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The Founders' Intent
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13430 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1987 |
6,674 Words |
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George W. Carey
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THE FOUNDERS' CONSTITUTION
Edited by Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987
5 vols., 3,520 pp., $300
As the title the Founders' Constitution indicates, the selections in these five volumes are designed to provide an understanding of the moral, intellectual, and political universe of the founding period so that we might better appreciate the framers' legacy; to see, as the editors put it, "the reach - and limits - of their aspirations, the preoccupations of the day and of the morrow, the principles which they chose and shaped and thought worth preserving and bequeathing."
With this goal in mind, the first of these volumes is devoted almost entirely to "major themes" implicit in the language of the Preamble to the Constitution. In "We the People of the United States," for instance, the editors identify three themes: the "popular basis of political authority," the "right of revolution," and the "republican government." The "in Order to form a more perfect Union" portion is broken down into: the "deficiencies of the confederation," "convention," "union," and "federal v. consolidated government." In all, the editors identify eighteen themes in the Preamble. These include "separation of powers," "representation," "equality," "property," and, in the form of an epilogue, "securing the republic." Under each theme, relevant selections are arrayed in chronological order: Under "republican government" are thirty-four items of varying length starting with portions of John Locke's Second Treatise (1669) and concluding with a Jefferson letter written in 1816. The selections are drawn from a wide variety of relatively standard sources. There is an introduction to each chapter designed to provide an overview and, at the end of each chapter, a list of additional sources.
Volumes two, three, and four deal with the text of the Constitution, starting with the Preamble (this time around providing general commentary on the purposes and nature of the Constitution) and running through Article 7, though by far the major portion of the entries deal with the provisions in Article 1. In other words, the volumes are organized around the specific articles, sections, and, in some cases, clauses of the Constitution. For example, volume four begins with Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1, which deals with the president's power as "Commander in Chief," his authority to require "in writing" the opinion of the "principal" officers in the "executive Departments" and to grant "Reprieves and Pardons." Under this heading the editors include all the relevant debates from the Philadelphia convention, abstracted principally from Madison's "Notes," and then selections - again ordered chronologically - dealing specifically with each of these functions and powers. The "Commander in Chief" section is fairly typical of the others throughout the middle volumes. It comprises eleven items and includes portions of the ratification debates in Virginia and North Carolina, excerpts from the Commentaries of both St. George Tucker and Joseph Story, and a most-interesting debate in the House of Representatives (1797) over the wisdom of limiting the president's discretion in the use of newly commissioned frigates.
Volume five deals with the Bill of Rights as well as the Eleventh and Twelfth amendments in the same clause-by-clause fashion. For example, the First Amendment, which
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