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could be compared with feudal baronies. Thus, it was left to Dickinson, who in thinking about devising structural substitutes for the English baronies, alone had perceived that the United
States already had institutional substitutes in the form of individual states–which, in a manner of speaking, were permanent and hereditary. He therefore proposed a mixed system, partly national and partly federal, in
which one branch of Congress would ‘be drawn immediately from the people’ and the other would represent the states as states and be elected by the states legislatures for long terms, ‘through such a refining process as will assimilate it as near as may be to the House of Lords in England.’ This combination of state governments with a strong national government, he added, was ‘as politic as it was unavoidable.’52
Dickinson justified this position by arguing the principle underlying it was “that a territory of such an extent as that of the United America, could not be safely and advantageously governed, but by a combination of republics, each retaining the rights of supreme sovereignty, excepting such as out to be contributed to the union.”54 As MacDonald noted, “every previous national authority either had been centralized or else had been a confederation of sovereign constituent states. The new American system was neither one nor the other: it was a mixture of both.”55
It was but a short, logical maneuver to our present system that avoided the purely national arrangement, by reconfiguring the idea of sovereignty around the notion sovereignty itself embraced a large number and wide variety of different and yet specific powers. Hamilton would be able to write powers of sovereignty among the states and the nation would be considered “sovereign with regard to its proper
objects” and, returning to Locke, if this were
denied, then the United States would furnish the “singular spectacle of a political
society without sovereignty, or of a people governed without government.”56
As noted by MacDonald, “this unmistakably
implied that the source of sovereignty was the people of the states and that the residue of sovereignty that was committed neither to the
nation/federal nor to the state governments remained in them–an implication that was subsequently made explicit by the Tenth Amendment.”57 Building upon past theories and past experiences, the framers of the
Constitution created a new order of the ages by being both conservative (derived from the Latin conservare, meaning ‘to guard, defend, preserve’) and radical (derived from the Latin radix, meaning ‘root, base, foundation’). By getting to the root of the matter, they had defended what was proper.
In the opinion of MacDonald, the Constitution marked the culmination of a tradition of civic humanism that dated back more than two millennia and of a common law tradition that dated back many centuries. But the order from which it sprang was already crumbling, and soon it was to be destroyed by a host of minor currents and events and by three developments of monumental force: the adoption of the Hamilton financial system, the French Revolution, and the enormous commercial expansion that accompanied the long succession of international wars which began in 1792. Together, these ushered in the Age of Liberalism, the Age of Capitalism and Democracy. The ensuing society of acquisitive individualists had neither room for nor need of the kind of virtuous public servants who so
abundantly graced the public councils during the Founding Era.58
The ensuing society and structure of
Could it be that we are in a unique time, when all of us are searching for new ideas?