The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government, by Steve Pincus

Abstract

This book’s clearly stated purpose is to show the compelling relevance of the Declaration of Independence for contemporary political debate about the scope and purposes of government. It is presumably intended primarily as a contribution to current controversies in the United States. Assertions that hostility to strong government has been characteristic of the American republic since its origins have been challenged by historians of the Constitution, notably by Max Edeling in his A Revolution in Favor of Government of 2003. Steve Pincus is challenging them for the colonial period as well. His use of concepts such as ‘austerity’ has obvious resonances too for contemporary British politics. Pincus’s main propositions seem to be that Britain and pre-Revolutionary America constituted a single political community, and that how to tackle the large debt accumulated by government—in the British case by winning the Seven Years War, and in the American case by winning the War for Independence (although his focus on the Declaration curtails Pincus’s treatment of this)—were central preoccupations throughout this community.