"Tending" and "intending" a nation: Conflicting visions of American national identity

Sheldon Wolin's categories of "tending" and "intending" expand the debate o ver the character of the American revolution and founding to include a cent ral though often overlooked fact of late eighteenth-century America: the im plications of the country's very fragile, very modern sense of itself as a nation. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists articulated coherent concepti ons of politics, bringing different elements of various liberal, republican and democratic paradigms together in defense of, respectively, "intendment " and "tendment" nationalities. Viewing their debates in light of this anal ysis not only demonstrates the complicated heritage of both the traditional liberal and republican positions, but also shows how these positions are i nextricably connected with our own modern self-understanding, Wolin suggest s that intending all but eliminated its rivals; it may be more accurate to say it absorbed them, merging different paradigms into a somewhat inconsist ent, romantic, and very modern national identity.