The American Revolution, State Sovereignty, and the American Constitutional Settlement, 1765–1800 by Aaron N. Coleman (review)

The American Revolution, State Sovereignty, and the American Constitutional Settlement, 1765–1800 offers itself as a revisionist history of the American Founding that corrects what author Aaron N. Coleman calls the "nationalist" conventional wisdom (p. 3). Scholars in thrall to this syllabus of errors, including major figures in the field, are said to have read their approval of later centralization back onto the Founding era. The nationalist interpretation has not adequately appreciated that state sovereignty was the basis of the Revolution and the Union, and that it endured throughout the Founding era, despite the contrary designs of Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist allies. This thesis is pursued through all the major events of the period: from the rationale for the separation from Britain through the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. The argument is well grounded in primary sources and conversant with the vast literature on the subjects it addresses, and this book stands as a competent expression of the state-centered perspective on the Founding.

A major theoretical pillar of Coleman's argument, adopted from Michael Oakeshott by way of M. E. Bradford, is the distinction between a nomocratic and a teleocratic political order. A nomocratic order lays out processes and methods for addressing common concerns, for making decisions, and for limiting power. A teleocratic order aims to achieve a specific philosophical objective or grand political project. This distinction is invoked throughout the book, though not in the depth of Oakeshott or Bradford. In practice, Federalists are condemned as teleocratic for wanting to centralize power in the federal government; Anti-Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans are valorized for wanting the opposite. Sometimes (and without explanation) the former term is rendered as "teleological." The reader is left to wonder whether this difference is intended to carry any meaning. Nevertheless, by use of this distinction, and by other indications, it is clear that the author has subtly but designedly aligned himself with Bradford's version of traditionalist-localist constitutional conservatism. Thus the revolt of 1776 is tendentiously described as "secession from the British Empire"; similarly, New Hampshire's ratification of the Constitution completed "the secession from the Articles of Confederation" (pp. 39, 127). Are we thus meant to regard that later and infamous attempted secession as just one more legitimate appeal to state sovereignty? Coleman offers a large clue in the conclusion's statement that it was Abraham Lincoln and the "Federalist-cum-Republican vision of the sovereignty of national government that emerged triumphant during the Civil War, and became enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment" (p. 237). The Civil War resulted in the "second American constitutional settlement that governs America today" (p. 238). To suggest that our modern Leviathan derived from the Federalists and Lincoln, rather than the Progressives and their heirs in the New Deal and Great Society, is to misunderstand the foundation and salvation of limited republican government in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the causes of its erosion in the twentieth century.

It is quite debatable, often on the author's own evidence, whether the "constitutional settlement" of the book's title was ever truly settled. The book portrays Federalists as teleocratic backsliders, promise breakers on the topic of state sovereignty and the limits it was meant to impose on the federal government. But this interpretation overestimates the amount of theoretical clarity and agreement that existed. The desire for a stronger central government that could affect citizens directly and defend them adequately coexisted with the desire for limits on its reach in deference to the local authority of the states. Just how to balance these imperatives was not something agreed to once and for all and then deviously abandoned. It was worked out over time as the Constitution was interpreted and put into effect (two inseparable facets of the same process). Constitutional politics happened. Interests and principles clashed; institutions were designed...