I will extend Arendt’s view of foundational acts to show that the consolidation phase of the American Revolution was widely perceived as guaranteeing the Revolution’s legitimacy by fabricating stable spaces for its augmentation, that is, institutions, which in turn are perceived as made through the force of speech acts - written constitutions.

The unprecedented reliance on the e thos of fabrication was a crucial ground for the perceived legitimacy of the consolidation of the American Revolution. Everywhere the revolutionaries framed their narrative of events in terms of fabrication, a frame, for that era, of great cognitive power.

This was reinforced by the written and printed nature of the early constitutions, which was crucial to both the making and the consolidation of a constituent and stable post-revolutionary body politic. The emergence of a print culture ‘recon­ceptualized the public sphere’ (Gordon Wood) through what was in the 1770s the unprecedented making of constituting documents that had the force and effect of consolidation. The perceived stabilising force of the making of written constitut­ing documents was crucial as ‘a foundation never more to be shaken’, as one of the framers of the first Pennsylvania Constitution put it. While Arendt, like many writers on revolution and founding, does not explicitly develop this important element at length, I will show that it is crucial to her views on the problem of the relation of revolution and founding on the one hand and to legitimacy, stability and consolidation on the other.

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