" The elected Virginia convention of 1776 saw itself as engaged in the epochal act of founding a new polity based on the consent of the governed... The utopian impulse grew from the same political theory that the Virginians and other Americans relied on to justify dissolving their bonds of obligation to the [British] throne. Human beings, according to this view, were naturally free and equal. They possessed..."unalienable rights" that government existed to protect... Unlike any governments imagined before, the governments of the new states would rely for their justification on their capacity to protect individual rights--not their brute power to control territory and issue commands that would be obeyed. "

― Noah Feldman , The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President