| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Originalism, Federalism, and the American Constitutional Enterprise: A Historical Inquiry. By Edward A. Purcell Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. x, 301 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-300-12203-9.)
This compact essay scrutinizes the recent revival of federalism in U.S. Supreme Court decisions and constitutional scholarship. It argues that federalism was nothing more than a pragmatic compromise in 1787 and since then has been used as a rationalization for specific ideologies and interests. There was no original concept of federalism. The federal structure was "doubly blurred, fractionated, instrumental, contingent," and "those four characteristics made the structure's resulting governmental system inherently elastic, dynamic, and underdetermined" (p. 189).	1
Though early on Edward A. Purcell Jr. disclaims any postmodern thesis that words and ideas are always contingent and relative, an easygoing relativism pervades this work. Within just two pages (pp. 184–85), ironic quotation marks encase the words "authentic," "originalist," "founders," "wrong," and, most tellingly, "history" and "the past." The result is a rather paradoxical indictment of originalists, who have "distorted the ... essential nature" of a federal system that has no essence or nature (p. 184).	. . .

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