The declarations of rights issued during the American and French revolutions are the most important outcomes of the eighteenth-century’s debates about natural rights. Concise and clear in their language, these declarations distilled decades of theorizing into easily understood axioms meant to make citizens aware of their rights and of their entitlement to participate in the making of the laws under which they lived. The eighteenth-century declarations on both sides of the Atlantic were drawn up by legislators determined to protect the institution of slavery that so flagrantly contradicted their sweeping statements about natural rights, and they were not intended to grant women equal rights with men. Their expansive language, however, provided a basis for excluded groups to formulate demands that rights be extended to them, even if the authors of the declarations had not intended to do so. The most influential of these documents, the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, used sweeping, universal language. Intended as temporary, it was swiftly canonized as the embodiment of the principles of the French Revolution. The more radical French Declaration of 1793 incorporated social rights to welfare, work, and education. Napoleon rejected the idea of including a declaration of rights in the constitution he imposed in France 1799, but the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights showed the lasting power of the tradition inaugurated with the Virginia Declaration of 1776.

Wilson articulates a theory of multilayered representation in which nonprofit organizations play an important role. Applying James Madison’s Federalist No. 10 to the nonprofit sector, the author maintains that nonprofits offer additional layers of representation outside of election cycles and party platforms. Nonprofit organizations enable multilayered representation by reflecting the multidimensional needs and aspirations of individuals and the communities to which they belong. This representation lessens the possibility of faction as nonprofits create a wide and varied range of opportunities for identity development at both the individual and community levels.

This chapter considers the Federalist Papers, an essay collection by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay under the pseudonym Publius and advocating for the ratification of the US Constitution starting in 1787. Beginning with reflections on the origins of the word essay and its many meanings, particular attention is given to one of these: the essay as an attempt to do something, either as an action or through writing. A central question guided the ratification debate: Could there be an essay – a concerted effort – striving toward just representation? In the passionate debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, a secondary, hidden debate was simmering: In what kind of prose should arguments be articulated? Was the essay, with its notoriously loose style and method, up to the task? In its ability to accommodate multiple, sometimes contradictory viewpoints in the same textual space, was it ideal for puzzling out the nation’s future? Or was it too distracted, a form of bad thought scribbled in haste, unsuited for such a momentous task? This chapter shows the correlative features of striving toward a political ideal and the striving involved in essayistic writing.

It is not possible to argue that the framers wisely created the electoral college and provided a sound basis for selecting the president in the twenty-first century. The electoral college does not work at all as the framers anticipated. Electors rarely exercise discretion and are condemned when they do. Instead, they are agents of political parties, which did not exist in 1787. The House has not selected the president since 1824. In addition, most of the motivations behind the creation of the electoral college are simply irrelevant today. Legislative election is not an option, there is little danger that the president will be too powerful if directly elected, voters have extraordinary access to information on the candidates, there is no justification at all for either electors or state legislatures to exercise discretion in selecting the president, defending the interests of slavery is unthinkable, and the short-term pressures have long dissipated. Those delegates who wanted electors to exercise independent judgment or be selected by state legislatures would soon be disappointed, and there is no support—and no justification—today for either option. In addition, the broad thrust of constitutional revision over the past two centuries has been in the direction of democratization and majority rule.

A core justification for the electoral college, and its violations of political equality, is that it is necessary to protect important interests that would be overlooked or harmed under a system of direct election of the president. Yet such claims are based on faulty premises. States—including states with small populations—do not embody coherent, unified interests and communities, and they have little need for protection. Even if they did, the electoral college does not provide it. Contrary to the claims of its supporters, candidates do not pay attention to small states. The electoral college actually distorts the campaign by discouraging candidates from paying attention to small states and to much of the rest of the country as well. Instead, they devote their attention to competitive states. It is also the case that people of color do not benefit from the electoral college, because they are not well positioned to determine the outcomes in states. As a result, the electoral college system discourages attention to their interests. It does, however, provide the potential for any cohesive special interest concentrated in a large, competitive state to exercise disproportionate power.

The clash between the First and Second amendments in the US Constitution – the First guaranteeing free speech and the Second guaranteeing the right to bear arms – leads into a discussion of legal interpretations of the Second Amendment from 1791, when the states ratified the Bill of Rights, to the present. Using a corpus linguistic analysis of the Second Amendment, with a focus on "the right to keep and bear arms," and an examination of the US Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), we see that, just like any other text, whether a literary work, a sacred book, or an everyday communication like a memo or shopping list, legal interpretation is always contingent, always subjective, and and always subject to reinterpretation.

The dispute over the Tariff of 1828 marked a turning point for interposition. State legislatures passed resolutions declaring protective tariffs unconstitutional, increasingly using more threatening language that echoed the doctrine of nullification John C. Calhoun advanced in the South Carolina Exposition of 1828. Calhoun’s arguments distorted Madison’s views and transformed traditional sounding the alarm interposition into an option for each state to nullify acts of the national government that it considered unconstitutional. Nullification prompted a national discussion about the nature of the Union, notably in the Webster–Hayne debate in the United States Senate in 1830.Nullifiers quoted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions and Madison’s Report of 1800 to justify their constitutional theory, but misunderstood Madison’s theoretical right of the people to interpose in the final resort and overlooked the sounding the alarm interposition of the resolutions. Madison rejected both nullification and secession and tried to explain what he meant by a complex federalism based on divided sovereignty, ultimately failing to correct misconceptions about his resolutions.

The new Constitution had existed for a short time before Madison and others became concerned about constitutional interpretations that were expanding the power of the national government. This early dialogue about federalism centered on what each state viewed as undesirable equilibrium: either forces that would weaken the relative authority of states or forces that would diminish national authority. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s financial and economic policies were broad expansions of national powers including assuming Revolutionary War debts and establishing a national bank. Anti-Federalists and others viewed these policies as part of a dangerous trend towards national consolidation that would eventually annihilate the states. Southern states, in particular, thought that without constitutional amendments to constrain the powers of a Northern majority, the South would be unable to protect slavery. When Virginia’s legislature passed the nation’s first interposition resolutions and a memorial in 1790 to sound the alarm to other states and Congress, it faced Federalist criticism that it was illegitimately intruding into the federal government’s sphere.

As Americans have monitored federalism, they struggled with how a government based on sovereignty divided between nation and states might function. The Constitution’s shared sovereignty created an inherently dynamic federalism with almost continuous debates over the balance of power, making this testing of the balance of federalism and monitoring government central to the American constitutional order. Many constitutional debates involved the protection of slavery, yet other interests including debt, taxation, and police powers also played vital roles in shaping American federalism. State resistance to the national government utilizing the constitutional tool of interposition arose when the disequilibrium of federalism was most keenly felt and states needed to resist perceived constitutional overreaching by the national government. This state legislative resistance shaped the broader American political conversation about constitutional rights and jurisdiction and this debate over federalism is arguably a strength and not a weakness of the framers’ constitutional design,inviting each generation to determine what the appropriate constitutional balance should be.

Presidents Jefferson and Madison’s Republican-backed policies prompted new waves of state interposition. Federalist-dominated state legislatures in New England passed interposition resolutions that protested:Jefferson’s Embargo Acts (1807–1809); United States v. Peters (1809) emphasizing the Supreme Court’s finality over constitutionality; the recharter of the Bank of the United States; and Madison’s efforts to mobilize state militias before the War of 1812. After the controversy over the Alien and Sedition Acts and Jefferson’s election in 1800, Americans might have expected Republicans to advocate strict construction of national powers under the Constitution while Federalists would urge broader powers. However, defenses of states’ rights never belonged exclusively to one political viewpoint or party. Americans debated whether sounding the alarm resolutions and state interposition were legitimate state actions – and some asked if and when they would be justified in more forcefully resisting federal law, notably during the Hartford Convention in 1814 that called for constitutional amendments to reduce the power of Southern states and the repeal of the Three-Fifths Clause.

The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson authored as a repudiation of the Federalist-backed Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 are incorrectly viewed as originating the idea that John C. Calhoun would develop into his theory of nullification, that is, the right of an individual state to veto federal law. Although these interposition resolutions lacked support from other states, their interstate circulation mobilized a grassroots movement that helped elect Jefferson as President in 1800 and overturned Federalist policies. Despite their political success, what Jefferson and Madison meant by language they used in the resolutions burdened the future efforts of states seeking to monitor the governmental balancing of powers and resulted in a deeply troubling political legacy. Madison drew subtle but crucial constitutional distinctions, yet failed to explain what he meant by the theoretical right of the sovereign people to interpose in the last resort (expressed in the Virginia Resolution and in his Report of 1800). Moreover, Jefferson’s statements that unconstitutional laws were null and void seemingly foreshadowed the remedy of nullification.

This chapter analyzes historical and cross-national evidence to contend that the angry politics of populism does not simply reflect the autonomous preferences of voters shocked by the pressures of globalization. Rather, voters express right-wing identity issues only after politicians – especially mainstream center-right politicians – have accentuated appeals to cultural self-defense in their own electoral campaigns. In brief, the identity appeals of populism emerge as a product of mainstream political parties’ efforts to cope with the contradictions of capitalism and democracy in an age of high socioeconomic inequality. In this sense, the very notion of a cultural majority is itself politically constructed – an imagined community of ephemeral democratic normative weight, crafted by center-right political parties as they scramble to try win electoral majorities in an age of heightened socioeconomic inequality. While Madisonian political majorities have normative weight, cultural majorities do not. If correct, this argument suggests that a focus on addressing the economic roots of populism is pivotal as is developing a civic notion of citizenship, no matter the ethnicity or background of citizens.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America is widely recognized as one of the most definitive accounts of American society and political culture. However, his thoughts on the US Constitution have often been overlooked. In this chapter, Jeremy D. Bailey argues that this neglect is unfortunate insofar as Tocqueville’s view of the US Constitution diverges in significant ways from the authoritative rendition of The Federalist. Rather than echoing classic explanations of the workings of the US Constitution by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, Tocqueville’s understandings of federalism, Congress, US elections, the presidency, and the Supreme Court are more influenced by the constitutional interpretation of Thomas Jefferson. Despite his extensive discussion of other parts of the US Constitution, however, Tocqueville has little to say about the Bill of Rights. This apparent oversight may be explained by the fact that he sees a respect for rights as emerging from political culture rather than any specific institutional framework.

Chapter 7 covers the federal constitutional debates and public debates on ratification, respectively. Substantial selections from Madison’s Notes of the Debates offer insight into the main subject of disagreement: Were the American people to be apprehended in their corporate capacity, at state level, or as a collection of individuals that happened to live various states? Corresponding to this theoretical dilemma, some delegates proposed the equal representation of the states in the national legislature, while others argued that the number of representatives should be based upon the population of each state. In the end, the Connecticut Plan offered a compromise between the two understandings of the people. In some respects, one could claim that the framers managed to recuperate and make permanent the Puritan legacy of the bi-dimensional covenant at a scale previously difficult to imagine. The second part of the chapter presents selections from both the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalists’ writings. These excerpts demonstrate the unique combination of theoretical perspectives in the American Constitution as well as lingering doubt about its practicality and legitimacy.

This chapter shifts the focus to the Constitution by tracking the emergence of historical readings of the Constitution and showing how debates over slavery drew attention to the historical realities of change since and distance from the founding era. The very act of producing a written constitution initiated this development. At first, the move to see the new Constitution as archival contributed to its status as a sacred document, but that move also had the potential to rapidly desacralize the Constitution by revealing that its roots rested in a distinct temporal setting. The death of James Madison in 1836 sparked efforts to publish and use his writings to interpret the Constitution. The slavery debates shaped that usage. Some abolitionists followed William Lloyd Garrison in using Madison’s Papers to damn the Constitution, but many antislavery constitutionalists advanced interpretations that emphasized the framers’ anticipation of eventual emancipation. Coupled with a stress on slavery’s unexpected spread and the sudden rise of the Slave Power, these antislavery accounts of original expectation cultivated a new sense of temporal dislocation from America’s most useful past.

This chapter explores the historical roots and purposes of the Free Speech and Freedom of the Press Clauses of the First Amendment. It shows that the most of the early conflicts in this area concerned press freedoms. Disagreements over these issues came to a head over the Sedition Act of 1798, which was used by the Federalist Party to jail its Republican opponents. Ultimately, out of this conflict the Republicans articulated a new model of citizenship, rooted in principles of popular sovereignty, which remains central to our system of government today. Freedom of speech, on the other hand, played a very limited role in early history. Regardless of its humble origins, however, the Framing generation agreed that Free Speech, like Freedom of the Press, was an essential element of democratic government. Unfortunately, these rights have often been ignored by our government and the judiciary during times of stress such as the Red Scare and the McCarthy era. Today, however, thanks to the influence of pioneering arguments by Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Louis Brandeis, there is broad agreement that these rights are essential to democracy and so must be protected.

Chapter 2 explores how two rogue diplomats, Robert Livingston and James Monroe, obtained half a continent for the United States without shedding a drop of blood. Despite President Thomas Jefferson's instructions that Livingston and Monroe negotiate only for the city of New Orleans and as much territory east of that city as Napoleon Bonaparte's government could be persuaded to part with, they broke ranks and pledged $15 million for the transfer of the immense Louisiana territory from France to America. This act violated two of Jefferson's most cherished principles: economy in government and strict construction of the Constitution. Fifteen million dollars was a huge sum of money in 1803 - it vastly expanded the national debt - and there was no clause in the Constitution empowering the president to buy land. Livingston and Monroe risked their reputations, and possibly their lives, on the gamble that Jefferson would cast his scruples aside and submit the Louisiana treaty to the Senate. They were right, and, as a result of their disobedience, the United States doubled in size, acquiring 827,000 square miles of territory west of the Mississippi at a cost of three cents an acre. It was a mind-boggling bargain, and, like the treaty that ended the American Revolution, it grew out of American diplomatic indiscipline.

I originally penned this essay in the summer of 2018, stimulated by a Twitter exchange I had with Elon Musk, itself triggered by the SpaceX CEO’s previously announced decision to colonize Mars. This led me to wonder if this visionary had given any thought to what sort of government he would set up on the Red Planet and if he already had a team of social scientists working on the problem or whether he was just going to wing it when they got there. Surely not, but what source for research would a team of social engineers (let’s call them) working at SpaceX (or NASA, since it too plans to send people to Mars in the coming decades) access? There are no working models. Or are there? There are. Since it is Earthlings going to Mars, experiments in governance on the Blue Planet are a useful resource for lessons on how to govern the Red Planet. This essay, originally published in Quillette, is my modest contribution to future Martians on what they should take with them when they slip the surly bonds of earth.