The transition from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution reveals the vital ingredients necessary for a Shackled Leviathan to emerge. First there must be a set of individuals or groups in society, our state builders, to push for a powerful state, which will work to put a stop to the Warre “of every man, against every man,” help resolve conflicts in society, protect people from dominance, and provide public services (and perhaps look after their own interest a little too). The role of this group of state builders—their vision, their ability to form the right coalitions to support their endeavor and their sheer power—is pivotal. The Federalists played this role in the founding of the U.S. federal state. They intended to build a veritable Leviathan, and understood that it was vital for the security, unity, and economic success of the new country that it should have a much mightier central state with the power to tax, the monopoly right to print money, and the ability to set a federal trade policy. Moreover, the Federalists were powerful enough to attempt such a state-building project; they already had considerable authority, as well-established politicians themselves. They also drew power from their alliance with George Washington and other respected leaders of the War of Independence. They were highly adept at influencing public opinion too, through the media and their brilliantly argued pamphlets, the Federalist Papers.
The second pillar of the Shackled Leviathan, societal mobilization, is even more critical because it is the essence of the Red Queen effect. By societal mobilization we mean the involvement of society at large (in particular non-elites) in politics, which can take both noninstitutionalized forms, such as revolts, protests, petitions, and general pressure on elites via associations or the media, and institutionalized forms through elections or assemblies. Noninstitutionalized and institutionalized powers are synergistic and support each other.
Despotism flows from the inability of society to influence the state’s policies and actions. Though a constitution may specify democratic elections or consultation, such a decree is insufficient to make the Leviathan responsive, accountable, and shackled unless society is mobilized and becomes actively engaged in politics. So the reach of a constitution depends on ordinary people’s ability to defend it and demand what was promised to them, if necessary via noninstitutional means. Constitutional provisions in turn matter both because they grant greater predictability and consistency to society’s power and because they enshrine the right of society to remain engaged in politics.
Society’s power is based on people’s ability to solve their “collective action” problem to get engaged in politics, block changes they oppose, and impose their wishes on major social and political decisions. The collective action problem refers to the fact that even when it may be in the interest of a group of people to organize to engage in political action, each member of the group may “free-ride” and go about his or her business without exerting the needed effort to protect the group’s interests, or may even remain unaware of what’s going on. Noninstitutionalized means of exercising power are unpredictable because they do not provide a reliable way of solving the collective action problem, while institutionalized power can be more systematic and predictable. Constitutions can thus enable society to exercise its power in a more consistent manner. It was critical that in the years leading to the drafting of the Constitution, U.S. society had both sources of power.
Its noninstitutionalized power was rooted in the popular struggle during the war against the British. Thomas Jefferson captured the essence of this mobilization when he wrote in 1787:
God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion … What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.
Thanks to the Articles of Confederation, American society had institutional means of preventing the Federalists’ state-building project as well, for example, by refusing to ratify the Constitution in state legislatures. These institutional constraints did not end with ratification, since according to the Constitution, the legislature continued to be a potent restraint on the executive and on federal power.
The degree of popular mobilization and the extent to which society was well organized had already played a central role in the War of Independence, which had been fueled by ordinary people’s resentment of British policies. These were the same features of American society that attracted the attention of a young French intellectual touring the country half a century later, Alexis de Tocqueville. In his masterpiece, Democracy in America, Tocqueville commented that
in no country of the world has the principal of association been more successfully used, or more unsparingly applied to a greater multitude of different objects, than in America.
Indeed, it was a “nation of joiners,” and Tocqueville marveled at “the extreme skill with which the inhabitants … succeed in proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and in getting them voluntarily to pursue it.” This tradition of robust popular mobilization empowered U.S. society to have a say in what type of Leviathan would be built. And even if Hamilton, Madison, and their allies wanted to build a more despotic state, society would not comply. So the Federalists were persuaded to introduce the Bill of Rights and other checks on their power to make their state-building project palatable to those who would have to “submit their Wills” to the Leviathan. They weren’t too keen about all of this; Hamilton decried this “excess of democracy,” and proposed that the president and Senate serve for life, which is understandable since the Federalists thought they would control the Leviathan.
Not only did this critical second pillar initially prevent the American state from embarking on a despotic path, but the balance of power it engendered ensured that the state remained shackled even as it became more powerful over time (and we’ll see later that in some respects they may have been too successful, constraining the capabilities of the state in the next two centuries, especially when it came to the role of the state to provide protection and equal opportunities for all of its citizens). The American state in 1789 was far less powerful than, and almost rudimentary in comparison to, our modern state. It had a tiny bureaucracy and provided only a few public services. It did not even dream of regulating monopolies or providing a social safety net, and it did not view all of its citizens, certainly not slaves or women, as equals, so loosening the cage of norms entrapping many Americans at the time was definitely not high on its priority list. Today, we expect so much more from the state in terms of conflict resolution, regulation, a social safety net, provision of public services, and protections of individual freedom against all sorts of threats. That these can be provided is a consequence of the Red Queen. If all U.S. society at the time could manage was to set in stone hard limits on what the state should do, we would not get many of the benefits (and to be sure also not suffer some of the intransigencies) of our current state. Instead, the American state did evolve over the last 230 years and changed its capabilities and role in society. In the process, it became more responsive to the wishes and needs of its citizens. The reason why it could achieve this growth was because the shackles on its ankles meant that society could, with some caution, trust that even with a further increase in its power, it would not become completely unaccountable and display its fearsome face. Its shackled nature also meant that society could contemplate cooperating with the state. Yet in the same way that U.S. society at the end of the eighteenth century did not fully trust Madison and Hamilton without guarantees, society generally does not fully trust those striving to increase the state’s capacity and reach. It will allow them to do so only as it increases its own capability to control the state.