Founders' errors about human nature and constitutional authority

The men who drafted the Constitution were wrong about human nature in most of the ways a person could be wrong about it in 1787. They worked with the social science of the 1780s: Montesquieu, Hume, Locke, classical history through Plutarch, and their own reading of the English constitution. They had no anthropology, no sociology, no economics past Adam Smith, and a picture of people drawn largely from gentlemen reading other gentlemen. That much is unremarkable. Every model from 1787 is incomplete, and the same sentence could be written about Newton or Linnaeus.

The interesting question is whether their errors were the kind that invalidate a structure or the kind a sound structure absorbs, and the record is mixed. Their assumption that a virtuous citizenry would restrain faction failed almost at once; parties formed within a decade. Their belief that a federal republic could postpone the contradiction of slavery indefinitely was catastrophically wrong. Their confidence that a document could fix the meaning of “the people” has been renegotiated ever since, once by war. Against that, their core intuitions, that power concentrates unless deliberately fragmented, that ambition must be made to counteract ambition, that legitimacy requires consent, have held up against two centuries of data better than most eighteenth-century social theory. Federalist 10 shows why. Madison declines the moralist’s move of curing faction, treats it as a permanent output of liberty, and proposes a structural remedy: extend the republic far enough and no single faction can assemble a durable majority. That is a mechanism stated clearly enough to be wrong, and it has been tested continuously since, sometimes confirmed and sometimes badly falsified, which is what distinguishes a hypothesis from a maxim.

Both habitual readings of the founders miss this. The hagiographic one flattens them into oracles; the dismissive one flattens them into provincials. They were working theorists wagering under uncertainty, some wagers paid and others ruined lives, and sorting which is which is the work of political thought, work that did not end at ratification.

The consequence is about authority. If the founders were wrong about human nature, then invoking their intent as a trump card is a category error; you cannot borrow the authority of men whose premises you have just conceded were false. This cuts against original-intent jurisprudence and against a style of civic veneration. It does not cut against the public-meaning originalist, who appeals to what was ratified rather than to what Madison believed, and it does not cut against the institutions, which can be defended or attacked on their own record without reference to Jefferson on agrarian virtue or Adams on natural aristocracy. The structures outlived the anthropology that produced them. That is the strongest reason to take the structures seriously, and the only reason the anthropology still gets a hearing.