ABSTRACT
Academic political science begins in the 1880's with Woodrow Wilson's great book Congressional Government; academic constitutional law begins about the same time with the publication of James Bradley Thayer's early effort to reconceptualize judicial review. In this chapter, the author aims to dis-solve countermajoritarian difficulty by undermining the vision of American democracy and American history that constitutional lawyers had developed by the Progressive era. In contrast to the image of the Founding inherited from the Progressive historians, the first Lecture seeks to recover the distinctively democratic foundations of our Federalist Constitution. The second Lecture argues that a neo-Federalist theory of democracy permits a deeper understanding of the distinctive problems of modern political life than does its Progressive competitor. The author then turns to the last Lecture to consider the role the Supreme Court may legitimately play within a neo-Federalist constitutional system.
