ABSTRACT
It is evident from the previous chapter that there exists a dichotomy in the perceptions and conceptualizations of American government. On the one hand, it is asserted that the American system of government is a living entity responding to changing conditions in accordance with the imperative of necessity. On the other hand, American government can appear to be just as susceptible to a mechanistic frame of reference, in which remorselessly fixed patterns of exact interactions between mutually external units provide the main source of explanation. It was this dichotomy which Woodrow Wilson sought to eliminate in the celebrated appeal to his fellow Americans to reject the blind immutability of their formal conception of government and to accept its reality as a necessarily unified, purposeful, and constantly evolving organism:
The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of ‘checks and balances’. The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life…. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life…. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. 1
