The origin of American federalism lays in the English Commonwealth, specifically the work of John Milton and James Harrington. The latter’s

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most completely broke from the hierarchic, corporate views embodied in Thomas Aquinas and carried on up through the aristocratic Edmund Burke (the work’s antihero). Colonial- and Revolutionary-era Americans faced the task of justifying an expansive republic governed by popular sovereignty, in contradistinction to the classical small republic (as advocated by Montesquieu) or parliamentary sovereignty. Here James Madison and then James Wilson come to the fore, the former for overturning the prejudice against small states by asserting conflict rationally resolved prevents tyranny of the majority, and the later (the unexpected hero) for explaining how the people would come to love their federal government. Ben Franklin also is to be admired; Alexander Hamilton is slighted. The work is particularly strong in showing how the people are simultaneously to be in control of and benefit from the administration of government; but there is ever the hint of viewing the Constitution as a ‘living’ document, which would seem to unsettle all of its theoretical underpinnings and equipoise.