The Constitution and Culture

FOR the William and Mary Quarterly to commemorate the bicentennial of the United States Constitution by reappraising Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic is in itself a revealing indication of the state of the field. Wood's work so overshadows all others on the historical background of the Constitution that it is virtually the only book on the subject (apart from Charles A. Beard's classic) that all American historians know they must know. One reason for its preeminence is surely that it marks a pivotal moment in American historiography. To reevaluate it from the vantage point of the 198os is necessarily to take stock of major trends in American historical writing since the Second World War as well as to assess the state of our knowledge about political developments in the I78os. At the time of its appearance Creation of the American Republic was pivotal not only in the sense that it broke conceptual ground but in its faithfulness to certain historical perspectives of the preceding era. One of the book's many triumphs was its ability to straddle the ideological and interpretive boundaries being drawn in the late i96os and I970s, to combine the old and the new. It was, on the one hand, a work of political and intellectual history, published at the moment when the new social history was gaining ascendency. It was, moreover, on a classic topic, addressing perennial questions about the making of the American state. In method, too, Wood's work was fully in keeping with the broad approach to the history of ideas that had been developed (especially within American Studies) in the postwar period. Yet in other respects Wood's approach was undeniably new. Following the lead of Bernard Bailyn, who in turn had been influenced by Clifford Geertz, Wood was instrumental in turning the attention of intellectual historians to ideology as a cultural system (emphasis added). Unlike Perry Miller, Henry Nash Smith, and other major earlier interpreters of American culture-who approached social and political values indirectly through ideas about religion and nature-Bailyn and Wood presented political beliefs themselves as a unified expression of culture. Their work went beyond the conventional intellectual history of political ideas in stressing the mythic, nonrational components of political thought. Perhaps

Constitution · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law

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