Tentative Answer: What was revolutionary about the U.S. Constitution?

Topics of insurgency inhabit a vast terrain in our political and social vocabularies, so much so that with overlapping meanings and valences, getting past the semantic components of narration can actually prove to be one of the most difficult tasks in the process of historical and cultural analysis. In the present day, we tend to think of "revolution" as a more or less confined category of movements that work in certain unilateral directions (mostly to the left), and adding alternate conceptions of revolution to our academic discussion can obfuscate what we are really trying to say.

Within this conception of revolution, the U.S. Constitution really isn't revolutionary at all: it more or less served to consolidate structures of power and dictate how power should flow through institutions in the broad context of a political liberalism. It outlined the distribution of said power in the government, and intertwined it with the growing popularity of ideas of individualism and "rights" that so heavily dominated political writings of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment eras. The Federalist Papers add to this finding—Madison and Hamilton seem to place priority on where to place the subject of individual rights within the grand scheme of the political schema, and this gave way to debates on causes and effects of human rights, how to exercise the spread of liberty, and what sovereignty and representation meant within the structures of a new government. It was less so about the ability to secure the rights themselves, and more about working conceptions of distributed power into a document to preside above all people.

That being said, the Constitution was "revolutionary" in that because of this fundamental project, it helped to usher in a new, and still lasting, age of political thought, in which we think about our power and liberty as indicators of our very essential beings. Additionally, we think of them as operative inside and through these structures of nation that heavily dominate our lives. We still tend to place great emphasis on private property, security, and representation in our mainstream political discourses, which is an effect of the writings of these thinkers.