The True, the Good, and the Beautiful: Structures of Social and Constitutional Thought

Why do we commonly refer to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful as the three grand realms of values? Why do we so often describe human beings as thinking, acting, and feeling or having the faculties of cognition, conation, and affection? Why do we assume that a democratic polity requires legislative, executive, and judicial functions? And could it be that all these questions have the same answer?

Such structures of thought - certain ways of dividing up the nature of the human and the nature of the social - have been handed down to us as a common heritage, and we rarely give them much attention. In this talk, John Levi Martin argues that a genealogical investigation of the most important of these structures shows not only why they have become so hegemonic, but that they brought with them a structural tension over the new place of reflective judgment - which has haunted constitutional thought.

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