The American Constitutional Experience: Origins and Principles

The American Constitutional Experience

Individual Rights and the American Experience

The American experience demonstrates that the concentration process, as an instrument for the liberation of individuals subject to the powers of an ancient feudal manor or corporation, is able to affirm the pre-state of the individual. Is the revolution in a historical or natural dimension, as justified by the known theoretical formulations of the European tradition of limited government and British security purposes?

Historicist and Individualistic Culture

The culture of the American Revolution and its freedoms is simultaneously historicist and individualistic. This is possible because historicism and individualism are no longer on American soil what they were on the old continent.

Republican Ideology and Democratic Practice

Some of these constitutions (such as Pennsylvania, 1776), as well as the general political practice of those years, show clear traces of a diffuse democratic stamp. This radical Republican ideology presupposes the existence of a virtuous people who mistrust the constituted authorities and mobilize against rulers for the defense of their individual rights.

Constituent Power and Constitutional Rigidity

The concept of constituent power is joined from the beginning to constitutional rigidity. This involves the presence of a strong, rigid constitutional pact that must be defended against the discretion of the legislature, especially to ensure and protect individual liberties.

Constitutional Reality: People vs. Rules

The primary and original reality of the constitutional experience is defined differently:

• For French revolutionaries, it is given by political unity, called the people or nation.
• For American revolutionaries, it is given by a set of inviolable rules, called the Constitution.

Contractualism and the British Tradition

In the culture of the American revolutionaries, one finds a continuous mixing and confusion between the contractualism of natural law (the social contract) and the British tradition of higher law.

Checks and Balances

The old ideology of balanced and moderate British government, while surpassed by the doctrine of the constituent power of the American people, remains alive in the 1787 Constitution. It is reflected in the technique of checks and balances, designed to avoid the formation of a sovereign power and to corroborate the reality and doctrine of limited government.

Conclusion

Only in the American experience do historicist, individualistic, and contractarian models recover their original inspiration and common security against the legicentric state philosophy of continental Europe.