The lovers' quarrel: the two foundings and American political development

The US has had two Foundings. The Constitution produced by the Second Founding came to be only after a vociferous battle between Federalists and Anti-Federalists. The Federalists favoured a relatively powerful central government, while the Anti-Federalists advocated the preservation of sovereignty in the states as crucibles of post-revolutionary republicanism - the legacy of the First Founding. This philosophical cleavage has been at the heart of practically every major political conflict in US history, and lives on today in debates between modern liberals and conservatives

The US has had two Foundings. The Constitution produced by the Second Founding came to be only after a vociferous battle between Federalists and Anti-Federalists. The Federalists favoured a relatively powerful central government, while the Anti-Federalists advocated the preservation of sovereignty in the states as crucibles of post-revolutionary republicanism - the legacy of the First Founding. This philosophical cleavage has been at the heart of practically every major political conflict in US history, and lives on today in debates between modern liberals and conservatives.

The United States has experienced Two Foundings, not one. The framers of the second Constitution, the Federalists, were not operating in an ideational or institutional vacuum; rather, the document they drafted and ratified was designed to remedy the perceived flaws of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. To decouple the Two Foundings is to appreciate that there is no 'original meaning,' only original dissent. Because, on the insistence of the Anti-Federalists, prior and democratically sanctioned understandings of federalism and union had to be negotiated and partially grafted ont