The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (review)

Slauter reports that John Wheelock, president of Dartmouth at the end of the eighteenth century, authored a lengthy manuscript about the rise and fall of nations. Wheelock's investigation into the "habits, customs, and political forms of nations" was pitched by a would-be publisher "as a kind of American equivalent to Montesquieu." The only problem was that early reviewers "couldn't tell what the main subject of the book was" (89–90). To report a similar conclusion with respect to Slauter's book is too harsh. However, if there is a main subject of Slauter's text, it surely has more to do with the book's subtitle than with its title.

Characterized as a "work of intellectual, cultural, and literary history," Slauter's text explores multiple features of early American culture using an impressive array of primary sources (personal correspondence, broadsides, newspapers and magazines, and professional handbooks) and secondary literature in literary criticism and political theory (18). Slauter's goals appear to be two: (1) He aims to flesh out particular aspects of American life, for example, the drawing of miniatures or the tendency among whites to criticize black poetry as "slavish" imitations of celebrated "masters." (2) He seeks to link these practices to better-known features of early American constitutionalism—to identify certain metaphors or concepts as culturally motivated. With reference to miniatures, he attempts to connect the practice of "taking" the likeness of a person to standing notions of representation (an assembly ought to "resemble" the people) (127, 140).

This approach to the study of early American culture and constitutionalism is coherent. In practice, however, there are at least two problems: First, not every metaphorical or conceptual feature of the Founding meshes with the specific cultural practice that Slauter assigns to it. Miniatures offer a plausible foundation for ideas about the proper constitution of a representative assembly, but in the same chapter, he also connects a competing image of the legislature (a body intended to "refine and enlarge the public views") to the practice of transcription in shorthand (148).¹ The substantive "fit" proposed by the author makes less sense in this case. The point of transcription, according to a how-to manual cited by Slauter, was for practitioners to take "down their own thoughts, or the sentiments of others" accurately—not to improve the style or substance of what was spoken (151). Similarly, the author discusses the Montesquievian notion that "constitutions and governments needed to accommodate people," or conform to the pre-existing tastes of the population, but he curiously grounds that theory in contemporary ideas about the judgment of art: An "aesthetic totalit[y]" such as the proposed Constitution ought to appeal to the "taste" of the reader-qua-critic (95, 117).

The second problem reflects the intellectual commitments of social sciences in which causality (how to demonstrate it, or how to choose between competing accounts of it) generates considerable scholarship. Each chapter draws a causal arrow between a cultural practice and some aspect of the "constitutionalism of the revolutionary period" (8). In no chapter, however, is Slauter's cultural account of origins explicitly set against an alternative explanation. For example, he maintains that criticism of the hermetic life—"[i]n solitude men would perish"—reflected standing societal unease about those who lived in isolation (223). Such an account needs to confront the long tradition of social contractarian thought, which employs the solitary individual as a theoretical starting point for politics, and the attending claim that early Americans merely appropriated older ideas when invoking this image.

Thus, we are left where we began—with fundamental uncertainty regarding the subject of Slauter's book. Surely the subject is not "the state as a work of art"; the effort to ground the language of "framing" in architectural ideas is limited to the first chapter. Nor is the subject constitutional history, for the very reason given above. Slauter's book is...