Reviewed by James R. Sofka | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1

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Reviewed by James R. Sofka | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding. By David C. Hendrickson . (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2003. Pp. xiv, 402. $29.95.)

Reviewed by James R. Sofka , University of Virginia

Although the literature on the founding period is already approaching saturation, David Hendrickson manages to wring fresh insights from exhaustively worked material by recontextualizing the story of the founding in light of international relations rather than the setting of domestic political institutions. Hendrickson argues that the Constitution was a "peace pact" agreed to by jealously competitive sovereigns largely for the purpose of avoiding worse alternatives. To be fair, neither aspect of this project is entirely new: James Brown Scott proposed that the United States was a prototype international organization at the time of the League of Nations, and the lore of interstate rivalry dates to the first Continental Congress.¹ Hendrickson, however, applies a theoretical literature usually confined to international relations scholarship to achieve greater explanatory power than most previous studies of the sovereignty problem in the new republic. While the events are familiar, the interpretation is fresh.

In this first of two projected volumes on the Constitution, Hendrickson begins by asserting that "the American Founding appears as a distinctive and most remarkable attempt to turn back the tide of war—that is, as a peace pact. It bears comparison with the great peace settlements of European and world history" (pp. x–xi). Eagerly globalizing the significance of the Philadelphia experiment, he characterizes "the argument this generation conducted on these questions" (p. 15) as constituting a far richer examination of the possibilities and limits of international cooperation and peace than anything written by Immanuel Kant, usually considered the formative influence on contemporary internationalism. Additionally, while union and state independence are normally considered a political double helix in the founding literature, Hendrickson finds that they were "in one sense mutually supportive, although weakness in one gnawed at the foundations of the other" (p. 21). Independence was the Polar Star of thirteen separate polities, and thus the architecture of the Articles and the Constitution itself was an "experiment in international cooperation" (p. 257). While Hendrickson's discussion of competing plans for governance, such as those put forth by the New Jersey and Virginia delegations in 1787, is standard, their grounding in the language of "structural realism" and in the context of eighteenth-century European peace treaties is not. His offers a much wider examination of the utility of international relations as an explanatory device than Scott in 1920 or David Deudney in 1995.²

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