Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) was a political theorist and Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books, including Who Governs?, Democracy and Its Critics, and On Democracy.

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How Democratic Is the American Constitution?

Yale University Press

Chapter One

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MY AIM IN THIS BRIEF BOOK IS NOT TO PROPOSEchanges in the American Constitution but tosuggest changes in the way we think aboutour constitution. In that spirit, I'll begin by posing asimple question: Why should we Americans upholdour Constitution?

Well, an American citizen might reply, it has beenour constitution ever since it was written in 1787 by agroup of exceptionally wise men and was then ratifiedby conventions in all the states. But this answer onlyleads to a further question.

To understand what lies behind that next question,I want to recall how the Constitutional Convention thatmet in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 wasmade up. Although we tend to assume that all thirteenstates sent delegates, in fact Rhode Island refused toattend, and the delegates from New Hampshire didn'tarrive until some weeks after the Convention opened.As a result, several crucial votes in June and July weretaken with only eleven state delegations in attendance.Moreover, the votes were counted by states, and althoughmost of the time most state delegations agreedon a single position, on occasion they were too dividedinternally to cast a vote.

My question, then, is this: Why should we feelbound today by a document produced more than twocenturies ago by a group of fifty-five mortal men, actuallysigned by only thirty-nine, a fair number of whomwere slaveholders, and adopted in only thirteen statesby the votes of fewer than two thousand men, all ofwhom are long since dead and mainly forgotten?

Our citizen might respond that we Americans arefree, after all, to alter our constitution by amendmentand have often done so. Therefore our present constitutionis ultimately based on the consent of those of usliving today.

But before we accept this reply, let me pose anotherquestion: Have we Americans ever had an opportunityto express our considered will on our constitutionalsystem? For example, how many readers ofthese lines have ever participated in a referendum thatasked them whether they wished to continue to begoverned under the existing constitution? The answer,of course, is: none.

Our citizen might now fall back on another line ofargument: Why should we change a constitution thathas served and continues to serve us well?

Although this is surely a reasonable line of argument,it does suggest still another question: By whatstandards does our constitution serve us well? In particular,how well does our constitutional system meetdemocratic standards of the present day? I'll turn tothis question in the next chapter.

And if our constitution is as good as most Americansseem to think it is, why haven't other democraticcountries copied it? As we'll see in Chapter 3, everyother advanced democratic country has adopted a constitutionalsystem very different from ours. Why?

If our constitutional system turns out to be uniqueamong the constitutions of other advanced democraticcountries, is it any better for its differences, or is itworse? Or don't the differences matter? I'll explorethis difficult question in the fourth chapter.

Suppose we find little or no evidence to supportthe view that our constitutional system is superior tothe systems of other comparable democratic countries,and that in some respects it may actually performrather worse. What should we conclude?

As one part of an answer, I am going to suggestthat we begin to view our American Constitution asnothing more or less than a set of basic institutionsand practices designed to the best of our abilities forthe purpose of attaining democratic values. But if animportant democratic value is political equality, won'tpolitical equality threaten the rights and liberties weprize? In Chapter 5, I'll argue that this view-famouslydefended by Tocqueville, among others-isbased on a misunderstanding of the relationship betweendemocracy and fundamental rights.

Yet the question remains: if our constitution is insome important ways defective by democratic standards,should we change it, and how? As I said, myaim here is not so much to suggest changes in the existingconstitution as to encourage us to change theway we think about it, whether it be the existing one,an amended version of it, or a new and more democraticconstitution. That said, in my final chapter I'llcomment briefly on some possible changes and on theobstacles to achieving them.

* * *

Before turning to these questions, I need to disposeof two matters. One is purely terminological. Indiscussing the formation of the constitution at theConvention in 1787, I shall refer to the delegates asthe Framers, not, as is more common, the FoundingFathers. I do so because many of the men who reasonablymight be listed among the Founding Fathers-including such notables as John Adams, Samuel Adams,Tom Paine, and Thomas Jefferson-were not at theConvention. (By my count, only eight of the fifty-fivedelegates to the Convention had also signed the Declarationof Independence.)

The second matter is both terminological and substantive.Some readers may argue that the FoundingFathers (including the Framers) intended to create arepublic, not a democracy. From this premise, accordingto a not uncommon belief among Americans, it followsthat the United States is not a democracy but arepublic. Although this belief is sometimes supportedon the authority of a principal architect of the Constitution,James Madison, it is, for reasons I explain inAppendix A, mistaken.

But even more important, the conclusion does notfollow from the premise. Whatever the intentions of theFramers may have been, we would hardly feel boundby them today if we believed that they were morally,politically, and constitutionally wrong. Indeed, morethan two centuries of experience demonstrates thatwhenever a sufficiently large and influential numberof Americans conclude that the views of the Framerswere wrong, they will change the constitution. Even ifthe Framers did not intend their constitution to abolishslavery, when later generations concluded that slaverycould no longer be tolerated and must be abolished,they changed the constitution to conform withtheir beliefs.

Even if some of the Framers leaned more towardthe idea of an aristocratic republic than a democraticrepublic, they soon discovered that under the leadership of James Madison, among others, Americans wouldrapidly undertake to create a more democratic republic,and in doing so they would begin almost immediatelyto change the constitutional system the Framershad created.

Chapter Two

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Wise as the Framers were, they werenecessarily limited by their profound ignorance.

I say this with no disrespect, for like many others Ibelieve that among the Framers were many men of exceptionaltalent and public virtue. Indeed, I regardJames Madison as our greatest political scientist andhis generation of political leaders as perhaps our mostrichly endowed with wisdom, public virtue, and devotionto lives of public service. In the months and weeksbefore the Constitutional Convention assembled "onMonday the 14th of May, A.D. 1787. [sic] and in theeleventh year of the independence of the United Statesof America, at the State-House in the city of Philadelphia,"Madison studied the best sources as carefullyas a top student preparing for a major exam. But evenJames Madison could not foresee the future of theAmerican republic, nor could he draw on knowledgethat might be gained from later experiences with democracyin America and elsewhere.

It is no detraction from the genius of Leonardoda Vinci to say that given the knowledge available inhis time he could not possibly have designed a workableairplane-much less the spacecraft that nowbears his name. Nor, given the knowledge available in1903, could the Wright brothers have built the Boeing707. Although like many others I greatly admire BenjaminFranklin, I recognize that his knowledge of electricitywas infinitesimal compared with that of a first-yearstudent in electrical engineering-or, for thatmatter, the electrician who takes care of my occasionalwiring problems. In fact, on that famous first experimentwith the kite, Franklin was lucky to have escapedalive. None of us, I expect, would hire an electricianequipped only with Franklin's knowledge to do ourwiring, nor would we propose to make a trip fromNew York to London in the Wright brothers' aircraft.Leonardo, Franklin, the Wright brothers were greatinnovators in their time, but they could not draw onknowledge that was still to be accumulated in theyears and centuries to come.

The knowledge of the Framers-some of them,certainly-may well have been the best available in1787. But reliable knowledge about constitutionsappropriate to a large representative republic was, atbest, meager. History had produced no truly relevantmodels of representative government on the scalethe United States had already attained, not to mentionthe scale it would reach in the years to come. Asmuch as many of the delegates admired the Britishconstitution, it was far from a suitable model. Norcould the Roman Republic provide much of a guide.The famous Venetian Republic, illustrious though ithad been, was governed by a hereditary aristocracy offewer than two thousand men and was already tottering:a decade after the Convention an upstart Corsicanwould knock it over in a featherweight military attack.Whatever knowledge the delegates could gain fromhistorical experience was, then, only marginally relevantat best.

Leaping into the Unknown

Among the important aspects of an unforeseeable future,four broad historical developments would yieldsome potential knowledge that the Framers necessarilylacked and that, had they possessed it, might wellhave led them to a different constitutional design.

First, a peaceful democratic revolution was soon toalter fundamentally the conditions under which theirconstitutional system would function.

Second, partly in response to that continuing revolution,new democratic political institutions would fundamentallyalter and reconstruct the framework theyhad so carefully designed.

Third, when democratization unfolded in Europeand in other English-speaking countries during the twocenturies to come, constitutional arrangements wouldarise that were radically different from the Americansystem. Within a generation or two, even the Britishconstitution would bear little resemblance to the onethe Framers knew-or thought they knew-and inmany respects admired and hoped to imitate.

Fourth, ideas and beliefs about what democracy requires,and thus what a democratic republic requires,would continue to evolve down to the present day andprobably beyond. Both in the way we understand themeaning of "democracy" and in the practices and institutionswe regard as necessary to it, democracy is nota static system. Democratic ideas and institutions asthey unfolded in the two centuries after the AmericanConstitutional Convention would go far beyond theconceptions of the Framers and would even transcendthe views of such early democrats as Jefferson andMadison, who helped to initiate moves toward a moredemocratic republic.

I shall consider each of these developments inlater chapters. But first I want to indicate some of thepractical limitations on what the Framers could reasonablyachieve.

What the Framers Couldn't Do

The Framers were not only limited by, so to speak,their inevitable ignorance. They were also cruciallylimited by the opportunities available to them.

We can be profoundly grateful for one crucial restriction:the Framers were limited to considering onlya republican form of government. They were constrainednot only by their own belief in the superiorityof a republican government over all others but also bytheir conviction that the high value they placed on republicanismwas overwhelmingly shared by Americancitizens in all the states. Whatever else the Framersmight be free to do, they well knew that they could notpossibly propose a monarchy or a government ruled byan aristocracy. As the Massachusetts delegate ElbridgeGerry put it, "There was not a one-thousand part of ourfellow citizens who were not against every approach towardmonarchy." The only delegate who was recordedby Madison as looking with favor on monarchy wasAlexander Hamilton, whose injudicious expression ofsupport for that heartily unpopular institution may havegreatly reduced his influence at the Convention, as itwas to haunt him later. Hardly more acceptable was anadaptation of aristocratic ideas to an American constitution.During the deliberations about the Senate, GouverneurMorris of Pennsylvania explored the possibilityof drawing its members from an American equivalentof the British aristocracy. But it soon became obviousthat the delegates could not agree on just who theseAmerican aristocrats might be, and in any case theywell knew that the overwhelming bulk of American citizenswould simply not tolerate such a government.

A second immovable limit was the existence of thethirteen states, with still more states to come. A constitutionalsolution that would be available in most of thecountries that were to develop into mature and stabledemocracies-a unitary system with exclusive sovereigntylodged in the central government, as in Britainand Sweden, for example-was simply out of the question.The need for a federal rather than a unitary republicwas therefore not justified by a principle adducedfrom general historical experience, much lessfrom political theory. It was just a self-evident fact. IfAmericans were to be united in a single country, it wasobvious to all that a federal or confederal system wasinescapable. Whether the states would remain as fundamentalconstituents was therefore never a seriousissue at the Convention; the only contested questionwas just how much autonomy, if any, they would yieldto the central government.

The delegates had to confront still another stubbornlimit: the need to engage in fundamental compromisesin order to secure agreement on any constitutionat all. The necessity for compromise and theopportunities this gave for coalitions and logrollingmeant that the Constitution could not possibly reflecta coherent, unified theory of government. Compromiseswere necessary because, like the country at large,members of the convention held different views onsome very basic issues.

Slavery. One, of course, was the future of slavery.



Continues...

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