SEPARATION OF POWERS: THEORIZING POLITICAL EXPERIENCE IN THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN MODEL

Abstract: This article examines the origins of the separation of powers in the United States and argues that the American model is best understood not as the application of a theory but as the theorization of an experience. The dominant account treats the Constitution of 1787 as the transfer of Locke and Montesquieu to the New World; yet the same texts circulated throughout late eighteenth-century Europe without producing comparable institutions, and the French Constitution of 1791, which applied a rigid separation most faithfully, collapsed within two years. The explanatory variable must therefore be sought in the particular accumulation of experience of the actors who read, interpreted and institutionalized those texts. Combining historical-comparative analysis with process tracing, the article applies a three-link analytical template—experience, thought, design—to five founders: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. It finds that the theoretical inheritance offered the founders a menu of mutually tense options rather than a blueprint; that the filter which selected from this menu was experience; that each founder's distinctive contribution to the system corresponds to his experiential profile; and that the Philadelphia Convention, The Federalist and the first decade of practice converted these individual lessons into collective design and constitutional culture. The article concludes by assessing the originality of the American model—separated institutions sharing powers, constitutive federalism, the presidential form and judicial review—and by drawing out the implications of the experiential thesis for comparative constitutional engineering.