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Book Review
| Robert A. McGuire, To Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 395. $24.95 (ISBN: 0-19-413970-4).
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| Robert McGuire's "new" economic interpretation of the Constitutional and state ratification conventions seeks to refute ideological and cultural interpretations that have dominated scholarship since the 1950s and to revive the Beardian "interests" thesis that prevailed for nearly fifty years before that. Yet McGuire's argument that "economic interests, even narrowly defined"(5) significantly influenced the kind of document created in Philadelphia, and that the framers "rationally weighed the expected costs and benefits"(5) of ratification on an individual level, departs significantly from Beard's emphasis on certain founders' political ideology and economic vision. For Beard, economic "interests" were not manifested as the particular individual choices that are marshaled in McGuire's exhaustive statistical analysis, but rather about the "forces" influencing broad swaths of Americans and the alignments of "personalty" and "realty" at the Philadelphia convention. Nor does this study join the flourishing field of political economies and economic histories of the founding generation. Rather, McGuire's account is "new" because it fits squarely within modern public-choice and institutional economics scholarship. |
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McGuire's central body of evidence is the compilations of roll call votes taken at the Philadelphia convention and the special state ratifying conventions. He statistically renders sixteen important votes of the Philadelphia delegates, overlaying them with a series of dependent and independent variables that are designed to measure such characteristics of the delegates as their primary economic position, their role in the Revolution, the values of their slaves and public securities, their proximity to navigable water, degrees of English ancestry, and more. We might concede that the amount of detail amassed about delegates, correlated to voting patterns in the convention and ratification controversies, is "new" because it is more sophisticated than the simple tallies of various subgroups of delegates appearing in other analyses, and that McGuire's multivariate statistical approach allows us to glimpse marginal and secondary economic interests affecting constitutional outcomes along with larger familiar issues such as slave ownership and public securities holdings. Moreover, McGuire's findings that many delegates voted differently in ratifying conventions than they did in Philadelphia is also important and bears further work. |
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But there is also much we might contest in this study. Three brief queries will suffice. One involves McGuire's use of statistical analyses to extend conjectures about familiar issues. For example, we have known for a long time that the mix of fifty-five delegates in Philadelphia represented primarily the new nation's coastal, urban elite; we have known, too, that men of significant property in land, securities, or slaves were highly likely to support the shift of political authority from the states to a national government. But it is McGuire's contention that within the larger generalizations about delegates' interests there were important distinctions of individual interests. For example, although most slaveowners voted to enlarge the authority of a national government, property in slaves per se was sometimes less important than other economic interests in influencing many planters' support for the Constitution. Further, delegates who personally owned slaves or came from areas where slavery was concentrated were "much more likely to vote to limit the national government or oppose the Constitution at the state level conventions"(6–7). McGuire does not explain to readers what the other, possibly more important, economic interests were; nor do his tables and statistical analysis explicate how views about slavery emerged in the extensive private and public deliberation, or the all-important compromises at the convention related to slavery. |
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The statistical analysis offers evidence of distinctions between Constitutional and state conventions, but it does not—cannot—address why divisions among slaveowners at Philadelphia or within states emerged. And claims that in the array of economically related decisions made by slaveowners their ownership of slaves may have been "marginal" to their votes on many issues does not really help us understand whether slavery itself was "marginal" to southern, or wider interregional, interests overall. Do the dependent and independent variables of so complicated a statistical portrait as McGuire's in fact give false impressions of accuracy about details, and yet distract us from the general truths about planters, slaves, and the Constitution? |
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Similar problems arise when McGuire's statistical approach ignores delegates' key decisions to prohibit export duties, as well as certain of their prohibitions on the existing states, all of which were tied deeply to compromises of broadly sectional divisions as well as disagreements within sections, and none of which are addressed in this study. Moreover, when McGuire summarizes estimates of variables predicting the likelihood of approving the Constitution at the state conventions with the words, "The effect of merchant interests is positive and highly significant in the New England states, but is not statistically significant in the South or the Middle Atlantic,"(153) we are left wondering how the merchants of Philadelphia, who were overwhelmingly supportive of the Constitution, did cast their vote; if not based on merchant interests, then what ones, and what are the consequences for a self-interest model such as McGuire's? Further, we might also ponder what interests can be illuminated with the sixteen votes that McGuire analyses, given their heavy emphasis on commerce and virtual exclusion of interests related to the West, manufacturing, and finance. In short, although "new" statistical analyses may point toward our need to reexamine certain dynamics of the constitutional discussion, they do not affirm or revise previous interpretations until they are given a broader context and put under the scrutiny of social scientists' good sense. |
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Thorough and nuanced as this statistical study of voting is, its focus on the individual economic interests of delegates at conventions does not address the economic issues at stake for myriad Americans. McGuire's prologue asks a number of important questions about the post-Revolutionary economy and the framers' approaches to resolving the economic crisis they perceived, but he never explains the economic contexts of matters such as tariffs, export duties, embargoes, printing money, or regulating interstate commerce. The result is not only to disembody votes from economic conditions generally and economic activities of delegates in particular, but also, in the book's silences concerning economic issues, to tempt readers to assume there are direct links from economic conditions, to perception of economic interests, to clustering of votes—or worse, that the statistical display of voting patterns has a self-evident explanatory power of its own. |
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Although McGuire asserts the "paramount importance of specific political agents"(7), and that there was a "lack of representation of individuals viewed as likely opponents of the Constitution"(93), the delegates he analyzes (not to mention the wider public) represent little more than variously clustered sets of characteristics. Historical actors rarely speak in this book, and like the missing economic context for voting patterns, the deliberating minds and biographical personas of voters are in fact absent, so that this study does not fulfill its stated goal of linking votes "to the economic interests and ideologies of the delegates personally and of their constituents"(49). In short, although specialists across the social sciences will appreciate McGuire's meticulously constructed tables and appendices which yield several "new" ways to understand what empirical decisions were taken by delegates at the Constitutional and ratifying conventions, they will need to look elsewhere for explications of why delegates made those decisions, and how interests won and lost important issues in this momentous drama, both in- and out-of-doors. |
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| Cathy Matson
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| University of Delaware |
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