To Make a Nation: The Rediscovery of American Federalism. - book reviews

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 22, 1993 | by Walter Berns

Samuel Beer, now the Eaton professor emeritus of the science of government, began his illustrious Harvard career in 1938. In more ways than one, his new book, To Make a Nation (Belknap/Harvard Press), is a reflection of that fact: It displays an immense learning and it is, in the best sense, old-fashioned. Unlike the works of too many younger political scientists and law professors, it takes the Constitution seriously, and in the process not only illuminates it but gives us reason to venerate it - and, not incidentally, venerate its framers.

As Beer rightly says, they were men of action, not of thought, which does not mean that they had not thought deeply about the problems of popular government and the institutions by which these problems might be, and were, resolved.

Beer begins his analysis of the Constitution by disagreeing with Ronald Reagan, who in his first inaugural address said that the "Federal government did not create the states; the states created the Federal government." This is patently untrue. The Colonies were joined originally by their common subjection to London, and none of them ever enjoyed an independent existence as a state, or, as Beer points out, "gave itself a constitution before being authorized to do so by the [First] Continental Congress."

The first to do so was New Hampshire, which, as it said, acted only after it obtained the "advice and direction of the Congress." Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, was right when he said, "The Union is older than any of the states, and, in fact, created them as states."

Beer has sound, nonpartisan reasons for taking exception to Reagan's understanding of the federal union. "If we are to understand what the Americans were for," he writes, "we must first see what they were against," and among the things they were against was this "compact theory" of the union. This theory had its champions among the anti-federalists (who could claim the authority of the "celebrated Montesquieu"), but, as Beer demonstrates, the framers rejected it in favor of what he calls "the national idea."

To elucidate this idea and its republican foundation, Beer takes the reader on a guided tour of some of the political philosophy that preceded the founding, beginning with the anti-republican thought of Thomas Aquinas (which he characterizes, correctly, as the Rule of the Wise and the Holy) and continuing with the republican thought of John Milton, James Harrington and David Hume. From these latter three especially, the framers took the idea of a federal republic and recast it in a new "national" form. What follows are chapters devoted to the constitutional institutions designed to make "government by discussion" possible in a large state.

For this, Beer credits the "nationalists," in particular Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and James Wilson. As he shows in sharp detail, their genius was in seeing what could be done with diversity. They not only tolerated it, they welcomed it, making its dynamic influence the ground of liberty and progress. "They saw that by rational discourse [which their Constitution was designed to promote] different opinions could be brought into agreement and diverse interests fitted together in the public interest."

That, I hardly need to say, was a considerable achievement, and peoples around the world - Christians and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Croats and Serbs, Shiites and Sunnis, whites and blacks, Zulus and Xhosas, their number is legion and the problem ubiquitous and timeless - could profit from Beer's account of how it was done at our beginning.

The only thing missing is a discussion of the idea of natural rights, which is the true ground of natural liberty and equality and, therefore, of modern democratic or republican government. By avoiding the subject, Beer presents an incomplete account; but he also avoids having to deal with that great body of modern thought - call it post-modernism - that denies the very idea of natural rights and, consequently, of constitutionalism, as well as the equally great body of criticism that faults the framers for embodying the natural rights idea in the Constitution.

I would not fault him for avoiding the subject. It is one that has inspired too much criticism - some of it savage, some supercilious, and none of it useful - and we yearn to cry "enough already." Samuel Beer - patriot and gentleman, as well as gifted scholar - may have had something like this in mind when he designed this book. For it he deserves our thanks and praise.

Walter Berns is John M. Olin university professor at Georgetown University.