An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States

"It is seldom that a book does much to make history, but Beard's is recognized of such character." -The New Review 1913.
"Has already made a distinct place for itself as singularly original, penetrating and instructive." -The Economic World, 1915
"The volume deserves the thoughtful attention of every student of American history." -The Nation, 1916
"Professor Beard has played into the hands of the socialists." - The Constitutional Review, 1917

Rejecting what he calls the "juristic theory of the origin and nature of the Constitution," and adopting the hypothesis that economic elements are the chief factors in the development of political institutions, Professor Beard in his 1913 book "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution" presents a study of the economic forces which conditioned the movement for the formation and adoption of the federal Constitution and determined its most important provisions.

Beard puts this question: "Suppose that substantially all of the merchants, money lenders, security holders, manufacturers, shippers, capitalists, and financiers and their professional associates are to be found on one side in support of the Constitution, and that substantially all or the major portion of the opposition came from the nonslaveholding farmers and the debtors, would it not be pretty conclusively demonstrated that our fundamental law was not the product of an abstraction known as 'the whole people,' but of a group of economic interests which must have expected beneficial results from its adoption?"

If this supposition be correct, he argues, the immediate and guiding purpose of the framers of the Constitution was not the vague thing known as the general welfare, nor any abstraction called "justice," but the direct impelling motive was the economic advantage which the beneficiaries expected would accrue, to themselves first, from their action.

One critical review in The Constitutional Review at the time of Beard's publication observed:
"Although economic considerations entered very properly into their deliberations. But their main concern was not the pitiful desire to protect their private fortunes, but the prosperity of the whole country. Their object, on this side of it, was to free commerce from the shackles imposed by petty state laws, to restore the public credit, and to provide secure guaranties for the property of all their fellow countrymen and all their posterity, not of themselves alone. To insert such guaranties in the Constitution would be a matter of course where every man of energy and enterprise either owned property or expected to.

"If the Constitution had been framed by the same men, not different in any way except that they had all been poor or possessed of very small estates, can it be supposed that the Constitution would have been essentially different from what it is now?

"On the other hand, if it had been framed by a group of men composed entirely of debtors or those who owned no property (the second of Professor Beard's economic classes) and if, from their hands, it had emerged with no provisions against paper money or repudiation of debts, and with no guaranties for the protection of property, how long would it have endured, and what would be the present state of the nation?"

About the author:

Charles Austin Beard (1874 1948) was one of the most influential American historians of the first half of the 20th century. For a while he was a history professor at Columbia University but his influence came from hundreds of monographs, textbooks and interpretive studies in both history and political science.

Dettagli