Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 253 of the original edition of Walter Lippmann’s sometimes deeply flawed but profoundly insightful and still-important 1937 book, The Good Society [footnote deleted]:

It was here that the founders set themselves apart forever from the naïve theorists of democracy. They saw, in Burke’s phrase, that the constitution of a state is not a “problem of arithmetic.” So they refused to identify the will of the people with the transient plurality of the voters of one constituency…. They thought of “the people” as having many dimensions in space, in time, in weight, in quality. They thought, as Burke did, that a society is “a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection,” and “as the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations,” a civil society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” The American founders sought to represent this many-sided people and they thought of the people’s will as an equilibrium of its many elements.