Theme: Incentives

Founding Beliefs Were Not Universal
(a) Man’s nature is not fixed but utilitarian and adaptive and follows incentives – what is rational and advantageous varies by circumstance (b) reason accelerates adaptation and more so negotiation of adaptive cooperation at increasing scales (c) Man’s abilities, education, and experience are unequal – making incentives vary. (d) Man’s behavior then is not universal (a holdover from Christian universalism – not from European aristocratic tradition) but particular to the individual, to the sex, class, group, polity, and civilization that creates the portfolio of incentives man adapts to. (e) The founders were not bound by shared beliefs but shared problems and they represented a distribution usually described as Hamiltonian and Hobbes vs Jeffersonian and Locke, but is more varied on that spectrum.
The cause of their generation’s myopia was the ratio of aristocracy (martial, governing) and nobility (clerical, administrative) proper, to the “lesser aristocracy” (Elites) that founded the country, to the emergent middle class due to expansion of trade during the age of sail, to the agrarian majority whether northern (small scale) family farmers or southern ‘industrial’ (large scale) plantation farmers. As class sizes change the realities and incentives of classes adapt – usually distributing influence (power) to alter outcomes across classes.
Amplify their divisions by the fact that the continent was settled by four different fundamentalist groups from four different regions of Britain. This meant that the constitution had to be largely secular due to English (England, Wales, Scotland) tradition on the one hand and in order to mediate differences between sectarian justifications on the other. It was not just a matter of enlightenment prose but incentives. It’s also why the constitution was written in both English and German – because of the large number of Germans in the population.
I’m not really trying to overthrow any argument here other than the presumption of a shared mind and set of beliefs, rather than shared interest given the incentives of the time, and the rather natural outcome of legal prose that sought to mediate differences between the parties founding the federation.