Madison on the Meaning of the "General Welfare," the "Purpose" of Enumerated Powers, and the "Definition" of Constitutional Government

According to James Madison, "the most important and fundamentalquestion" he ever addressed was the meaning of and relationbetween the general welfare clause and the enumeration of particularpowers. This question is the most "fundamental" because theanswer determines the very "idea" or "nature" of the U.S. Constitution.Commentators virtually agree on the answer Madison proposedand defended in Federalist 41, namely, that the general welfareclause is neither a statement of ends nor a substantive grantof power. It is a mere "synonym" for the enumeration of particularpowers, which are limited and wholly define its content. Fromthis answer, it follows that the primary meaning of the nationaldimension of the federal Constitution is limited government,understood as a government with a limited number of powers ormeans. The thesis of this essay, however, is that, contraryto the commentators' claims, Madison argued that the clausewas a substantive grant of power for the generally stated endand that the primary purpose of the ensuing enumeration wasto define more particularly the ends alluded to by the phrase"general welfare." Hence, the meaning of the general constitutionalgovernment in the American federal system is a government orientedto a limited number of limited ends.     

Metaphor, Intertextuality, and the Post–War Consensus

The idea of a once 'postwar consensus', between the Labour and Conservative parties, has become a commonplace in the academic literature of British political science. Here, I intend to briefly consider two aspects of this. I want to look at how the phrase 'postwar consensus' is used in a rather loose and indeterminate metaphorical fashion; and how the idea remains something of an intertextual construct rather than being a more fully developed social scientific argument. The simple moral or lesson being that social scientists require to be highly circumspect with regard to the subsumption of broad extents of time and/or space under some all-embracing catch-all label or designation.