Constitutional theorists must read The State as a Work of Art. Shallow debates over originalism and textualism receive their comeuppance in this book, which recreates the complicated world of thought that actually produced the Federal Constitution. Legal scholars naturally tend toward a narrative of winners and losers. Eric Slauter reaches instead for the underlying confusions that allowed leading figures in the 1780s to use the same words with very different meanings.

Slauter deepens our understanding of the debates that vexed the constitutional era in four significant ways. First, he shows how the controlling metaphors used were understood in different ways by disputants because they crafted constitutional language around different theories of the state. Second, he brings a richer array of texts to bear on the questions of the day with the understanding that we must expand our textual base if we are to come to grips with early republican uses of language, which resemble our own but differ from them. Third, he approaches conflict over the issues of governance in the period through the interdisciplinary filter of cultural studies, where literature, law, visual aesthetics, and politics meet. Fourth, in what will become an image culture, he makes a case for the role of visual materials as influences on understandings of the federal problem in all of its uncertainties. In other words, the burning question in national origins—Oh, say, can you see?—precedes the national anthem.

The book opens with a question that cannot be answered but that fueled endless controversy in the late eighteenth century. Do the people make a good constitution or does a constitution make a people good? Each chapter of The State as a Work of Art explores a dimension over why that seemingly unanswerable question (chicken and egg in form) so dominated understandings.

The early pages of the book explore the shift in understandings from an anthropomorphized sense of the state as a body politic toward a new conception that governments are not set forms but artificial constructs to be made and altered through the ingenuity of its citizens. The Founders are caught between conceptions. Slauter is at his best in depicting the controversies that arise over this slow “transformation from depictions of government that reference the human body to depictions of a depersonalized political apparatus embodied most often in architectural constructions” (57–58). Debates over the Federal Constitution are so fierce because the government rendered in language familiar to all from previous constitutional documents gives birth to something that the contestants themselves identify through very different forms of understanding.

The confusions that follow therefrom are embedded in terms of choice over who grasps the nature of government best. How one argues in the ensuing disputes depends on what kind of refinement one expects in a document and government that all parties accept as evolving but address in contrasting social or political terms. Put another way, Slauter investigates the proper perspective and distance needed to see clearly in the emerging science of politics.

Not least is Slauter's important contribution to theories of “The Matter and Meaning of Representation” (123–66), the root issue in thinking of government as an artificial construct. Should representatives reflect their constituencies, in architectonic form, or do they provide a higher and presumably independent vision of government as part of the body politic? Slauter approaches this standard problem through the unique perspective of portraiture in the period, a metaphor that many used to describe the nature of a representative assembly. Did such an assembly speak for the people by resembling them? Answers depended on “the material referents behind the metaphors of image and voice in political representation” (127).

Eric Slauter offers the broadest possible grasp of the writings and images of the period, and it enables him to take the central debates of the day over slavery, over the nature of the social contract, and over the role of church and state to deeper levels of investigation. A true historian and critic, he does not try to parse artificial developments for functional purposes in the way that far too many legal scholars attempt to do. Instead, he wants us to see what was actually happening on the ground of eighteenth-century debates in all of their rich complexity and uncertainty.

The results are instructive for all concerned. Anyone who still wants to argue in terms of the Framers' intentions or the original meaning of constitutional language will have to grapple with Slauter's richer conception of the times or admit that originalism is simply the blatant political rhetoric of our own times.