrastructure, for security in particular, that enables each paying member to pursue their private happiness within this realm.

To adopt the insurance picture effectively means to reject the very idea of a political community. One insurant may have nothing in common with the next, and they certainly don't have a common good. Each pursues their personal good, having chosen to do so as part of a collective scheme. More recent liberal theorists, such as John Rawls, may postulate more extensive social obligations, but the liberal picture of rationality, hence personhood and hence the state, did not change in four hundred years.

Aristotle and most other ancient authors had a very different picture. He characterizes the state as physei proteron, that is, “prior in nature” or first in the order of things, which means that the state precedes the individual human being. Not chronologically, of course; his is a claim about essence.