Richard B. Bernstein (with Kym S. Rice): Are We to Be a Nation? The Making of the Constitution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, December 16, 1987.
Published by Harvard University Press, underwritten by the New York Public Library, recommended by Henry Steele Commager (“the dean of American historians,” as he is often billed), this handsome coffee-table volume marking the bicentennial anniversary of the United States Constitution can be safely assumed to represent the views of America’s academic establishment. As it does, for better and for worse.
For better, the establishment no longer subscribes to the crude economic determinism of Charles Beard. Writing in the 1930s, that celebrated ‘progressive’ historian aimed to ‘debunk’ the Constitution by claiming the framers acted in accordance with their own financial interests. His claim fit well with the temper of the American Left at the time, led by a U. S. president who decried ‘economic royalists’ on Wall Street. Professor Forrest McDonald disproved this claim some thirty years ago, carefully researching those interests and contrasting them with the arguments made on the floor of the Constitutional Convention. Insofar as the framers defended economic interests, these were more regional than personal; politics not corruption was their fame, played hard but honorably.
Bernstein respects the integrity and intelligence of the framers. He calls the Constitution the culmination of the intellectual ferment and political experimentation in the new republic.” As befits a historian, he does better at describing politics than at understanding political philosophy.
He rightly notices that the Declaration of Independence speaks of the American people, not the people of Massachusetts, Virginia, New York; Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues thereby “nationalized the case against George III.” Bernstein does not adequately connect the principles, as distinguished from the “nationalism,” of the Declaration of the Constitution, despite the Declaration’s clear statement that governments are instituted among men for the purpose of securing their unalienable rights—a point unlikely to have slipped from the minds of the framers. In this oversight too he follows contemporary scholarship.
Bernstein knows that “In the era of the American Revolution, more than at any other time in our history, ideas dominated our politics.” This fact even leads to a small and amusing design problem: Many of the book’s numerous plates depict nothing more visually striking than old book and pamphlet covers. Unfortunately, Bernstein endorses the regnant historicist or ‘contextualist’ interpretation of those ideas, an interpretation promoted by such scholars as J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. This school exaggerates the effect of ‘the times’ on great political thinkers and statesmen, overlooking the fact that such individuals themselves form a large part of what we mean when we look back at ‘the times.’ Too much attention paid to ‘context’ typically causes inadequate attention to ‘texts,’ a failure to read the writings of political thinkers with sufficient care, and therefore to judge the actions of thoughtful statesmen who did read with care.
Specifically, Bernstein calls Montesquieu’s magisterial The Spirit of the Laws a “disorganized, rambling treatise,” which it demonstrably is not. He fails to see that while the principal framers rejected Montesquieu’s preliminary argument on the impossibility of maintaining a republic in an extensive territory, they accepted his final argument for an extended commercial republic. Following Pocock, Bernstein claims that “at the heart of republican thought was a deep concern with public virtue and an obsession with corruption,” oversimplifying The Federalist‘s argument, wherein civic virtue combines with representative and federal institutions, the extended territory those institutions make possible, and the practical spirit of agriculture and commerce to temper impolitic popular enthusiasms. Published work by Professor Paul Eidelberg, particularly his 1974 book, A Discourse on Statesmanship: The Design and Transformation of the American Polity, provides a subtler and more accurate assessment of the framers’ achievement.
Bernstein’s failure to see the Constitutional significance of the Declaration of Independence, along with his superficial account of the Constitutional order itself, issue in an inaccurate conclusion: That Hamilton’s preference for commercial life and Madison’s preference for agricultural life, reflected in the dispute between northern and southern states at the Convention, eventuated in the severest crisis the American regime has faced, the Civil War. In fact, the Civil War had little to do with issues between financial men and farmer, and everything to do with slavery. Both Hamilton and Madison opposed slavery, although Madison (himself a slaveholder) could never think of a way to divest himself, or his fellow Virginians, of their ‘property.’
The dispute between Madison and Hamilton centered on politics, not economics. Madison suspected Hamilton, and the Federalist Party generally, of harboring oligarchic ambitions against republicanism itself. Madison expected and wanted commerce to thrive in the United States, but wanted only such commercial activities as in his judgment fostered virtues of industry and honesty similar to those of the agrarian way of life. Far from simply identifying himself with southern agricultural interests, Madison recognized that chattel slavery made white southern gentry into aristocrats, not good republican citizens. These regime-threatening tensions, not the normal and manageable strains between town and country—characteristic of the extensive, diverse republic Madison himself lauded in the tenth Federalist—led to “the crisis of the house divided.
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