chapter we discuss how the problem of slavery was handled), but the notion that a
government gains its legitimacy from the “consent of the governed” and that its
central purpose is to uphold the “unalienable” or natural rights of the people was
central to the framers. The “right of the people to alter or abolish” a government
that did not protect these rights served both to justify the revolt against the British
and to remind the framers of their continuing obligation to make sure that those
rights were maintained. The leaders who met in Philadelphia thought the Articles
of Confederation had become “destructive to those ends” and therefore needed to
be altered.
Paine, Jefferson, Madison, and other political thinkers of the American Founding
broke new ground in laying out the principles of republican democracy, but they
also built on the ideas of political philosophers of their era. As mentioned in Chapter
1, Thomas Hobbes argued that government was necessary to prevent people from
living in an anarchic “state of nature” in which life would be “nasty, brutish, and
short.” However, Hobbes’s central conclusion was undemocratic: he believed that a
single king must rule because any other form of government would produce warring
factions. Another influential seventeenth-century philosopher, John Locke, took
the notion of the consent of the governed in determining a government’s legitimacy
in a more democratic direction. He discussed many of the ideas that later appeared
in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, including natural rights,
property rights, the need for a vigorous executive branch that would be checked by
a legislative branch, and self-rule through elections.^11 Baron de Montesquieu, an
eighteenth-century political thinker, also influenced the framers. Although he did
not use the term “separation of powers,” Montesquieu argued in The Spirit of the Laws
(1748) that no two, let alone three, functions of government (judicial, legislative,
and executive) should be controlled by one branch. He also argued that in order to
preserve liberty, one branch of government should be able to check the excesses of
the other branches.Human Nature and Its Implications for Democracy The most comprehensive
statement of the framers’ political philosophy and democratic theory was a series
of essays written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay titled
the Federalist Papers. These essays explained and justified the framework of
government created by the Constitution; they also revealed the framers’ view of
human nature and its implications for democracy. The framers’ view of human
nature as basically being driven by self-interest led to Madison’s assessment that
“[i]n framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great
difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed;
and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” This analysis, which comes from
Federalist 51, is often considered the clearest articulation of the need for republican
government and a system of separated powers.
In Federalist 10, Madison described the central problem for government as the
need to control factions. He argued that governments cannot control the causes
of factions because differences of opinion—based on the fallibility of reason;
differences in wealth, property, and native abilities; and attachments to different
leaders—are part of human nature. The only way to eliminate factions would be to
either curtail liberty or try to make everyone the same. The first remedy Madison
called “worse than the disease” of factions themselves, and the second he found
“as impracticable as the first would be unwise.” Because people are driven by self-
interest, which sometimes conflicts with the common good, government must,
however, try to control the effects of factions. This was the task facing the framers at
the Constitutional Convention.“consent of the governed”
The idea that government gains its
legitimacy through regular elections
in which the people living under that
government participate to elect their
leaders.natural rights
Also known as “unalienable rights,”
these rights are defined in the
Declaration of Independence as
“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of
Happiness.” The Founders believed
that upholding these rights should be
the government’s central purpose.Seventeenth-century political
philosopher John Locke greatly
influenced the Founders. Many ideas
discussed in Locke’s writing appear in
the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution.Full_03_APT_64431_ch02_030-069.indd 37 16/11/18 1:30 PM