One INTRODUCTION : EVERY STATE A WELFARE STATE

THIS BOOK examines the constitutional dimensions of the welfare debate in America. The precise shape of state-facilitated welfare here and elsewhere will depend on results of policy experiments either under way or anticipated and on the contest among philosophic frameworks for describing those results. Because I share to some limited extent the conventional view that constitutional questions differ from policy questions, this book proposes few specific policies in the Constitution’s name. But I shall emphasize here what I have argued elsewhere: the American Constitution makes sense (and originally made sense) only in light of general substantive ends like national security, freedom of conscience, domestic tranquility, and the people’s economic wellbeing. For this reason, fidelity to the American Constitution entails a concern for more than negative constitutional rights, constitutional procedures, and institutional forms; it also entails a concern for what James Madison called “the solid happiness of the people.” And this must be the chief concern—the end to which all other concerns must bend. As Madison reminded critics who saw the ratification debate as a contest between confederated and unitary or “consolidated” forms of government, the American Revolution teaches that “the real welfare of the great body of the people is the supreme object to be pursued; and . . . no form of Government whatever, has any other value, than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.”1 I try here to defend Madison’s statement about the end of government and to show what it imports for the basic normative nature of the American Constitution, for the cultivation and maintenance of a people that appreciates such a constitution as its own, and for constitutional theory as a field of academic inquiry. I try to persuade constitutional theorists to take the Constitution’s Preamble seriously and turn to the hard philosophic and scientific work of formulating a forthrightly substantive theory of “the general Welfare.” I contend against