Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution. - book reviews

National Review, March 7, 1994 by Jeffrey Hart

Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution, by M. E. Bradford (Georgia, 165 pp., $24.95)

IT IS NOT yet the moment to make a definitive assessment of the intellectual journey of the late M. E. Bradford, who died very prematurely in the midst of his creativity. I would say that Bradford will rank with R. P. Blackmur, Lionel Trilling, F. R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, and those others whose work has made a permanent difference in our sensibility. The present book is a masterpiece, centrally about the roots of limited government. Bradford throughout traces those roots to their philosophical sources. He easily breathes the air of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia. Of course Bradford's prose is up to his grand design. It is a prose that discusses issues within itself, sentences answering sentences, as in a debate. Even subordinate clauses contain qualifiers. I believe that in the end Bradford will win. When the time comes for the summing up of M. E. Bradford's contribution, it will be a large debt we are obliged to pay him.