Alan Gibson has compiled an exhaustive review of the literature on the American Founding and has organized it around the four debates or “confrontations” that he considers to be central to modern scholarship on the Founding. First, he reviews the continuing debate over the economic motives of the Founders (and subsequently the defenders) of the Constitution that began in 1913 with Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and continues today in the work of rational choice theorists. Second, he explores the issue of the extent to which the Constitution provided for a democratic form of government. Third, he examines the methodological confrontation over whether the Founding should be studied using a historical and contextual approach or one that is more traditional and philosophical and considers the Founders' contribution to the Western political tradition. Finally, Gibson revisits the debate over the question of whether the intellectual foundations of the United States are located in Lockean liberalism, republicanism, some synthesis of the two, or a mixture of liberalism and republicanism and other traditions.

Understanding the Founding is very neatly organized around those four questions. Indeed, Gibson devotes a chapter to each debate, and in each, he explains the issues of the controversy clearly, insightfully, and in detail, identifying the participants and elaborating on their arguments. Each chapter also contains a section in which Gibson offers his own suggestions for advancing the debate. He is careful not to claim to have the answers that will actually resolve the controversy but instead offers recommendations for further investigation or a shift in perspective that could shed light on unanswered or neglected questions. For example, in Chapter 2, after scrupulously reviewing the literature, including The Federalist, that has addressed the question of how democratic the original Constitution was, Gibson concludes that there are a number of complicating factors that have led to an impasse between those who contend that the Framer's Constitution was democratic and those who argue on various grounds that it was not. The most prominent of these factors is that both sides interpret the original design of the American political system in similar ways but that they have different understandings of what constitutes democracy. He agues that if we shift the focus to “concrete comparisons along several dimensions of democracy rather than diffusive or even unarticulated conceptions of it, the character of the Constitution is revealed as complex and ambiguous” (p. 86). Although that hardly seems to provide a way to get beyond the impasse, Gibson uses those concrete comparisons to claim that the Constitution established one of the most progressive political systems of its time and that it recognized the most extensive electorate in the world at that time. In short, the Constitution was inclusive and historically progressive. Still, he is not taking the side of the democratic interpretation of the Constitution. Indeed, he notes that scholars who argue that the document created a democratic republic ignore the ways in which it impeded the direct expression of the people's will and was inconsistent with political equality.

How democratic was the Constitution? At the end of Gibson's analysis we have learned a great deal about the progressive and subsequent critiques of the Constitution as well as the defenses from The Federalist to Martin Diamond. But how have we moved beyond the stalemate between the opposing sides? It seems that we have not. Still, the author offers the following insights: The proponents of the democratic interpretation are mistaken in their insistence that historical actors must not be judged against modern standards of inclusion or political equality because such standards did not exist in the eighteenth century. He finds that those standards did, in fact, exist although they were rarely held: James Otis, for example, considered that equality meant voting rights for women; New Jersey did not deny single women the franchise. Thus, if we criticize the Constitution for not guaranteeing women and African Americans full rights, we are judging the Framers against the most progressive standards of their day. On the other hand, we should not judge the Constitution without taking into account that it had multiple intended purposes—the Framers were not concerned only with the advantages and disadvantages of democratic government. In addition, Gibson encourages us to take a careful look at the Federalists' arguments. For example, does the decision-making process really become concentrated on fewer individuals in legislative assemblies with a large number of representatives?

In Chapter 4, Gibson thoroughly examines the debate over the intellectual origins of the Founding and strongly supports Rogers Smith's multiple traditions thesis (“Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review 87 [September 1993]: 549–56). Gibson agrees that inegalitarian ascriptive ideologies were part of the political thought of the Founders, existed alongside liberalism and republicanism, and served to justify slavery, nativism, segregation, and the subordination of women. The multiple traditions thesis can thus be used to understand the sources of major conflicts in American ideas and practices. One of his suggestions for moving the debate forward in the context of the political traditions of the Founders is that scholars can seek to identify the inegalitarian ideologies that were part of the Founders' political ideas. Such an endeavor would “serve as an empirical indicator of the relative strength of the ideologies” (p. 162).

The strength of Understanding the Founding lies in the way the author has brought together such an enormous amount of scholarship to explain the nuances and complexities of the four debates. Scholars who are familiar with the four “confrontations” but who wish to revisit the details and sources of the arguments, as well as their historical development, are likely to find that the book provides useful summaries. Students grappling with the debates for the first time will also find that the author provides an accessible introduction to the major controversies concerning the Founding.

At the same time, the myriad suggestions that Gibson offers for moving the debates forward and eventually perhaps even resolving the differences between scholars of various persuasions—which seem so promising in the introductory portion of the book—are ultimately disappointing. They tend to be vague and ambiguous and at times even circular insofar as they lead the reader back to the starting point of the controversy, rather than pushing ahead to transcend the conflicts. For example, it is not clear how identifying inegalitarian ideologies in the Founders' ideas will help resolve the debates regarding the nature of the American political tradition, particularly given that a number of scholars have been doing exactly that for many years. Indeed, Gibson's recommendation points back to the starting point of the controversy over the extent to which the Founders' ideas were liberal, republican, or ascriptive, rather than pushing beyond the current disagreements. This is a serious weakness. Still, anyone who wishes to better understand the literature regarding the four central controversies will find this book to be a valuable resource.