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6 - Divide et Impera: Constitutional Heresthetics and the Abandonment of the Articles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2009

Charles A. Kromkowski
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Summary

The contextual conditions described in Chapter 5 and the divergent political expectations they supported made constitutional change possible in the mid-1780s, but they neither required nor spontaneously prompted the abandonment and replacement of the Articles of Confederation. Constitutional change of this magnitude requires the timely intervention of individuals who possess the vision, commitment, and political skills to organize and to direct other dissatisfied individuals and groups toward the transformation of an existing order. The process of constitutional change must thus be understood as being entrepreneur-dependent.

However necessary constitutional entrepreneurs are for this account's explanation, they play an initial but clearly secondary role because they rarely dictate the final terms of the process of constitutional change. Not only are they constrained by their own capacities to envision both a new constitutional horizon and the immediate range of real possibilities, but, once initiated, transformative processes typically and often thankfully are propelled by and negotiated among a much larger and more diverse set of political actors. Regardless of the vision or charisma of any particular entrepreneur, his or her capacity to extend the political discourse of the day to include the possibility of constitutional change remains contingent on innumerable historical accidents of context and personality. As a consequence, constitutional change remains uncommon not only because of the high transformation costs but also because the convergence of the necessary macro- and microlevel conditions make real opportunities for wholesale transformation rare indeed.

Type
Chapter
Information
Recreating the American Republic
Rules of Apportionment, Constitutional Change, and American Political Development, 1700–1870
, pp. 236 - 260
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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