The founders were sailors and shopkeepers, farmers and merchants, not a few of whom were disconcerted by the incivility of dumping tea into the Boston harbor. They certainly were not anarchists, so there is no question that their revolution was “in favor of government.” Rather, the open question concerns the extent of the powers that the various parties wished to bestow upon their new government. This book's thesis is that, far from wanting to create a limited government as previous scholarship has claimed, the Federalists wished to create one that could mobilize the full resources of society.

In developing and supporting this thesis, Max Edling relies on the debates recorded in the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. His particular focus is upon two central issues of the time: military power and fiscal authority. For both subjects, the book presents background, the Federalist position, the Anti-Federalist response, the Federalist counter-response, and the outcome. This is a natural method of organization, and it suits the inquiry. Because of extensive treatments of political philosophy and the historical background, less of the text is devoted to the actual debates than might be expected and desired.

The value and limitations of the approach can be seen in the analysis of the debate over federal assumption of the public debt. Edling finds in the documentary history that Federalists made appeals to honor and restore the public credit. Such arguments are not what the previous literature on the subject had considered the reasons for assumption; thus the contribution of the documentary evidence. The interpretation of the evidence, though, is problematic. Edling finds it noteworthy that the reasons debaters gave for debt assumption were neither opportunistic nor based on economics. Not only can restoration of public credit be interpreted as an economic argument, it is not clear why one would expect arguments to be opportunistic.

Calls for government action are often made on the grounds of a public interest that, following Arrow, does not exist. Although it is reasonable to presume that the arguments made were appealing to contemporaries, it is not clear that one can learn from them the true motivations of the actors. Edling provides a thoughtful discussion of this problem, but the implications of the findings remain unclear. The interpretation of forthrightness is just one difficulty posed by the use of this sort of documentary evidence. Another significant problem is that views of the nonelites are very poorly known. Records of the debates show that the views of the elites varied in ways that are not simple to characterize either across time (notably, pre- and postratification) or across geographic regions. The full range of opinion would be expected to vary even more.

Edling's argument relies on a claimed absence of federalist checks in the Constitution. He writes, for example, that there were no limits to the types of taxes that could be levied. How, then, could the Supreme Court have decided that the use of an income tax required a constitutional amendment? Edling also stresses that the national government could tax regardless of the say of the state legislatures. The point is of course true, but misses the role of state legislatures in selecting the Senate. The extent of the state legislatures' levels of influence may be a matter of some debate, but should not be ignored. (Although it may be mere coincidence that the greatest peacetime expansion in the federal government occurred after the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, it is hard to reject a causal relation out of hand.)

In the end, Edling sides with the Anti-Federalists in concluding that, “[i]n important respects, this government was not a limited government, as the conventional interpretation of the Constitution holds, but an unlimited government” (p. 226). With the explicit restrictions in the Constitution's text, in addition to the states' role in selecting the Senate, this characterization is strained. It also leaves unexplained the fact, acknowledged by Edling, that an unlimited government did not develop over time. A more reasonable explanation is that, even if the powers accorded to the federal government have been underappreciated in past scholarship, those powers were in fact limited. Edling writes that, “the Civil War marked the failure of the founders' attempt to create a lasting union” (p. 229). On the contrary, the union endures.