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Contradictions in currently dominant academic views on the Constitutional founding of the United States induce us to reexamine the deliberate reasoning informing its institutions, and thus to rediscover the problematic tension which exists between constitutional and democratie government. Madison's well-known argument at the Constitutional Convention on the problem of factions has been insufficiently related to what The Federalist calls the motives of passion and interest, which must be considered both in the elaboration of institutions and in respect to the fourfold aim of the Constitutional design : a popular government that is nevertheless attentive to the requirements of minority rights, political stability, and governmental competence. The solution to these competing aims of the common good led to the willful transformation of an agrarian society to a commercial republic in a vast federal territory. In examining this solution by the American founders to the problem of constitutional statescraft, one may see the symbiotic relation between the task of multiplying factions and the Constitution 's provisions for commercial growth combined with the separation of powers and federalism. Under decentralized political institutions and a commercial political economy, the multiplication of occasions for rival ambitions and interests attenuates their effects by diminishing their scope, in a way permitting that political moderation which is the condition for giving place, under the requisite degree of national consensus, for deliberate reasoning in the highest levels of government. This solution to the problem of constitutional rule requires, therefore, policies which promote equality of individual opportunity ; but it also requires opposition to policies leading to equality of result. Whether or no.t this solution be the best possible, contemporary studies which abstract from these considerations of prudence risk distorting thereby the perception of American political and social questions.

This comment takes issue with the applicability and usefulness of the terms « dominant orthodoxy » and « dissidence » to describe contemporary American debate over the Constitution. It challenges the suggestion that the influence of Charles Beard still gives direction to academic study of the American Revolution and the Constitutional Founding. It is the work of Louis Hartz, rather thon that of Beard, which has until recently directed the mainstream of contemporary American scholarship on the Constitutional era. However, the strength of Hartz's consensus paradigm has been weakened by evidence developed by more recent historians and political theorists, of significant conceptual variety and conceptual change at work in the debates of the Founding era. The thrust of recent scholarship on the Constitution has thus moved well beyond the influence of Charles Beard and the categories of dissidence and orthodoxy utilized by Terence Marshall.

The author summarizes the principal theses developed in his political interpretation of the American Revolution published under the title, La naissance de la pensee politique américaine. The theoretical conclusion of that Revolution in the Constitution of 1787 and in its interpretation by The Federalist Papers does not explain the two phenomena which continue to define American political life : the birth of a System of political parties, and the practice of judicial review by a non-elected Supreme Court. It is thus necessary to explain how these two phenomena, invented at the time of the « Revolution of 1800 » which brought Jefferson to the Presidency, could develop on the basis of the political theory on which the Revolution itself was founded.