Steve Reads

I’m nearly done with Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic, which is probably an earthshaking book if you’re a historian, but is still pretty bloody interesting if you’re not. Its main goal is to convince Americans that John Locke wasn’t the only important source of philosophy for the Framers of the Constitution — that it was in some sense the counterrevolution to the Lockean, Whiggish revolution that led to the Constitution. Wood charts in lucid, fast-paced detail the major changes that the republic underwent from the Declaration of Independence to the debate on the Constitution 11 years later — including, crucially, the debate over the state constitutions. Somehow we made it from the Whigs, with their emphasis on a weak executive as the greatest guarantor of liberty, to a Constitution that creates a very strong president and a very strong central government. Charting the path from the one to the other is a fascinating task, and Wood does it as well as one could hope.

I would go into more detail about the intervening stages of American government, but that’s quite daunting. I can’t imagine writing out the argument in any fewer words than Wood did — not if I wanted to make it convincing. One of Wood’s strengths is that he manages to pack extraordinary quantities of supporting evidence around every point that he makes. So the argument is irresistably compelling, all while Wood tells a great story.

It’s really a remarkable book, which I can measure by the amount that I’ve been arguing with it. I’ve been writing loads against the Federalists and Whigs in the margins; Wood presents their arguments as fairly as he possibly could, which may be the best part of the book. I find that the challenge with reading a lot of history is understanding how people in the past could have thought the way they did; it’s easy to dismiss what they think, which makes the whole act of reading kind of pointless. Wood does his best to eliminate the benefits of hindsight, which makes his book very much a living document.