The Constitutional Problem

Every institution faces the same decisive moment: the moment when the interests of its governors diverge from the interests of those it was founded to serve. The question is not whether this moment will come. It is whether the institution was designed, before that moment arrived, to survive it.

— Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons

The greatest political philosophers of the Western tradition were united in their understanding of the central problem of institutional design. The problem is not finding good rulers. The problem is building systems that remain just even when governed by people who are not good. This is why Madison wrote, in Federalist No. 51, that if men were angels no government would be necessary. The genius of constitutional design is the recognition that governance is ultimately not a question about people. It is a question about structure.

We have now seen what Providence is, how it works, what it is to live inside it, and how its Currency of Presence reaches all the way down to the ground of material life — to land and water and seed, to the question of who is fed. And it is precisely the reach of this instrument that makes its governance the gravest question in this entire volume. A network that can let relational standing govern access to the material foundations of life is a network of enormous power. Every instrument of enormous power can be captured, corrupted, and turned against the people it was built to serve. We have spent the preceding chapters establishing that Providence is a Currency of Presence — and that this currency is destroyed by extraction. An institution that minted such a currency while being governed by extractive logic would not merely be hypocritical. It would be self-annihilating, corroding the very substrate it depends upon. The coherence of the governance must therefore be continuous with the coherence the institution exists to cultivate. The structure must embody the value, because a structure that contradicts its value will, under pressure, betray it.