2 - Looking “Backward” or “Forward” to American Constitutional Development

Summary

Looking back to the American constitutional founding, we see a gap between soaring transformational rhetoric on the one hand and preservation of privilege and slavery on the other. Emphasizing what the legal historian Michael Klarman has called a “coup” by the framers against more broadly inclusive democratic institutions, this chapter argues that the final set of compromises extracted by the forces of preservation amounted to a “pact with the devil”. The first period of implementation witnessed a set of brutal battles over interpretation of the constitutional text, especially about issues of state sovereignty and the scope of national power, that played out in the courts and the political sphere. The preservation of the new country was hardly to be taken for granted, and this meant that those with transformationist aspirations had to of necessity temper their demands.