A central theme of Jeremy Waldron’s new collection of essays, Political Political Theory, is illustrated by the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Among the multifarious reasons Republicans and Democrats alike might quail at the prospect of a President Trump—racism; intemperance toward criticism; degrading sexism; a giddying appetite for fiscal crisis etc.—one is underappreciated: By attacking a federal judge in a case in which he has an interest, and by threatening to use the institutional powers of the presidency to hound political opponents, Trump has proposed transgressions of the lines that are supposed to demarcate partisan conflict from the ordinary operation of government. To many, this willingness to violate, willy-nilly, important institutional bounds seems deeply unsettling.

The justification for that unease, though, is surprisingly hard to pin down. Conventions of national partisan conflict are not set in stone. The institutional pathways of national policy-making are also fluid. The New Deal catalyzed tremendous changes in the institutional forms of the national government, which are generally accepted today despite harsh criticisms at their inception. Today, critics of President Obama condemn his actions on immigration enforcement and environmental policy as unconstitutional innovations. If a President Trump were to change the way government works in his turn, would this not simply be one more round of institutional evolution, similar to ones that have come before?

At the heart of Waldron’s volume of essays is the idea that the quintessence of a sound and healthy democratic system is a set of “articulate legal structures.” These execute qualitatively distinct tasks and thereby promote a plurality of valuable ends. Most important, they formalize, channel, and enable resolution of inexorable democratic disagreements of policy and principle. A democratic polity, he suggests, cannot do without an array of distinct institutional forms. In particular, it benefits from having two branches of government. It also benefits from specific elements within each branch, such as a bicameral legislature. All these are, to use Hannah Arendt’s metaphor, democracy’s furniture. Guiderails for democratic settlement in a durable, civil fashion, they preserve national political life as a ‘going concern.’

This thumbnail summary, though, does not do justice to Waldron’s subtle, multifarious, and surprisingly coherent book. There are at least three other levels to the work, which I will only sketch here.

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