The Constitution was designed to curb, not maximize, political engagement.

Evidence

I sometimes fear that political scientists would like a world in which the people were more preoccupied with political matters than they are, whereas the Constitution was designed, I believe, by persons who did not believe in the primacy of politics, and who went to great and imaginative lengths to create a system that would harness the citizenry to responsibility without pretending that they were (or should be) as committed to public life in a democracy as were the aristocrats and monarchs they supplanted. — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 302

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the American founding as anti-civic-republican — a counter-narrative to the engaged-citizen ideal.
• XREF: Challenges the civic-republican reading of the Founding associated with writers like Hannah Arendt and Michael Sandel.