Hamiltonian Democracy

Hamilton is one of the most important draftsmen of the “1787 Constitution” whose meaning is the establishment of American political order: making the Funding Father’s idea of institutional arrangement become a stable, recurring pattern of behavior. There are two features of constitution that represent the Hamilton’s idea of institutional arrangement in the realm of politics. Firstly, according to the Constitution, in theory, the President and the Congress play the roles of the complementary representative that political power is divided by dividing the legislative function between them, thus creating a system of “checks and balances” which equalized power. In practice, nevertheless, as the expectation of Hamilton, the gravity of power is prone …show more content…
“Political modernization,” Huntington maintains, “involves the rationalization of authority, the differentiation of structures, and the expansion of political power.” Fukuyama, also, argues that there are three basic political components constitute the modern political order: the state, the rule of law, and mechanism of accountability. In light of theses arguments, there is one common that the modern political institution should be based on the strong, authoritarian, centralized government that holds a monopoly on legitimate force for defending unification as well as has capacity to enforce the policies over a defined territory. Moreover, there is the one characteristic that makes modern politics distinguish from the traditional absolutist politics: the institution that maintains a strong central government while having a strong democratic assembly to oversight it to be accountable with governed, generally reaching a subtle balance between PP and PR. In the case of American political institution after the approval of Constitution, America has the strong centralized government that holds a monopoly on legitimate force over a defined territory, such as “Whiskey Rebellion in 1791” and “American Civil War ”, meanwhile, there are two opposite forces that counterbalance such government: the rule of law (Supreme Court) and the mechanism of democracy (Congress). The meaning of Hamiltonian concept, hence, perhaps is that if the Jeffersonian idea deems to constitute a strong mechanism of democratic accountability, Hamiltonian concepts insists to form a strong, authoritarian centralized government, such counterbalance forces are contributed to facilitate the