At the close of the American Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have answered “a republic if you can keep it” to a woman who asked him, “what kind of constitution did you delegates establish?” Our paper unfolds as an extended meditation on Franklin’s response. The constitutional republic established in 1789 entailed a federal government limited to 13 enumerated powers, with all remaining activities belonging to the states or to individual citizens. To be sure, this federal republic was not some libertarian paradise: for instance, Jonathan Hughes (1977) explains that the 13 American colonies were rife with regulation, making it reasonable to presume that regulation was a state and not a federal activity after 1789. Today, the federal government has nearly plenary authority limited only by the search for electoral success, indicating that the original federal republic has been transformed into an unlimited electoral democracy.

Our interest in developing this paper is scientific and not normative. Our focus rests on apprehending the internal logic that underpins this transformation and not on critiquing this transformation from a normative point of view. It’s not that we are indifferent to alternative points of view. Not at all. It’s that we sense that economists are entrapped by methodological premises that force upon them a logic that denies them the ability to understand historical transformation. In short and looking ahead, the neoclassical revolution that arose in the 1870s and which displaced the social theories of the Scottish Enlightenment was responsible for transforming economics from an analytical discipline centered on understanding the internal logic of social orderliness into primarily a normative scheme for public administration, where politics occupies the foreground of correcting presumed defects in privately organized economic activity, as conveyed by theories of public goods and welfare economics.

We start by exploring some significant methodological problems that all forms of social inquiry must face. Most significantly, we cannot directly observe our phenomena of interest, for no one can directly observe such analytical objects as state or market. We can observe such manifestations as parliamentary buildings or places of business, but these are only pieces of what is meant by such abstract nouns as state or market. We can observe our phenomena of interest only indirectly by first creating models that we think capture essential facets of those phenomena. Our working presumption is that the neoclassical theorists reduced the complex phenomena explored by the Scottish philosophers to a simple subset of that phenomena, those subject to easy calculation. This change in analytical focus subsequently shifted the attention of economists away from efforts to understand better how people can live well together toward explorations of imaginary problems as to how governments can better intervene into society to attain some image (Boulding 1956) of societal goals. In short, our thinking about society is shaped by the models we embrace to direct that thinking. Models, thereby, are the ghosts in the machine that is the brain from which our thinking emerges. To explore the logic that must have underlaid Franklin’s response from 1787 implores us to start with some exploration into some methodological issues that are unavoidable for realistic social inquiry.

KEYWORDS: Constitutional Drift, Entangled Political Economy, Ideology, Freedom, Individual vs. Collective Action.