Although it seems counterintuitive, America's founders thought like Machiavelli, at least insofar as they also believed that people required restraint. They were products of the European Enlightenment, but as they saw it, their main task was to form a government that was for and by the people but that would simultaneously set limits on the body politic and on those who would lead it.

To be sure, the emphasis was different. Whereas Machiavelli was concerned primarily with the question of how to contain followers, the framers of the U.S. Constitution were concerned primarily with the question of how to contain leaders. Alexander Hamilton, for example, was, in comparison with his peers, a proponent of a strong executive. But even he considered it ideologically important as well as politically expedient to focus not on the possibilities of presidential power but on its limits.