Democratic Processualism

Stephen Elkin has written a remarkable book, Reconstructing the Commercial Republic: Constitutional Design After Madison. The book is noteworthy for its broad scope; for its development of the value of “commercial republicanism” despite Elkin’s serious worry about the political consequences of the poverty that a commercial society will produce; for its sophisticated engagement with the question of partiality in a constitutional order (especially as manifested in faction and party); and for its methodological insistence on a certain way of doing constitutional theory. It is this last element of the work that I wish to engage here. It is appropriate to read Reconstructing as a methodological invitation as much as constitutional theory. The book is clear about its hope, not only to develop our understanding about one good regime, but also to engage methodological questions about what “kind of reasoning should inform efforts” to constitute good regimes more generally (Elkin 2006, 75). Elkin reveals an almost combative relationship with academic philosophy, which he believes has impoverished rather than enriched constitutional theory. He says that much contemporary moral philosophy is focused on setting out the meaning and justification of certain values, as if those can be considered separately from the concrete institutions where those values are made manifest: