The chapter reviews the geographic aspects of Madisons system at the local, state, and regional levels. It begins with the crucially important rules that translate citizens votes into seats in Congress. It then describes how the advent of computers made it easier for politicians to evade traditional anti-gerrymandering rules and argues for an alternative, computerized approach that is simultaneously neutral, transparent, and respects the constitutional principle community. The scheme is further described in an Appendix. The chapter then turns to the states role in fostering political consensus within their borders while leaving room for different policy choices on the national scale. It concludes by examining how voters pushed the federal government into expansive missions that undermined the Framers principle of limited government and produced a bloody Civil War. The result was a new uncertainty over just where federal power begins and ends which still exists today.

Chapter 5 shows how false Stories help to perpetuate the political imbalance, described in Chapter 3, which rests on polarization and gridlock and thwarts the principle and practice of national majority rule. These Stories include those admiring many Founders, various traditions and virtues, limited government, and Christian nationalism.

Chapter 6 shows how false Stories help to perpetuate the economic imbalance described in Chapter 4. These Stories include those of economic growth, comparative advantage, creative destruction, and ceaseless innovation. Most of them originate in mainstream economics, including praise for shareholder interests and insistence on social choice theory. Karl Polanyi claimed that such Stories, which endorse a society roiled by constant change, ignore what he called community welfare.

Chapter 4 examines institutional and intellectual trends in the early Qing, up to the end of Kangxi’s reign. It focuses on the intellectual and political response to the Ming collapse, which spurred a large wave of arguments, both scholarly and political, in favor of light taxes and a noninterventionist state. In contrast to the heavily moralistic tone of Ming fiscal conservatism, the trauma of the Ming-Qing transition drove early Qing elites toward a fiscal worldview that was both more “realist,” but also far more hostile toward state taxation. This hostility stemmed directly from a mainstream historical interpretation of Ming collapse that placed much of the blame on late Ming tax increases, which, in turn, seemed to have cognitive roots in Qing elites’ deep-rooted moral skepticism of state extraction. Mindful of this “history lesson,” and of ethnic tensions between Manchu and Han populations, the Qing political elite committed itself, both rhetorically and institutionally, to very low agricultural tax quotas. At the same time, however, no such commitment was made towards nonagricultural taxes due to the specific circumstances of the Ming collapse.

This chapter interrogates the proper function of the law from a capabilities perspective. It argues that an application of the capabilities approach to understanding the law, especially constitutional law, is both normatively appropriate, and embedded in the realization of the capabilities approach’s goals. A recognized purpose of constitutions is to embed values, and entitlements commensurate with those values, into the foundational legal mechanisms of a country. Using examples from constitutions around the globe, the chapter shows concrete ways in which the capabilities approach finds expression in two ways suggested by Nussbaum: conceptions of citizen entitlements, and the interpretation of legal provisions. The chapter concludes by recognizing that viewing constitutions — both written and unwritten — from a capabilities approach is a vivid example of making visible the philosophic choices made by those who drafted the documents (where the discussion focusses on written constitutions), and those tasked with interpreting constitutional law in the context of people’s real, lived experiences. This approach to understanding the law is entirely consistent with the capability approach’s emphasis on an active role for government in providing the conditions that make real choices — about what to do and who to be — possible.

The second great transition is the organic development of the Western legal system – from legal frameworks for succession and transmitting landed property to the oaths of fealty, on into a macroscopic nexus of institutions, practices, and beliefs that formed a hypernetwork within the wider society. The evolution of the legal tradition, forging a system of strong but limited states, is a story of increasing returns. No legal document or pact like the Magna Carta exists in China. Its aristocracies never gained sufficient military, political, or ideological strength to demand rights that could constrain the sovereign via institutions. Imperial officialdom did not intend to negotiate with a corporate body in possession of its own resources and rights. Nor did the bureaucratic clans have any incentive to stem the centralization of authority. They acted as representatives of the state’s interests, not those of civil society. The legalist/Confucian state exercised authority over economic resources to an extent that no European monarch could hope to accomplish. It also counterbalanced power with a code of ethical responsibilities to ensure the basic needs of the population.