The Political Import of Jonathan Rauch’s “The Constitution of Knowledge”

“Rauch takes as his subject how we know what we know in public life, and what the greatest contemporary threats to our shared public knowledge are.”

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the seven words from the Declaration of Independence that have deservedly garnered the most attention and praise from Americans throughout our history. They have always served as a moral lodestar, guiding us toward better approximating a regime of true equal liberty.

But there are another seven words that flowed from Thomas Jefferson’s pen that might deserve renewed attention today: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” In addition to their radical content of equal human dignity, the very proposition of “these truths” was similarly earth-shattering in 1776. Jefferson and the Founders were purporting to legitimize a political movement and construct a new political regime on the basis of universal truth—not hierarchy, not tribe, not tradition. Truth—derived from human experience and reason—was the supposed progenitor of this new type of regime, an American one. That regime would coalesce around the Constitution of the United States in 1787, uniquely founded on the basis of “reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force,” as Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist No. 1.

While reading the Brookings Institution’s Jonathan Rauch’s brilliant new book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, it is essential that we keep this point in mind—that ours was a politics born of certain truth claims. Rauch takes as his subject how we know what we know in public life, and what the greatest contemporary threats to our shared public knowledge are. He stresses that knowledge is a social process—something we acquire together, arguing and debating our way through key mediating institutions like newspapers, academia, and scientific journals. These institutions and the values and mores undergirding them, argues Rauch, collectively form the “Constitution of Knowledge,” the life-giving structure to epistemic liberalism, just as the Constitution is the life-giving structure to political liberalism. Members of the “reality-based community” uphold the Constitution of Knowledge, just as citizens must uphold the Constitution of the United States. Rauch writes:

“The United States Constitution and the Constitution of Knowledge differ in many respects, but in the end what they do is the same: they compel and organize social negotiation. Each forces competing people and factions toward compromise, or at least accommodation, in order to achieve something they want to accomplish, whether to pass a law or claim knowledge. In doing so, each answers a fundamental challenge for any large and diverse and contentious society: how to provide dynamic stability?”