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To Form A More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution 1st Edition

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Many important questions regarding the creation and adoption of the United States Constitution remain unresolved. Did slaveholdings or financial holdings significantly influence our Founding Fathers' stance on particular clauses or rules contained in the Constitution? Was there a division of support for the Constitution related to religious beliefs or ethnicity? Were founders from less commercial areas more likely to oppose the Constitution? To Form a More Perfect Union successfully answers these questions and offers an economic explanation for the behavior of our Founding Fathers during the nation's constitutional founding.
In 1913, American historian Charles A. Beard controversially argued in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States that the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution were less interested in furthering democratic principles than in advancing specific economic and financial interests. Beard's thesis eventually emerged as the standard historical interpretation and remained so until the 1950s. Since then, many constitutional and historical scholars have questioned an economic interpretation of the Constitution as being too narrow or too calculating, believing the great principles and political philosophies that motivated the Founding Fathers to be worthier subjects of study.
In this meticulously researched reexamination of the drafting and ratification of our nation's Constitution, Robert McGuire argues that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, George Mason and the other Founding Fathers did act as much for economic motives as for abstract ideals. To Form a More Perfect Union offers compelling evidence showing that the economic, financial, and other interests of the founders can account for the specific design and adoption of our Constitution. This is the first book to provide modern evidence that substantiates many of the overall conclusions found in Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation while challenging and overturning other of Beard's specific findings. To Form a More Perfect Union presents an entirely new approach to the study of the shaping of the U.S. Constitution. Through the application of economic thinking and rigorous statistical techniques, as well as the processing of vast amounts of data on the economic interests and personal
characteristics of the Founding Fathers, McGuire convincingly demonstrates that an economic interpretation of the Constitution is valid. Radically challenging the prevailing views of most historians, political scientists, and legal scholars, To Form a More Perfect Union provides a wealth of new findings about the Founding Fathers' constitutional choices and sheds new light on the motivations behind the design and adoption of the United States Constitution.

ISBN-10

0195139704
ISBN-13

978-0195139709
Edition

1st
Publisher

Oxford University Press
Publication date

March 27, 2003
Language

English
Dimensions

9.76 x 6.56 x 1.33 inches
Print length

416 pages
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Editorial Reviews

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"Robert McGuire's To Form a More Perfect Union is and will long remain the definitive study of the effect of economic influences on the drafting and ratification of the American Constitution." - Cal Jillson, Chair, Department of Political Science, Southern Methodist University

"No longer can economic interpretations of the Founding Fathers' votes on the Constitution be dismissed as 'simplistic.' Robert McGuire's careful reasoning and thorough testing of alternative viewpoints yields a rich harvest of persuasive conclusions. The mix of economic interests definitely shaped the Constitution. A different mix could easily have defeated ratification and produced a very different America. In fact, had the delegates just had the same amounts of slave-owning of their average constituents, there would have been stronger opposition to the Constitution we have lived under ever since."--Peter H. Lindert, President, Economic History Association and Professor of Economics and Director of the Agricultural History Center, University of California-Davis

"The U.S. Constitution is the wonder of the world. It has been key in development of the American society, government, and economy. Yet, the process by which the document was drafted and ratified remains controversial . In this provocative and valuable book, Robert McGuire uses formal economic models, the empirical techniques of economic history and political science, and modern statistical analysis to examine the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. His findings support Beard's conjectures - self interest influenced both government design as well as specific constitutional provisions. McGuire provides guidance for interpreting these findings and their implications for understanding the origins of the Constitution." - Gary Libecap, Anheuser Busch Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies, Economics, and Law, Director of Karl Eller Center for Entrepreneurship

"To Form A More Perfect Union presents a new and quite interesting examination of the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Robert McGuire's interpretation will reopen many old debates, as well asstart some new ones regarding Charles Beard and the economic interpretation of the Constitution."--Stanley L. Engerman, John Munro Professor of Economics and Professor of History, University of Rochester

"This is an important book that will be of great interested to any student of American political-economic history."--EH.NET, Keith Poole, Department of Political Science, University of Houston

About the Author

Robert A. McGuire was born in Long Beach, California, and educated at Long Beach State and the University of Washington. A professor of economics at the University of Akron, he is the author of many studies that have appeared in academic journals, including the American Economic Review, American Journal of Political Science, Economic History Review, Journal of Economic History, and Public Choice. Among his most recent research is a study of the Confederate constitution appearing in Economic Inquiry and an ongoing study of the role of diseases in American economic history funded with a National Science Foundation grant in 2000.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 1st edition (March 27, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195139704
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195139709
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.63 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.76 x 6.56 x 1.33 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,665,830 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #385 in Constitutional Law (Books)
- #389 in Econometrics & Statistics
- #886 in Constitutions (Books)

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Robert A. McGuire

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Robert A. McGuire was born in Long Beach, California and grew up in Lakewood. He attended Paramount High School where he ran around with a group of rowdy friends while still making the Honor Roll and lettering in cross-country and track. His education continued at Rio Hondo College in Whittier, Long Beach State, and at the University of Washington in Seattle where he received a Ph.D. in economics.

Robert McGuire is an economist with a strong historical bent. He is currently Adjunct Research Professor at the University of Akron in Ohio (but lives in Brea, California). He has previously been on the faculty at Ball State University in Muncie, IN and held visiting appointments at Ohio State, Washington State, and the Universities of California at Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, and Santa Cruz. He is an avid hiker, runner, skier, traveler, and wine collector who spends two to three weeks each summer in Europe, as well as travels elsewhere during the year, but he is always home in Southern California for the Christmas and New Years holidays.

Robert McGuire's research interests are multi-faceted, examining economic development issues that integrate economics, history, and microbiology perspectives, as well as examining various constitutional issues that integrate economics, history, and politics. His most recent book is _Parasites, Pathogens, and Progress: Diseases and Economic Development_ (MIT Press 2011).

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Fascinating reading

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 16, 2008

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Colloquially speaking, the main thesis of this book is that the Constitution of the United States was ratified by those who "voted their pocketbook." This has been claimed before in both popular culture and by the historian Charles Beard in his books written in the early years of the twentieth century. What sets this book apart from Beard's work however is that the author attempts, and succeeds to a large degree, to justify his claims with a rigorous statistical study. For those with the appropriate mathematical background and interest in the subject matter will find the book fascinating, even though at times the reader can get lost in the details. Absent for the most part though, and this is refreshing, is excessive moralizing by the author, for such would make the book irritating to some, with a consequent loss in readership.

The main mathematical tool used is logistic regression, which it is fair to say is the most popular tool among economists, even though at times it strains credulity to apply it in some situations that they do. This book could even be used by statistics instructors as a source of more challenging problems in logistic regression. Overall the author is convincing in his use of this tool, and therefore the conclusions of the book are difficult to counter if one accepts logistic regression as being a viable tool. It certainly is in other contexts, such as finance and biological modeling.

If one investigates the economic history of the United States after the war of independence it is not surprising to hear that Americans at the time were fed up with the loose conglomeration of states under the Articles of Confederation. Being financed essentially by paper money by the Continental Congress this currency suffered dramatic depreciation in value as the war dragged on. Some economic historians have estimated that $449 million dollars were issued during this time by the Continental Congress and the states, with none of it bearing interest. Certainly this situation motivated many at the time to seek a hard-money policy, and their attitudes are reflected in their votes for the ratification of the Constitution, as the author shows clearly in this work. To allow the states to issue paper money by fiat would be an anathema to those who lived through it during the war, and its prohibition in the Constitution would thus be a very desirable goal.

The Constitution of the United States is thus a product of the attitudes and interests of those who framed it and voted to adopt it. But their intentions, whether economic or otherwise, are in the final analysis irrelevant since only its social, moral, and legal efficacies are important. If the Constitution is an umbrella of freedom and sound justice for all of its citizens then it does not matter what the intentions of its founders are. If it is not, it should be altered, and it does not matter what the intentions are of those who alter it. The primary value of studying intentions is to shed light on the attitudes of the citizens at the time, and how they reacted to the absence of British rule after the war. No longer a part of the world market system via the British mercantile system, and having a government that could not pay the interest on domestic and foreign debt, they sought out a new alliance, a new government, to ameliorate their dire situation. Their efforts were in retrospect successful, and the government they invented has done a fair job since then.

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The Independent Review

A Compelling & Thorough Look at the Economic Interpretation

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 30, 2004

"In To Form a More Perfect Union, Robert A. McGuire attempts to provide the first solid modern analysis to quantify the impact of the personal economic interests of the Founding Fathers on the structure and content of the U.S. Constitution. Readers familiar with the literature in this area will immediately, and correctly, associate this book with Charles A. Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, [1913] 1935). In that book, Beard concludes that the delegates' personal interests shaped their behavior with respect to the drafting and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. His hypothesis was generally accepted until the 1950s, when most scholars began to question the analysis. An onslaught of counterevidence came during the 1950s and early 1960s, and today most academics believe that Beard's original interpretation was too narrow and that the general political philosophies of the Founding Fathers had greater importance in determining the nature and contents of the U.S. Constitution.
"McGuire essentially resurrects Beard's hypothesis and offers substantial evidence in favor of the view that the Founding Fathers' personal interests had a significant influence on the process of constitutional design and ratification. In light of the substantial body of empirical evidence this book provides, it is likely to bring the personal interest view back into widespread acceptance among academics. Although McGuire draws some of the analysis presented in the book from his previously published journal articles, at least half of what he offers is new and original. What makes the book so compelling is the use of today's significantly better empirical methodology to analyze data, in contrast to the techniques available during the 1950s, when the counterevidence to Beard's hypothesis was presented.
"Readers searching for a middle ground in the debate over whether personal self-interest shaped the U.S. Constitution will find refuge in this book. McGuire repeatedly makes clear that these personal interests were relevant at the margin in the Founding Fathers' decision calculus and that many other factors (such as general political philosophy) influenced these individuals' overall behavior. Among the most compelling findings: (1) personal interests played a bigger role in the specific content of the U.S. Constitution than in the document's overall design; and (2) the framers' debt holdings and slave ownership and the degree of commercialization in their local communities are significantly correlated with their observed behavior and, hence, with the content of the constitution they produced....
"One of the book's strengths is the amount of underlying background data and statistics provided. For example, McGuire includes tables that show not only each individual delegate's vote on an issue (the data used for the dependent variable), but also the predicted probability of a yes vote for that delegate from the estimated logistic regression model. As anyone who has estimated a logistic regression model knows, it is possible for these models to fit well overall but still do a poor job of predicting individual votes. Throughout the book, however, McGuire provides the evidence necessary to comfort readers worried about such potential problems. The book's main weakness is that at times it becomes rather lengthy and dull, but this aspect is simply a cost of being thorough, which is necessary in this case because of the controversial nature of the theory being tested.
"For the great number of readers who are likely to use the results of the book as a single-sentence footnote or reference in their own research, the eleven-page prologue provides all of the background and summary information necessary to make an informed citation of the work. The remaining three hundred or so pages merely fill in the sufficient details to support these conclusions. In that sense, the book reminds me somewhat of Bjorn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
"Had I been a reviewer for the book prior to its publication, the only suggestion I might have offered to improve it would have been for the author to include a fuller discussion of the debate surrounding the adequacy and structure of the document that preceded the U.S. Constitution, the Articles of Confederation.... Had McGuire presented this discussion, he would have provided a fitting framework in which to view the Founding Fathers' choices as marginal institutional changes relative to the existing constitutional order.
"To Form a More Perfect Union undoubtedly will elicit additional research in this highly debated area of constitutional research. Future research will benefit from the 122 pages of raw data and empirical results provided as appendix material. McGuire's book most likely will meet with a better initial acceptance than Beard's book received (it was banned from high school libraries in Seattle and condemned by President Taft and by the president of Beard's own university).
"One important implication of McGuire's book is that the condition of a Rawlsian `veil of ignorance,' putatively necessary to produce a `just' social contract, is not and cannot be satisfied in reality. Any constitution or social contract will be shaped by its designers' individual self-interests. Modern public-choice scholars who favor theories based on the premise of methodological individualism will find comforting reassurance as they read To Form a More Perfect Union."
------------------------------
Excerpted from a review by Russell S. Sobel in "The Independent Review," Winter 2004.

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Kevin

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 4, 2015

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Great book!

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