This is a three part assignment.  In the first two, students will read and summarize the concept of sovereignty as defined by James Madison in Federalist 46 and John C. Calhoun in the South Carolina Exposition and Protest.  In the third part of the assignment, students will be asked to compare and contrast the main arguments of each document through the lens of Popular Constitutionalism, a concept proposed by Larry Kramer, Dean of the Stanford University School of Law.

AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the union, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

This course examines the modern definition of freedom, and the obligations that people accept in honoring it. It investigates how these obligations are captured in the principles of our political associations. This course also studies how the centrality of freedom plays out in the political thought of such authors as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke and Montesquieu, as well as debating which notions of freedom inspire and sustain the American experiment by careful reading of the documents and arguments of the founding of the United States.
This course is part of the Concourse program at MIT.

United States Government: The Basics of Government Function, Structure, and ProcessDeborah Smith Hoag, Remix Lead AuthorRichard Fonte, Remix AuthorGlen Krutz, Content Lead - OpenStax VersionSylvie Waskiewicz, Lead Editor/OpenstaxCover Photo Attribution:  Carol M. Highsmith (2007) Library of Congress

This migrant agricultural worker’s family might find participating with government difficult when daily life is a struggle. Does socioeconomic status affect civic participation? (Credit: Dorothea Lange; Library of Congress Collection)