The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton Smith Circle, edited by Michael
P. Zuckert and Derek A. Webb. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 2009, 447 pp.,
$29.00 cloth, $14.50 paperback.
Book Review (excerpted from publius.oxfordjournals.org)
Reviewed by Jonathan L. Silver
Georgetown University
In The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton Smith Circle, editors Michael P. Zuckert and Derek A. Webb collect some of the most sophisticated and theoretically rich essays, speeches, letters, notes, and pamphlets by the Constitution’s opponents during the debate over its ratification. The volume reproduces in full everything the editors could find authored by Melancton Smith, including his speeches at the New York Ratifying Convention in 1788, as well as the Letters from the Federal Farmer and the Essays of Brutus. The contents of this volume are narrower than the two most popular competing compendiums of Anti-Federalist writing, both Murray Dry’s abridgment of Herbert J. Storing’s The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985) and Ralph Ketcham’s edition of The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates (New York: Signet Classic, 2003). Excluding Centinel, A (Maryland) Farmer, Agrippa, the Impartial Examiner, Patrick Henry and others allow the editors to present more focused and coherent critical assessment of the proposed Constitution, in turn making it easier for students and scholars of these debates to specify their arguments with greater precision.
Zuckert and Webb have produced a volume that deserves a wide and thankful readership. While historians will find their carefully documented claims about a Smith circle of great interest, it is really political scientists who should consider the arguments of the Smith circle. Images of the American past and particularly of the founding dominate American political rhetoric. Nearly all serious public policy proposals are presented in terms of fulfilling the original ideals of the nation’s founding. Visionaries on the political left and the political right both seek to show that they are the true heirs of the same founding. A real science of politics must ascertain the wisdom of that founding, and competing claims to its mantel. In the service of that science, Zuckert and Webb help students and scholars of American politics rediscover that the framers do not pronounce their wisdom in one coherent and seamless voice. The founding of the United States took the unique form of a political debate, and arguments on multiple sides of that debate are responsible for the nation that grew out of it. As this volume so clearly demonstrates, the most eloquent arguments for the Bill of Rights, and the clearest recognitions of American political institutions’ dependency on a vibrant and
robust civic culture, were often advanced by the same framers who harbored the most
serious misgivings about the Constitution.
The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton Smith Circle, edited by Michael
P. Zuckert and Derek A. Webb. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 2009, 447 pp.,
$29.00 cloth, $14.50 paperback.
Book Review (excerpted from publius.oxfordjournals.org)
Reviewed by Jonathan L. Silver
Georgetown University
In The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton Smith Circle, editors Michael P. Zuckert and Derek A. Webb collect some of the most sophisticated and theoretically rich essays, speeches, letters, notes, and pamphlets by the Constitution’s opponents during the debate over its ratification. The volume reproduces in full everything the editors could find authored by Melancton Smith, including his speeches at the New York Ratifying Convention in 1788, as well as the Letters from the Federal Farmer and the Essays of Brutus. The contents of this volume are narrower than the two most popular competing compendiums of Anti-Federalist writing, both Murray Dry’s abridgment of Herbert J. Storing’s The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985) and Ralph Ketcham’s edition of The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates (New York: Signet Classic, 2003). Excluding Centinel, A (Maryland) Farmer, Agrippa, the Impartial Examiner, Patrick Henry and others allow the editors to present more focused and coherent critical assessment of the proposed Constitution, in turn making it easier for students and scholars of these debates to specify their arguments with greater precision.
Zuckert and Webb have produced a volume that deserves a wide and thankful readership. While historians will find their carefully documented claims about a Smith circle of great interest, it is really political scientists who should consider the arguments of the Smith circle. Images of the American past and particularly of the founding dominate American political rhetoric. Nearly all serious public policy proposals are presented in terms of fulfilling the original ideals of the nation’s founding. Visionaries on the political left and the political right both seek to show that they are the true heirs of the same founding. A real science of politics must ascertain the wisdom of that founding, and competing claims to its mantel. In the service of that science, Zuckert and Webb help students and scholars of American politics rediscover that the framers do not pronounce their wisdom in one coherent and seamless voice. The founding of the United States took the unique form of a political debate, and arguments on multiple sides of that debate are responsible for the nation that grew out of it. As this volume so clearly demonstrates, the most eloquent arguments for the Bill of Rights, and the clearest recognitions of American political institutions’ dependency on a vibrant and robust civic culture, were often advanced by the same framers who harbored the most serious misgivings about the Constitution.
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