The collisions and failures of concave democracy, where men
spontaneously managed all their own affairs, were before their eyes.
The problem as they saw it, was to restore government as against
democracy. They understood government to be the power to make
national decisions and enforce them throughout the nation;
democracy they believed was the insistence of localities and classes
upon self-determination in accordance with their immediate interests
and aims.
They could not consider in their calculations the possibility of such
an organization of knowledge that separate communities would act
simultaneously on the same version of the facts. We just begin to
conceive this possibility for certain parts of the world where there
is free circulation of news and a common language, and then only for
certain aspects of life. The whole idea of a voluntary federalism in
industry and world politics is still so rudimentary, that, as we see
in our own experience, it enters only a little, and only very
modestly, into practical politics. What we, more than a century later,
can only conceive as an incentive to generations of intellectual
effort, the authors of the Constitution had no reason to conceive at
all. In order to set up national government, Hamilton and his
colleagues had to make plans, not on the theory that men would
cooperate because they had a sense of common interest, but on the
theory that men could be governed, if special interests were kept in
equilibrium by a balance of power.
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