what was the beard thesis of the constitution

In this, its centennial year, Charles Beard’s 1913 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States retains its hold on both the publication market and, at least in certain circles, the popular imagination. Its claim that the Founders were possessive aristocrats out to protect the property of the privileged has, to be sure, been demolished in the scholarly literature, most notably by Forrest McDonald. But it may be time for those who respect the Framers to acknowledge at least one deep vein of truth in Beard’s thesis and reply with an even deeper one. Call it “the Seinfeld defense”: Yes, they wanted to protect property—not that there’s anything wrong with that. The idea that the Founders had to be redeemed from Beard’s charge has so framed the response to the Progressive historian that the charge itself has been too little examined. But while Beard’s assessment of the personal economic stakes of the Philadelphia delegates was, as McDonald and others have shown, mistaken, his deeper point cannot and indeed ought not be dismissed: One purpose of the Philadelphia project was the protection of property. To be sure, Beard’s errors are legion. They are theoretical, not just historical. He claims that the “economic corollary” to Madison’s political thought is that “[p]roperty interests may, through their superior weight in power and intelligence, secure advantageous legislation whenever necessary, and they may at the same time obtain immunity from control by parliamentary majorities.”[1] This is patent error—Madison had in fact said property could be regulated even to prevent its excess accumulation—as is Beard’s imputation of judicial supremacy to Madison, and his mistaking of that doctrine for the proposed national veto over state laws.[2] Yet Beard’s assessment of the centrality of the economic dimensions of the Tenth Federalist is also essentially.
In fact, the inquiry which follows is based upon the political science of James Madison, the father of the Constitution and later President of the Union he had done so much to create. This political science runs through all of his really serious writings and is formulated in its most precise fashion in The Federalist as follows: “The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties in the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of society into different interests and parties The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination, A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit and party of faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.” Here we have a masterly statement of the theory of economic determinism in politics. Different degrees and kinds of property inevitably exist in modern society; party doctrines and “principles” originate in the sentiments and views which the possession of various kinds of property creates.
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States is a 1913 book by American historian Charles A. Beard. It argues that the structure of the Constitution of the United States was motivated primarily by the personal financial interests of the Founding Fathers. More specifically, Beard contends that the Constitutional Convention was attended by, and the Constitution was therefore written by, a cohesive elite seeking to protect its personal property (especially bonds) and economic standing. Beard examined the occupations and property holdings of the members of the convention from tax and census records, contemporaneous news accounts, and biographical sources, demonstrating the degree to which each stood to benefit from various Constitutional provisions. Beard pointed out, for example, that George Washington was the wealthiest landowner in the country, and had provided significant funding towards the Revolution. Beard traces the Constitutional guarantee that the newly formed nation would pay its debts to the desire of Washington and similarly situated lenders to have their costs refunded. Historiography[edit] Historian Carl L. Becker in History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776 (1909) formulated the Progressive interpretation of the American Revolution. He said there were two revolutions: one against Britain to obtain home rule, and the other to determine who should rule at home. Charles A. Beard in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) and An Economic Interpretation of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915) extended Becker's thesis down to 1800 in terms of class conflict. To Beard, the Constitution was a counter-revolution, set up by rich bond holders (bonds were personal property ), in opposition to the farmers and planters (land was real property. ) The Constitution, Beard argued, was designed to.
Abstract The Debate over an Economic Interpretation of the Constitution: Where has Beard taken us and where are we after McGuire’s “New” Interpretation? Since 1913, developing a complete analysis on the creation of the American Constitution necessarily requires a thorough consideration of economics. Until Charles A. Beard published his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), the standard account of the Founding Era was that the Framers acted out of idealism – a disinterested, public-regarding impulse to promote democratic ideals for which the Revolution was fought and the American Republic was founded. Beard challenged this idealistic view of the Framers that had, since the adoption of the Constitution, been the accepted understanding of the beginning of America. Beard offered a harsh, more realistic understanding of the framing of the American Constitution that to this day is regarded as labeling the Framers’ motives “anti-democratic” and Charles A. Beard as a “Marxist.” For roughly forty years, Beard’s economic interpretation reigned supreme. It became accepted that the Founding Fathers acted out of “selfish class interests” when drafting the Constitution. Not until the 1950’s, after the 1913 publication of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, and the subsequent 1935 edition, did the economic and historical academic communities rushed to critique Beard’s analysis and offer their own; each claiming a more developed understanding and interpretation. In the last fifty years, some of the more outspoken academics on the subject have included scholars such as Gordon Wood, Forrest McDonald, Shlomo Slonim, and Robert McGuire. This paper will first develop an understanding of where the debate began, where it has been, and finally where it currently stands. More importantly, this paper will provide an.
Charles Beard argues that the constitution was written by a group of rich landholders who wanted to protect their property at the expense of the debtors and the poor farmers. The slaveholding, landed class, he believed, was not motivated by philosophy. Rather, they were motived by their own economic self interest. He believed that the radical democracy of the Revolution was an example of true Jeffersonian democracy, where power was in the hands of the common people. However after the Revolution, he argued, and freedom was won, the men in power wanted now to have laws designed to protect their wealth. He called the constitution a counter Revolution of bond holders (men who lent money to others and had a lot of money in banks and property) against the common people, the farmers and the debtors. Beard was born well off but was a Progressive, and very liberal. He would have argued that the stated truths, the principles outlined by John Locke and echoed by George Mason in the Virginia declaration and then discussed in the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, were not the true motivation of the framers. He believed that they were trying to protect their own wealth. The framers were powerful men of means. If you did not have property, you could not vote. Interestingly, George Washington rose from being a minor young relative of some property owners to a shrewd businessman and then marrying well and inheriting property, to become the richest man in the colonies. John Hancock made his fortune trading outside of the official British system and of course when the British imposed taxes on the men of commerce they did not like it. So yes, the framers were of course men of wealth and power.  They certainly did some things, like allow slavery to continue, despite the obvious contradiction between their words and their ownership of other human beings. You probably.
Was the Constitution an economic document for economic ends ?One of the most influential—and controversial—history books ever published was Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, in 1913. Beard, a professor of politics at Columbia University, was a Progressive historian (a member of the Republican Party, not a Marxist) committed to reforming the federal government to save American democracy from what he considered to be the abuses of capitalism. His work was influenced by his contemporary context, in which he and other Progressives hoped that the Supreme Court would prove more amenable to federal regulation of trusts and congressional labor laws to protect industrial workers. Beard clearly admired the Constitution's framers and the work they accomplished, but he also demystified those framers, the process by which the Constitution was framed, and the motivations for doing so. He analyzed each individual convention delegate (in alphabetical order!), described their economic background and interests, and demonstrated how they each stood to benefit financially from passage of the new governmental structure. None of the delegates represented the interests of small farmers or mechanics; most of them came from towns or coastal regions where personal property was highly concentrated.Essentially, Beard argued that these framers shaped a new government to curb the excesses of democracy and to protect wealthy men with property interests, including themselves. Property interests later became business, which subsequently became synonymous with the despised corporate oligarchy of Beard's era. Marxist historians had mounted similar arguments before him, but Beard's status within the profession and his judicious tone brought credibility to his economic interpretation among mainstream scholars and created an uproar upon publication of.