‘We the People’: How the Constitution calls us to a common purpose

Back in the days before deaning distracted me from actually doing legal scholarship, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about the meaning of particular provisions in the U.S. Constitution. I confess that I didn’t devote a great deal of thought to the preamble, but at this moment in our nation’s history, I find myself increasingly drawn to that opening sentence: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

James Wilson played a central role in drafting these words, and in his recent book on Wilson, The Lost Founder, the journalist Jesse Wegman suggests that this sentence may be the most famous verse in what he calls “America’s civic poetry.” Mr. Wegman also describes “we the people” as “the three most resonant words in the history of democracy.”

While technical legal language makes up much of the text of the Constitution, the civic poetry of the preamble helps us to understand the central purpose of the document and the goal of the entire constitutional project. During what can often feel like a particularly fraught and fragile moment in our constitutional history, we should hear the poetry of the preamble as words that shape who we are—and also as a challenge that demands a response from us.

“We the people” are the foundation of this constitutional republic. The preamble calls us to remember that the constitutional project is not the work of atomistic individuals caring only for their own polarized and partisan interests. Instead, we are connected to one another as a political community in our shared commitment to a fundamental purpose: to promote the general welfare.

I suggest that we might understand promoting the general welfare as a way of talking about what the Catholic social thought tradition calls promoting the common good: working together to build a community characterized by institutions, structures and civic virtues that recognize and protect the inherent equal dignity of the person and allow all persons (not just all citizens) in the community to flourish in the fullness of their equal human dignity. A more perfect union, justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense and the blessings of liberty are all essential components of that general welfare or shared common good.

We often think about the Constitution as a document that protects a set of fundamental rights, and it certainly does do that. Important as the courts and the judicial process have shown themselves to be in protecting both those rights and our commitment to the rule of law, the civic poetry of the preamble reminds us that the Constitution is about more than judicially enforceable rights. The Constitution calls us (“we the people”) to recognize that we have not just constitutional rights but also constitutional responsibilities.

We share a responsibility to work together to promote the general welfare, to build a common good. The work of the constitutional project belongs to all of us; it is not simply or even primarily the work of judges and justices, or presidents and members of Congress. And a call to recommit ourselves to promoting the general welfare or the common good should not be understood as a call to empower judges or other officials to impose some sort of blueprint for the general welfare or common good on the rest of us.

Instead, the Constitution creates structures and institutions and protects basic rights that empower all of us, we the people, to argue about, deliberate over and democratically decide a fundamental question: What will most effectively promote the general welfare at this moment in our history—and what will most effectively allow all persons in our national community to flourish?

We the people have ordained and established a Constitution that empowers us to argue about, deliberate over and democratically decide always-evolving answers to that fundamental question. At this moment in our constitutional history, are “we the people” willing to carry out our shared constitutional responsibility to do that?

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Gregory Kalscheur, S.J., is the dean of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College, in Chestnut Hill, Mass. This piece is adapted from remarks given at Boston College on Constitution Day, Sept. 17. 

This article appears in November 2026.

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