History bonus help please?

Question

The Preamble to the United States Constitution reads, "We the people...do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United states of America."

How exactly do those words capture the ideas of the Enlightenment?

Answer 1

The fact that they were free to finally make a just and righteous nation WITHOUT any authority and ANYONE could make it with dreaming the impossible.

Answer 2

The idea was that government is an expression of the people.  Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.  People create governments to fill a need. The government works for the people, not vice versa, and when a government no longer meets the peoples' needs it is the peoples right and their duty to either make such changes as are necessary to that government or to abolish it and create a new government.

So it is WE, the PEOPLE of the US who ordained and established our Constitution, NOT the delegates who signed the paper, NOT the states or the federal government--they work for us, as our representatives, our agents.  WE are the boss.  And the preamble goes on to explain why we were doing this--to form a more perfect union, establish justice, etc. etc.

BTW this idea of the government working for the people was also in the Declaration of Independence. It was not an American idea, it was an English idea, and the Declaration was only reminding Brits of their own political principles.