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Hope Of The Framers To Enter Public Life By Jack N. Rakove

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The establishment of the Constitution after the failed Articles of Confederation remains a source of controversy among American citizens even in modern times. In his essay “The Hope of the Framers to Recruit Citizens to Enter Public Life,” Jack N. Rakove accurately argues that the Constitution was meant to be an avenue for the people to enter into and be involved in politics, and for the government to be involved in the peoples’ lives in order to ensure a non-autocratic future for the new nation. An element of the Constitution through which the Framers ensured the freedom and political participation of American citizens was the Bill of Rights. “The principal result of the ratification debates was the acceptance of an idea that the framers …show more content…

Young in his essay “The Pressure of the People on the Framers of the Constitution,” have argued that the accommodations for the people to be involved in the government written in the Constitution were only established because the authors felt pressured by popular opinion, not because they felt that was the way the government should operate. Young argues that , “To last it[the Constitution] had to conform to the “genius” of the American people.” The assumption that the delegates who established the Constitution were “forced” to give common citizens a voice in the new government can be proven wrong when examining John Rakove’s quote. “Decisions on other provisions also worked to remove formal barriers against election to the legislature. Instead of requiring a congressman to be “resident” in his state for a fixed period of years, the convention agreed that he need only be an “inhabitant” of the state at the time of election.” Also, “On balance, then, the principal concern of the framers was not to limit access to national office to those who were most conspicuously qualified to occupy it, but rather to open up the process of political recruitment in the hope that better men would be moved to enter public life and prove capable of achieving electoral success.” Thus, it is apparent that the framers genuinely wanted the people to take part in the government, and did not make that decision based on the pressure of popular

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