ABSTRACT
The inspiration for this position is The Federalist Papers, the contemporary defense by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay of the then newly proposed Constitution of 1787. Their collection of essays, less a philosophical statement about politics than a set of arguments about the institutionalization of politics, is still generally regarded as our greatest native work of political theory. Two aspects of their work ought to be central to our own efforts to revitalize democratic legitimacy in the twentyfirst century. The first is their commitment to the notion that the quality of political life depends upon the successful translation of sound political ideals and normative commitments into working political institutions. Democratic sentiments count for little without well-designed institutions to act upon them. The second is the brilliant institutional eclecticism they advocated with regard to the new constitution. To make the system work, the framers not only envisioned national executive, legislative, and judicial branches, each structured differently and each with different authorities, capacities, selection mechanisms, and internal decision-making processes; they also imposed federal constitutional roles explicitly on state judges and legislators, and authorized a future Constitution-amending role for popular conventions in the states (Shane 1999). The government so organized was intended to embody and carry forward a revolutionary ideal of “popular sovereignty,” a wholly novel understanding of the nature of political legitimacy (Wood 1969). The founding generation had hardly worked out all details of how popular sovereignty was to work or how, in principle, it would function to confer legitimacy on the exercise of political power. But what the framers realized, and what the essays in The Federalist Papers demonstrate, is that robust democratic legitimation can effectively occur only through an eclectic amalgam of different kinds of political institutions. That is because the legitimating character of democracy derives from more than one attribute of democratic life and practice, and democracy will prove most vital where each legitimating attribute enjoys a healthy institutional life (Farina 1997).
