An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States

In his piercing introduction to An Economic Interpretation, the author wrote "whoever leaves economic pressures out of history or out of discussion of public questions is in mortal peril of substituting mythology for reality". It was Beard's view that the founding fathers, especially Madison, Jay, and Hamilton, never made such a miscalculation. Indeed, these statesmen placed themselves among the great practitioners of all ages and gave instructions to succeeding generations in the art of government by their vigorous deployment of classical political economy.In this new printing of a major classic in American historiography, in his introduction Louis Filler provides a sense of the person behind the book, the background that enabled Beard to move well beyond the shibboleths of the 1910s. While the controversies over Beard's book have quieted, the issues which it raised have hardly abated. Indeed, one can say that just about every major work in the politics and economics of the American nationmust contend with Beard's classic work. His ideas rest on an examination of primary documents: land and slave owners, geographic distribution ofBeard, Charles Austin is the author of 'An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States' with ISBN 9780765845733 and ISBN 0765845733.