The founding of the United States after the American Revolution was so deliberate, so inspired, and so monumental in scope that the key actors considered this new government to be a work of art framed from natural rights. Recognizing the artificial nature of the state, these early politicians believed the culture of a people should inform the development of their governing rules and bodies. Eric Slauter explores these central ideas in this extensive and novel account of the origins and meanings of the Constitution of the United States. Slauter uncovers the hidden cultural histories upon which the document rests, highlights the voices of ordinary people, and considers how the artifice of the state was challenged in its effort to sustain inalienable natural rights alongside slavery and to achieve political secularization at a moment of growing religious expression.
A complement to classic studies of the Constitution's economic, ideological, and political origins, "The State as a Work of Art" sheds new light on the origins of the Constitution and on ongoing debates over its interpretation.
Reviews
Modern Language Association: MLA-Prize for a First Book, 2010
"A richly imaginative study that will compel a new look at the origins of the Constitution" – Gordon S. Wood, Brown University
"It is profoundly surprising that in the twenty-first century a fundamentally new insight into the U. S. Constitution and the mentality of its framers can be achieved, given the twentieth century's extensive and prodigious scholarship. Yet Eric Slauter's 'The State as a Work of Art' has accomplished just such a novel rereading, revealing a system of imagery and an elaborate lexicon that envisions state making and politics in light of the human processes of artistic creation – building, drawing, inscribing, and writing. Slauter shows just how much the structures of government and public life projected in the Constitution owe to aesthetic ideas about form, relation, and process and to widely held convictions about human agency in creation. Beautifully written, cogently argued, and ingeniously exemplified, Slauter's 'The State as a Work of Art' restores the cultural grounds of the framers' self-understanding" – David S. Shields, University of South Carolina
"Each chapter of 'The State as a Work of Art' recovers a lost element of debate in the creation of the Federal Constitution. No student of the period can be without Eric Slauter's book, and the citizen who turns to its pages will grasp the language of national origins in a dramatic new way" – Robert A. Ferguson, Columbia Law School
"The American Constitution emerged amid a democratic riot of poetry and prose, print and paint, architecture and furniture. Eric Slauter's rich and fascinating book brilliantly returns the Constitution to the cultural cacophony from which it arose. Bold, persuasive, and inspiring, 'The State as a Work of Art' will set the study of the American founding on a new and fertile course" – David Armitage, Harvard University
"'The State as a Work of Art' offers a beautifully written, powerful analysis of the complex dynamics and practices that informed the construction of the nation's governing document. The text of the Constitution and ideas about governing did not spring full-blown from the minds of the framers but were deeply grounded – and implicated – in changing American cultural practices: verbal, visual, material, and performative. Slauter elegantly reveals how difficult it is to interpret our governing text in its original context, and how much more we can discover about our nation's rich and promising, contentious and compromised founding when we try. It's a must-read for students of early national history, culture, literature, government and law" – Dana Nelson, Vanderbilt University
"Scholars have long recognized that the founders of the American republic often thought about political constitutions in either mechanical or natural terms. Now comes Eric Slauter to take a wholly fresh and provocative approach. This is the first truly aesthetic and cultural interpretation of the constitution-making enterprise. With his own ingenious and artful readings, Slauter uncovers new layers of meaning in the various ways in which Americans expressed their political ideas in words, images, music, and objects. We will never think about the Constitution in quite the same way again" – Jack Rakove, Stanford University
"[A] richly imaginative book... Slauter's book is the first full-scale effort by a literary scholar to bring to bear the special tools of his discipline on the Constitution and its cultural origins" – Gordon S. Wood, The New Republic
