d the desire to limit their sovereignty on the other."1 The central theme of early American, or Madisonian political theory holds that, if unrestrained by external checks, any given individual or group of individuals will tyrannize over others.
Thus, the central goal of early American political theory was the prevention of tyranny, which required the effective use of the art of compromise in the conduct of the political process. Tyranny was defined by Madison by stating that "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, may be justly pronounced the very definitionof tyranny."2
This Madisonian principle implied than an absence of external checks within a political system would inevitably lead to the development of tyranny within the system. Therefore, a central feature of the early American political system (and one which not only survived but gained strength) is the development of a set of checks and balances. These checks and balances were (and remain) intended to insure that no individual or group of individuals was able to deprive another individual or group of individual of their natural rights. The absence of "an agreed definition of natural rights" was, in the eighteenth century, and remains, in the last half of the twentieth century, "one of the central difficulties of the Madisonian theory."3
It is difficult to protect the natural rights of individuals within a political system, when the individual members of the system do not agree as to just what those natural rights are. Nevertheless, through its practiceof compromise, that is what the early American political system attempted to do and that is what the American political system in the last quarter of the twentieth century continues to attempt to do.
The developers of the early American political system recognized that tyranny could come from any quarter. In this context, Alexande...