Alan Gibson's previous book, Interpreting the Founding (Lawrence, KS, 2006), provided a remarkably helpful guide, as the subtitle suggests, to the most “enduring” “frameworks of interpretation” which have sustained the modern debate about the founding of the American Republic. His new book is an equally useful and enlightening guide to what he calls “the crucial questions” this enormous body of scholarship has generated. It might be tempting to label Gibson the “graduate student's best friend” – these extended historiographical essays will become required reading for students of the Founding – but that would diminish his achievement here, which is to set out an agenda for scholars and an approach to thinking about the Founding. It seems fair to say, too, that this is hardly a beginner's guide. Except for a few key sections, this book requires familiarity with many of the crucial debates.

Gibson's four questions – each the subject of a chapter – rarely appear in question form, but they are: first, was the Constitution, as Charles Beard suggested long ago, the product of the economic interests of the Founders rather than the will of the “people”? Second, to what degree can we understand the Constitution to be democratic? Third, with what methodological approach should scholars examine the founding era? Fourth, how can scholars move forward from the now stale debate over Republicanism versus Liberalism?

Gibson first shows how Beard “liberated scholars to critically study the Founders rather than merely celebrate them,” and suggests, as he did in Interpreting the Founding, that a good deal of the subsequent scholarship on the era is on some fundamental level a commentary on Beard (15). He also carefully and fairly describes the reaction against Beard's argument, pointing out, nevertheless, that even Beard's critics tend to acknowledge the Constitution's basic economic orientation even as they refine or reject some of Beard's supporting evidence (that the Founders were a phalanx of personalty holders, for example). Indeed, the backlash against Beard in the 1950s paved the way for a much more sophisticated socioeconomic interpretation. Gibson does seem to privilege the “systematic empirical study of economic interests or social status” over what he describes as impressionistic evaluation of the political rhetoric of the Founders, but his description of the scholarship is fair and accurately spells out the difficulties (if not impossibilities) such empirical efforts necessarily encounter (42).

Intimately related to the questions Beard asked – since Beard himself described the undemocratic features of the Constitution as designed to serve the economic interests of the Founders – are tensions between the Constitutional structure and democracy. Gibson's is as clear and straightforward an analysis of this discussion as one is likely to find. Particularly helpful is his suggestion that much of the confusion arises from contested definitions of “democracy” held by participants in this debate. For example, many progressives have decried the multiple ways in which the Constitution resists deference to popular majorities, while others focus on the exclusion of women and minorities from its provisions, pointing out that checks on majority will are essential to the implementation of substantive democracy. Also confusing this debate, Gibson points out, are the ways in which “the label democratic has become increasingly normative and prescriptive” (51). Gibson is neither naive nor cynical – the Founders, he suggests, did check popular will, but they also took substantial risks to their own status when they made their government more responsive to the people's voice than any other on earth to that time.

The chapter on methodology may be the most heady, pitting “linguistic contextualists” like Gordon Wood, Quentin Skinner, and J. G. A. Pocock against political philosophers who see the Founders as participants in a conversation about “perennial questions” whose wisdom can guide contemporary political thought and practice. This is one of those sections in the book where beginners can get a clear description of an extraordinarily complex argument. But it also may be the chapter least likely to appeal to a newcomer interested in the fundamental debates about the Constitution itself (for whom the relevance of the Founders may be a given). Gibson offers a solid description of contextualization, but ultimately rejects it, cautiously but explicitly endorsing study of the Founding as a “search for enduring answers to perennial questions.” Historians may find his critique less than fully satisfying, but his suggestion that the ideas of the founders can and properly should inform and “enhance … contemporary political thinking” – perhaps especially when their thought seems least like ours – is nevertheless compelling (111).

Readers looking for an introduction to the liberalism–republicanism question should look at Gibson's earlier book (chapters 3–5), but scholars will find the discussion here rewarding. Gibson begins with the assumption that most scholars in this debate have rejected reductionism and adopted some form of what he calls a “multiple traditions” or synthetic approach to the question, acknowledging the presence of both liberal and republican elements in early American political culture. What follows is both descriptive (since not all syntheses are alike) and prescriptive. Given the scholarly denouement, Gibson asks, where should we go from here? If, for example, scholars tend to agree both that few Founders considered promotion of virtue to be the province of government, and that most also believed that government was nevertheless tenuous in the absence of such virtue in the citizenry, how did they believe such virtue would be fostered? The answer, Gibson suggests, is civil society, which, he argues, should be a focus of Founding scholarship in the future. Too, Gibson says – in line with his advocacy of political theory – since several fundamentally incommensurable claims “embedded in the history of American political discourse” were present at the Founding, studying it may help us make better sense of their contemporary manifestations (164).

Gibson follows well his own admonition that we engage the Founders “independent of either romanticism and puerile worship on the one hand or self-righteous acontextualized condemnation on the other” (193). He takes a similarly generous approach to the historiography of the Founding. Scholars will long be indebted to him for this succinct description of a capacious scholarship as well as for his clear-headed call to further study.