Contradiction and Dialectic Imagination

"Contradictions imply more than mere conflicts, and they are logically (and perhaps psychologically) less easily shelved than are many other kinds of problems. Indeed, if Hume is right, 'the Heart of Man is made to reconcile Contradictions.'" - James Farr, "Understanding Conceptual Change Politically," in Ball, Farr, & Hanson eds. Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (1989).

The political development of the 1780s was not simply a matter of leaders shifting from an anti-authoritarian to an authoritarian (or responsible) stance. Neither, of course, does the shift from childhood to adulthood follow this pattern. Revolutionaries who, in their own eyes, acted to keep social and political order as the new republic came of age, did not forget their revolutionary principles. They did not reject liberty in favour of tyranny, despite Jefferson's later criticisms.

Rather, they came to appreciate more powerfully and personally than before their contradictory impulses, to be free and to be responsible. While every generation faces such a contradiction, American leaders in the 1780s were in a unique historical position to play out their reconciliation in the politics of the republic. The feats of conceptual imagination in the 1780s, in the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, were the results an attempt to ease a tension psychologically associated with coming of age.