The Art of Constitution-Making

At the time of the Constitution's bicentennial, the historical community was in agreement that scholarship on the founding had come to a standstill. Since the turn of the century, however, the founding has attracted renewed interest, and the last decade has seen the publication of several important works on the framing and ratification of the Constitution. Eric Slauter's The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution is the latest addition to this group. Whereas conventional accounts of the founding focus on the making of the Constitution, Slauter is concerned with how the founders understood the process of constitution-making. The overarching theme of Slauter's book is that "revolutionary Americans embraced the idea that the state was a work of human art." But even if they saw government as a man-made construct, a successful constitution was "framed with a specific population in mind" and was "one that could be taken to be an expression of the genius of the people" (pp. 298-99). The tension between the creative imagination of statesmen and the need to adapt government to the "manners, morals, beliefs, opinions, customs, genius, and tastes" of the people (p. 11) characterized the founding era. It is this tension that Slauter's book explores.

Slauter's investigation ranges far and wide. There are discussions of the use of the metaphor of the body politic in medieval thought, of the frequency of the word "God" in the title of American eighteenth-century imprints, of the art of making miniature portraits, and of the enlightenment language of taste. Slauter thereby contributes to scholarship on the founding by broadening the context in which the Constitution is typically interpreted far beyond the Constitutional Convention, The Federalist, various political and legal traditions, and even the full ratification debate that has been so successfully tapped by several recent historians. Placing the Constitution in the context of eighteenth-century art, literature, poetry, and aesthetics, as well as the period's material objects and practices, considerably improves our understanding of how the founding generation understood the art of constitution-making. The State as a Work of Art is unquestionably an impressive achievement. The topic is important, the perspective novel. The breadth and depth of the author's learning are profound. Yet for all its accomplishments, this is also a frustrating book to anyone seeking a ready answer to just what the cultural origins of the U.S. Constitution really were.

In the first of the book's two parts, Slauter is interested in the framers' understanding of state-building. Three chapters address the shift from bodily to architectural metaphors in the language of state-building, the importance of aesthetic judgments in promoting the Constitution, and the metaphors in which the framers and their critics tried to make sense of the concept of political representation. In the second part, Slauter turns his attention to the ways in which cultural characteristics of American society, broadly construed, shaped the way in which the Constitution was framed. One chapter explores how slavery and ideas of race affected the conception of rights. The following, and least successful, chapter in the book looks at ideas about the relationship between society and the social and political identity of the individual. The final chapter deals with the place of God in the purportedly godless Constitution of the United States.

Whereas the tension between government as artificial construct and cultural product is broad enough to allow Slauter to investigate almost any aspect of the Constitution, it is also too broad to provide much in the way of a coherent argument. As a result, The State as a Work of Art reads more like a collection of essays than a monograph. Traditionally, historical argument over the Constitution has concerned what the intentions...