"Moral Anthropology, Social Ontology, and Authentic Human Freedom"

That's the (ponderous, I admit) title of this essay of mine, over at Public Discourse, on the work of Jean Bethke Elshtain.  A bit:

Law is “of, by, and for” the people—for real human persons. The project of promoting persons’ flourishing—their real goods—will, necessarily, proceed on the basis of some “anthropological” assumptions about what it means to be human, about who and what people are, and about what they are made for. The project can only succeed if these assumptions are true. . . .