Thinking Historically: A Manifesto of Pragmatic Hermeneutics

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Introduction: The New England Town Meeting: A Founding Myth of American Democracy

Notwithstanding notable exceptions, historical investigation is far from central in deliberative scholarship and even recent work on participatory research stresses the need for more historical work. The aim of our introduction to this collective volume is to assess and to draw attention to the contribution of historical analysis in the current scholarly debate on democracy, in particular regarding the ways in which participation and deliberation emerge and develop in New England’s famous town meetings. Town meetings have traditionally been cited as one of the fullest and earliest realizations of the idea of democratic government and of deliberation at work. Nowadays the great debate on deliberative and participatory democracy has contributed to restoring the town meetings as a symbol of democratic deliberation. The critical study of how one of the oldest and most inspiring forms of democratic participation has evolved is not only a fascinating endeavor in itself, it is also a unique opportunity to better understand how and to what extent these institutional practices, inspired by ideals of deliberation and participation, can support – or impede – the democratization of today’s societies

Collective Interview on the History of Town Meetings

As illustrated in the introduction, the special issue ends with a ‘collective interview’ to some distinguished scholars that have given an important contribution to the study of New England Town Meetings. The collective interview has been realized by submitting three questions to our interviewees, who responded individually in written. The text of the answers has not been edited, if not minimally. However, the editors have broken up longer individual answers in shorter parts. These have been subsequently rearranged in an effort to provide, as much as possible, a fluid structure and a degree of interaction among the different perspectives provided by our interviewees on similar issues. The final version of this interview has been edited and approved by all interviewees

Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought

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To Promote the General Welfare: Why Madison Matters

This essay addresses an aspect of constitutional law that never gets old—the relation between the Constitution and the ideas of James Madison. When I began thinking about writing this essay, I considered addressing the issue of Madison and originalism. But I decided against that. Recent books by Mary Sarah Bilder, Saul Cornell and Gerald Leonard, Jonathan Gienapp, Michael Klarman, Jack Rakove, and chapters of Alison LaCroix’s forthcoming book The Interbellum Constitution have convinced me that for serious scholars in the field of legal history, the idea of originalism, whether it’s 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0, has been so thoroughly discredited that there is little left to say about it. Instead, this essay examines a way of thinking about the purpose of law and government common to several prominent and influential thinkers in the late eighteenth century. It is a way of thinking that might strike some readers as odd, and others as naive, particularly those whose training came from studying recent work in the mainstream social sciences, especially neoclassical economics, political science, evolutionary psychology, or any field bewitched by the idea of so-called rational choice. I argue that the primary purpose of government, not only for Madison but also for other influential American Constitution writers in the late eighteenth century, John Adams and James Wilson, was not to protect individual rights, or property, or the freedom to do whatever a self-interested individual wants to do. The purpose of government, at least from the perspective of Adams, Wilson, and Madison, was to advance the common good, or, in the words of the Preamble to the Constitution, to “promote the general Welfare.” That, I will argue, is why Madison matters