This slender and very concise (194 pages of text, 75+ pages of notes) is a follow-up to Prof. Gibson's fine first book, Interpreting the Founding. In that volume (see my review), Gibson outlined the historigraphical debates about the founding American period (which I define as late 1760s to 1800).
In this book, he goes more to the heart of the subject itself. Gibson's project in these two books is two-fold: What is the best analytical framework to use in examining the founding generation? What can we say that we now know of them after the last fifty years of (often brilliant) historical work? Another way to state this is to say that his project is to point out future directions for research to answer the questions that past work has defined.
Before I discuss his work, I want to baldly state his main conclusion:
Gibson believes that the founders were deontological liberals. They believed that the protection of rights was the central role of government.
They did not believe that government should try to change or form the character of the people.
He centers his discussion around four basic questions or debates. Each of these controversies is covered in his chapters 1 thru 4.
The first is the validity of Beard's thesis of the economic interpretation of the Constitution. In many ways this is the least interesting chapter simply because the necessary data is so incomplete or so seems to point every which way. Let me give you one of my own examples of the latter. Gibson discusses Robert McGuire's fine statistical work on what we know about the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Gibson states that "McGuire's most important claim...is his proposition that slave-holding made a delegate much less likely to favor a national negative on state laws..."(p. 40). The irony of course is that that national negative was proposed in Resolution 6 of the Virginia Plan, written by one slaveowner and proposed to the Convention by another.
But Gibson's main point is how little we know about the financial holdings not only of the delegates to the Federal Convention, but about the financial holdings of the 1648 delegates to the state ratifying conventions, let alone of the ~160,000 voters who voted in the elections that produced the delegates to the state conventions (p.42) The kind of data required is unlikely to be ever found because it is simply unlikely to ever had existed. Nevertheless, Gibson's summation of the debate leads him to several conclusions. I will quote just one:
"Beard's proposition that the movement for the Constitution was begun by an elite group of men who were disproportionately wealthy, urban, and commercial in their interests, and that they were responding to threats to their economic interests from within the states...is no longer a source of controversy"(p.45)
The second chapter looks at recent debates about how democratic is the Constitution. I loved this chapter because it illustrates the difficulties with a contemporary tendency to place the Founders in the middle of current debates.
The Founders did not regard democracy as a paramount value. In Gibson's words, they "...did not assume that democratic government was good government"(p. 88). Thus we should not be surprised that what they created was not very inclusive nor democratic.
Secondly, there is a tendency to confuse the effects of federalism with anti-democracy. Consider the Senate. Each state has two senators. At the 2000 census, California had ~33,800,000 people. Wyoming has just under 500,000. So you could argue that each Californian senator represents some 15,000,000 people while each Wyoming senator represents 250,000. The difference is a 60-1 ratio. Seems pretty undemocratic depending on how you define "democracy". But the whole point of the Senate was to represents the states qua states; as a corporate political entity. Senators represent their state, not its people.
The final three chapters of Gibson's books I see as being of a piece. In chapter 3 he looks as the historical methodologies of the linguistic contextualists (Pocock, Woods, Skinner) and critiques that methodology from the point of view of those who advocate an "enduring question" approach (some examples of the latter would be Rahe or Zuckert). In chapter 4, Gibson is looking at the compromise that eventually came out of these debates- the multi-tradtion approach. The questions explored by this chapter are what traditions should be included? Is there a core tradition to which the others are adapted?
Gibson's conclusion in these two chapters form the analytical framework that he is suggesting for several future areas of research.
He comes down mostly on the side of those who propose the enduring question approach. Gibson feels that we are to some degree linguistically or culturally constructed but nowhere near to the degree suggested by Skinner, Woods, and Pocock. For these writers even explaining cultural innovation becomes a theoretical difficulty. Gibson (and Rahe and many others) point out that we have no evidence that individuals are that imprisioned by their cultural and linguistic heritage.
Gibson then argues for a multi-tradtion approach that takes the core work of Michael Zuckert and confronts it with the challenge of Rogers Smith work. Zuckert believes that Lockean liberalism is the core tradition of our political founding and that adapted to that core were ideas or means taken from the Portestant tradtion, the English Whig tradition and civic republicanism. But Locke is the key. But Rogers Smith's work can be seen as a challange to that conclusion. Smith believes there are actual intellectual traditions of ascriptive inequality (towards foreigners, women, Black-, Hispanic- and Asian-Americans) that have been used throughout our history to justify the exclusion of those groups from civil and political rights. Can we really say with Zuckert that the core of our political founding is a natural rights philosophy if Smith is right?
Gibson is very impressed by both of these authors (as am I) and wants to work toward exploring the tensions in their interpretations as well as to answer conundrums like the following: The Founders "...did not believe that it was the function of government to promote virtue among the citizens or to foster a particular conception of the good life" (p.157) Yet they believed that such virtue was necessary for the republican government to survive. So how was this virtue to be promoted by the civil society? By church? By schools? By the economic structure of society (Jefferson's nation of yeoman farmers)?
I could go on about this book far longer than I already have. Gibson states the issues so well in so many debates that it really is a spur to further research and reflection even for us amateur readers in the period.
I will leave the summary of chapter five (the lessons of the period for contemporary politics) to your own reading and reflection. I hope I have given you some idea of how impressive both of Prof. Gibson's books are. I recommend them to anyone interested in the period. Anybody who wants to discuss them with me, please feel free to email me or to make comments.
Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Customers who bought this item also bought
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
