Liveblogging Wood's The Idea of America: Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution
This is the most interesting essay of this collection so far. Wood states a bold thesis to begin: We have repeatedly pictured the Founders, as we call them, as men of vision -- bold, original, open-minded, enlightened men who deliberately created what William Gladstone once called "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the hand and purpose of man." We have described them as men who knew where the future lay and went for it... In contrast, we have usually viewed the opponents of the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists, as very tame and timid, narrow-minded and parochial men of no imagination and little faith, caught up in the ideological rigidities of the past -- inflexible, suspicious men unable to look ahead and see where the United States was going. The Anti-Federalists seen forever doomed to be losers, bypassed by history and eternally disgraced by their opposition to the greatest Constitutional achievement in our nation's history. But maybe...