An uncharitable reading of Tom Cutterham’s new book would suggest the alternative title: “An Economic Interpretation of the Buildup to the Constitutional Convention.” But Cutterham, a lecturer in U.S. history at the University of Birmingham in Britain, is up to something more interesting, and perhaps more controversial, than Charles Beard was. Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic contends that the political institutions and values adopted after the American War for Independence stemmed from class-based struggles to define justice that animated the young republic. These institutions, on Cutterham’s reading, did not abolish hierarchy but created new anti-egalitarian social…
|Aedanus Burke, Declaration of Independence, Gentlemen Revolutionaries, Henry Knox, Property Rights, Tom Cutterham