Comparing James Madison And John Dewey's Contribution To The State Of Democracy

Since the constitution of the United Stats of America was written in 1787 it has long since been a topic of conversation as well as confrontation among politicians and political theorists alike. The ideals of James Madison and John Dewey regarding constitutional reform and democracy are just another example of this. These two men, both extremely influential in their own way, have conflicting views of liberty, democracy and largely the revision of the constitution and its consequences or lack there of. James Madison, Father of the U.S. Constitution, believed that constitutional revision should be infrequent. While John Dewey argues for change, while not specifically on constitutional revision but rather for “effective liberty” for the state of democracy as a whole, which ultimately relates to that of constitutional revision. In James Madison’s Federalist 49, written in 1788, he lays out his argument for why constitutional revision should be limited. He believes that, in response to Thomas Jefferson’s idea of frequent revision that being every 19-20 years, that this recurrent change to the constitution would ultimately lead to the people’s intolerance of the government in the sense that they would begin to believe that it was defective and could not be fixed. In the eyes …show more content…
Dewey, an American philosopher, georgist and educational reformer, explains in his book Liberalism and Social Action the importance of “effective liberty”, that being the function of social conditions existing at anytime. He explores the significance of this in relevance to the reconstruction of American Democracy, meaning that the government should be “by the people” not simply just “for the people”. He stated that early