The Personal and the Political: Implications of Constitutional Entrepreneurship
In arguing for the ratification of the U. S. Constitution, Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 1 wrote, “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”1 This famous passage is the quintessential statement of a political project aimed at constructing governance institutions that allow individuals to reap the benefits of collective action, while avoiding its potential hazards. This received interpretation of the Constitutional project implies a heavy emphasis on institutional design, and a retreat from the stress placed on the virtues and vices of individual governors found in much of classical political philosophy.
However, the Founders were in fact intensely concerned with the character of the citizens of the new Union, and the governors who would be drawn from those citizens. They also appreciated that personal character matters, even in institutions with an even balance of power. In Federalist No. 6, after detailing numerous instances of personal influence over important social events throughout history, Hamilton writes, “[t]o multiply examples of the agency of personal considerations in the production of great national events, either foreign or domestic, according to their direction would be an unnecessary waste of time.”2 During his presidency, John Adams would write in a letter to the Massachusetts militia, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”3 The men who played a crucial role in forming the Union and governing it during its early days thus did not consider a well-crafted constitution as a substitute for personal character. Instead, the idea of a well-crafted constitution implied suitability for a specific group of people with a definite historical, political, and moral context. Some of these people would come to exercise political power, and thus be in a position to engage in further constitutional entrepreneurship. History’s most notable constitutional entrepreneurs held that even a robust constitution could not obviate considerations as to the characteristics of the constitutional entrepreneurs themselves.
This paper contributes to the literature on constitutional entrepreneurship by exploring, at a theoretical level, how and why the personal characteristics of constitutional entrepreneurs matters for social change.4 In the “mainline” tradition of political-economic analysis, individuals are treated as rational, in the sense that they are goal-seeking, and choose methods to reach those goals as best they know how.5 But individuals do not make choices in a vacuum; their choices, in terms of the incentives they face and the information they have at their disposal, are structured by the social institutions within which they act. 6 Thus mainline political economy explains social outcomes by examining individual behavior as channeled through institutions. 7 Given the role institutions play in generating information and aligning incentives, and hence their prominence in governing social feedback mechanisms, they have understandably received a great amount of scholarly attention. In the context of constitutions, this typically has taken the form of analyzing how various meta-rules, and meta-rule changes, will affect individual behavior.8 In contrast, this paper will focus on the characteristics of the individual who participates in constitutional change. Even if the personal traits of constitutional entrepreneurs are only analytically separable from their environment, focusing on these characteristics brings attention to an underserved, but nonetheless important, aspect of constitutional change, while complementing the insights of several related literatures.
