14 A government of limited powers
American Constitution has indeed had an important impact upon the way
in which politics is carried on, but it must be made somewhat clearer what
we mean by ‘the Constitution’. The formal Constitution, the document that
emerged from the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, has been hardly changed
to this day. It remains fundamentally the same, in spite of the mere twenty-
seven amendments that have been made in the course of the last two centu-
ries. Thus, to the problems of meeting the challenges set by American society
and history there is added the difficulty of working a Constitution that was
devised by the men of the eighteenth century to meet eighteenth-century
needs, and in accordance with eighteenth-century ideas about a desirable
system of government. The Founding Fathers had not heard of atomic power,
Keynesian economics, radio and television, the railway or the aeroplane; yet
the American system of government has to deal with these aspects of modern
life and many others unknown to the founders of the American polity. Much
of this burden is carried by the Supreme Court of the United States, which
has the task of interpreting an eighteenth-century Constitution in a way
which will make sense in the twenty-first century. But it is the working politi-
cal system that has to translate this Constitution into action, and to produce
results that will be satisfactory in the modern American context.
Of course, the above description relates only to the formal, written Con-
stitution, but many aspects of it have been profoundly altered in practice,
and certain modes of behaviour, although not written in the Constitution,
have become just as fixed as if they were rigid constitutional rules. We shall
see this in particular in the working of the system of electing the president,
which operates in strict law as laid down in the Constitution, but in fact pro-
duces a result very different from that which the Founders intended. Then
there is a whole range of political institutions, such as the congressional com-
mittee system and the White House Office, which have grown up as a means
of ensuring a much greater degree of contact between the legislative and
executive branches than the Founding Fathers intended. Furthermore, the
working of the party system, and the existence of pressure groups, provide
extra-legal links between the parts of government, and thus articulate them
in practice.
The United States political system is the conscious creation of the hu-
man mind, an artificial creation, fashioned out of the wilderness within the
past 400 years. Although short by European or Asian standards, its history
is packed with incident, for the United States has had in that period to pass
through those stages of political development that elsewhere have taken 1,000
or 2,000 years. When the original colonists sailed for America they went for
two main reasons: either to escape from religious oppression or to make their
fortune in the New World. When they arrived they had to govern themselves
as well as to combat the wilderness and the indigenous peoples. The ideas
they held about government were inevitably largely drawn from the society
that they had left behind. The people of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and
Virginia established their own forms of government but, throughout most of