To Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution

Extract

To Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution. By Robert A. McGuire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 395p. $24.95.

Charles Beard's (1913) An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States has long been a focal point for scholarly debate on the motivations of the American Founders. Beard argued that each of the Founders could be classified as merchants with “personalty” interests or as farmers with “realty” interests and that political conflict during the Founding could be interpreted through the prism of conflict between these two classes. This work came to be greeted with growing disdain by scholars who found his “Marxist” interpretation of the Founding inadequate, but given the rise of rational choice theory as an important analytic tool for political scientists, another look at Beard's theory through modern conceptual lenses is long overdue.