| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding. By David C. Hendrickson. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. xiv, 402 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-7006-1237-8.)
David C. Hendrickson argues that the founding of the American federal republic must be recontextualized. As the Federalists of 1787–1788 conceived it, the United States Constitution was intended primarily as a peace pact, a device for preventing the advent in North America of a state system along European lines dominated by the balance of power.	1
One alternative to a European-style predicament was the hated system of world empire. The ancient Greeks had proven unable to maintain an adequately strong confederation, and so they had succumbed first to the Macedonians, then to despotic Rome. The United States, says Hendrickson, tottered uneasily in the revolutionary era between "a centralized despotic empire" (the Antifederalists' nightmare, p. 257) and "a system of regional confederacies" (the Federalists' fear, ibid.), and neither ancient nor modern history seemed to provide a clear answer to the question of which possibility loomed more menacingly.	. . .

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