The True, the Good, and the Beautiful: Structures of Social and Constitutional Thought

Описание: Why do we commonly refer to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful as the three grand realms of values? Why do we so often describe human beings as “thinking, acting, and feeling” or having the faculties of “cognition, conation, and affection”? Why do we assume that a democratic polity requires legislative, executive, and judicial functions? And could it be that all these questions have the same answer?


Such structures of thought – certain ways of dividing up the nature of the human and the nature of the social – have been handed down to us as a common heritage, and we rarely give them much attention. In this talk, John Levi Martin argues that a genealogical investigation of the most important of these structures shows not only why they have become so hegemonic, but that they brought with them a structural tension over the new place of reflective judgment – which has haunted constitutional thought.

John Levi Martin


John Levi Martin, a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2025/2026, is the Florence Borchert Bartling Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Social Structures (Princeton, 2009), The Explanation of Social Action (Oxford, 2011, 2021), several other books on theory, methods, and statistics, and various articles. He is currently the editor of the American Journal of Sociology. During his stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg, he is exploring partisan interactions on the floor of the Weimar Reichstag.


Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Januar 2026