Michael J. Faber’s book, An Anti-Federalist Constitution, offers a detailed conceptual account of the ratification of the United States Constitution from the perspective of the Anti-Federalists. In the midst of a contemporary moment of “Founders’ Chic,” Faber offers a timely and important reminder that the development of the United States as a political unit did not begin with the genius of a Philadelphia convention and a popular ratification of its work: even in that initial moment of constitutional creation, dissent and opposition shaped the constitutional settlement that emerged. Perhaps even more significantly, Faber shows convincingly that the opposition itself was shaped by contestation over the Constitution, weaving democratic, rights-based, and institutional concerns into a productive challenge to the Philadelphia document. As such, Faber’s study does much to bring insights developed in the course of conversations between the fields of American Political Thought and American Political Development to bear on the now-enriched subject of Anti-Federalism following the path-breaking work of the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution and Pauline Maier’s recent powerful historical account of ratification, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (2010).

Faber identifies the purpose of the book as “an effort to rehabilitate the Anti-Federalists… to restore their thought to the respect it deserves” while identifying and explaining “the Anti-Federalist ideology that emerged from the ratification debates” (p. 2). To do so, he proceeds in three parts. The first section of the book (two chapters) provides a conceptual framework for understanding Anti-Federalist thought. The second, by far the longest section of the book—stretching to 15 chapters—explores the development of Anti-Federalist thought over the course of ratification. The third section (the final two chapters) attempts to model an alternative Anti-Federalist constitution and then assesses the legacy of the Anti-Federalists.

It is in the first two sections that Faber makes his signal contribution to the study of the Anti-Federalists. The book makes two interventions here that work to revise the long-standing smear on the Anti-Federalists that they were, as Cecelia Kenyon famously put it, “Men of Little Faith.” The first highlights the complexity of Anti-Federalist thought by presenting the opposition to the Constitution as comprising three distinct strands: a Democratic Anti-Federalism suspicious of the aristocratic pretensions of the Federalists, a Rights Anti-Federalism that feared for individual liberties under the new Constitution, and a Power Anti-Federalism that sought to protect the prerogatives of the states under a new continental regime. The suggestion here is that only the first— Democratic Anti-Federalism—was ultimately committed to the preexisting Articles of Confederation; the other two strands accepted the need for a strengthened central government, but challenged the plan that emerged from Philadelphia in 1787.

The second intervention is to show that these three strands, and thus Anti-Federalism itself, were not static over the course of 1787–1791, but evolved and interacted in response to the events and arguments brought forth by the ratification process. As Faber puts it, “The Anti-Federalist position, as much as it was unified by the eventual ratification, developed organically from various unconnected and sometimes conflicting proposals” (p. 47). Moreover, as the detailed study of the period indicates, the precise balance and trajectory of Anti-Federalism varied from state to state in accordance with events, local political considerations, and each state’s understanding of its place within the wider ratification process and the eventual union. Such a rich study goes far in convincing the reader of the weaknesses of treating political thought as a static entity, unconnected with the politics of the day. Instead, Faber harnesses the close attention to history associated with American Political Development to expand our understanding of the Anti-Federalists. This in itself makes the book an important contribution to our understandings of the American Founding and to American Political Thought more generally.

Nevertheless, the book could do more to situate itself within the wider discussion of political thought during the Founding and in the early Republic. The context of that wider discussion offers the possibility of enhancing and sharpening some of the book’s contributions. Faber’s study builds on and acknowledges a canon of Anti-Federalist study that emerged in the early twentieth century with and from the Progressive analysis of the Founding offered by Charles Beard. But it is less successful in locating its own conceptual analysis of Anti-Federalist thought in the ideological ferment of the early Republic. This would be useful, because without it, the exact distinctions between Democratic, Rights, and Power Anti-Federalism are not fully clear. At the heart of each seems to be a commitment to popular sovereignty manifesting in different conceptions of the people: as a popular body, as a collection of individual rights holders, or as institutionalized in the state legislatures. How these commitments relate to civic republican values, emergent ideas of possessive individualism, or a robust democracy marked by contestation is not explored here in ways that might sharpen the stakes of the distinctions being made or signal the location of Anti-Federalism within American political thought in addition to American constitutional development.

In a similar way, the book does not engage with the burgeoning literature on the role of slavery in the creation of the Constitution. To be sure, that literature has not been focused on the Anti-Federalists, but Faber’s study offers a timely opportunity to bring the opposition to the Constitution into this discussion. Slavery as an issue is not located within the tripartite framework of Anti-Federalist thought. Faber claims “the question of slavery, though discussed in many places, could not factor into the opposition anyway because of sectional differences” (p. 25). But this conclusion cuts against much of the evidence presented in the detailed analysis: the emergence of slavery as an Anti-Federalist issue is noted in New York (pp. 96–98), Massachusetts (pp. 109, 142), Maryland (p. 198), Virginia (pp. 109, 252, 271), North Carolina (p. 300), and Rhode Island (pp. 339, 341). The issue of slavery is seen as important enough that in modeling an Anti-Federalist constitution Faber removes the Three-Fifths Clause and the prohibition on regulating the slave trade (pp. 360, 377), and he concludes that slavery would ultimately have destroyed such a constitution: “a violent resolution to the issue of slavery, which was probably inevitable, would have torn the union asunder, and a weak central government would have been powerless to hold it together” (p. 397). It might certainly be the case that slavery could not be a unifying issue for continental Anti-Federalism, but that only serves to underline the complexity of the opposition to the Constitution and perhaps highlights the compromised contribution of Anti-Federalism to the reformation of the Constitution. Given the growing scholarly attention to the relationship between slavery and the Constitution, this element of the book is underdeveloped.

With this book, Faber has made an important contribution to the study of the Anti-Federalists, drawing together a detailed historical analysis and a novel and informative conceptual framework to provide a rich account of Anti-Federalism as the ideological opposition to the Constitution. He has rekindled an area of study that is vital to understanding constitutional development in the United States. One hopes it will lead to a reinvigorated study of this important area and a broader and deeper understanding of the period.