PLCY 702
Directions in Scholarly Research:
Article Review
Submitted to
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the completion of
PLCY 702
By
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Carey's (2004: 14) article "America's Founding and Limited Government" begins with a big,
bold criticism of the current scholarship of America's founding. According to Carey, America's
founding and government studies have produced more questions than answers, division and
contradiction than consensus, and competing paradigms than solid, unified theories that he
described altogether as “a dead end.” Carey’s provocative questions expose knowledge gaps and
lack of focus of scholarship of America's founding, government, and policy in recent history.
Much of Carey's treatises revolve around understanding the Founding Fathers' contextual
realities, moods, predicaments, and motivations translated into the documents they have written.
Some scholars view the early constitution with cynicism and question the relevance of certain
provisions to the current era. Others describe the early constitution as a bargaining document
whose main purpose was to harness collectivism and solidarity for the entire country. Given
those views there is tendency to treat Carey’s thoughts with validity. Carey’s article remains a
great resource for furthering scholarship around important themes on early America and the
Founding Fathers’ vision of government, constitutionalism, religion, federalism, free enterprise,
and the intersection of these issues.
In response to Carey’s review, Donald S. Lutz’s From Covenant to Constitution in American
Political Thought in Publius (Autumn, 1980, Vol. 10, No. 4, Covenant, Polity, and
Constitutionalism) published by Oxford University Press 33 pages provide essential insights
into the early American constitution. Through this article, Lutz aimed to assert the role of the
founding documents in the development of the US Constitution with a focus on the covenantal
aspects. According to Lutz (1998:102) "the idea for a written national constitution, as well as
basic elements and institutions within it, come from the state documents."
Many scholars became interested in studying biblical rhetoric following the American
Revolution. Donald Lutz, a political science professor at the University of Houston, Texas, is one
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of them. As a professor, Lutz’s interest focused on American and European political theories,
textual analysis, political texts, ethical theories specializing in American political theory,
publishing over 40 articles and books about the US Constitution and Federalism. Lutz is editor of
two important books: American Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760-1805 (in 2
vols) and Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History. The second
book is an essential collection of over eighty documents from the mid-1600s. They include proto
constitutions and state documents that describe how local communities functioned during the
colonial period that scholars can use to deepen their understanding of the foundation of the US
Constitution.
Lutz is highly qualified to write about the foundational history of the US Constitution. In recent
years, Donald Lutz began his research on state and national constitutionalism, constitutional
theory, and how other nations regard their constitutions. Lutz has published articles and book
chapters in many academic publishing outfits, including the American Political Science Review,
the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics. His latest books include A
Preface to American Political Theory (1992), The Origins of American Constitutionalism (1988),
Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History (1997), and most
recently, Principles of Constitutional Design (2006).
Lutz’s article "From Covenant to Constitution” is one the few pieces that examine the origins of
the US national (Federal) constitution. It disproves some of the common misleading stereotypes
about the origin of the American Constitution. Too often, the American national Constitution is
viewed as a clone of the Imperial British’s Magna Carta or patterned after the expert writings of
the Declaration of Independence. Lutz's proves otherwise. His article "From covenant to
constitution..." highlights the integral role of the proto constitutions and State documents as part
of the evolutionary development of the national constitution.
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According to Lutz, the American national (Federal) constitution was formed from a coherent
political thought drawn from a combination of Federalist and Whig theories. It is a hybrid
product of deduced proto constitutions and state documents that embody the American
republican character and the European and Whig political theories. Because of this, the origin of
the national constitution as one that evolved from “bottom-up” rather than “top down” faces
criticism for short-sightedness and operational focus rather than visionary and strategic. There is
some truth to this criticism. In fact, Madison, a Federalist would have preferred a perfectly laid
out vision and eliminated the Bill of Rights which is an operational concern.
As it should be, a constitution lays down the fundamental political basis for rule, laws, and
principles a state or nation governs or be governed. The proto-constitutions existed in the form of
compact, contracts, or covenants that embodied a coherent set of values in responses to problems
early Americans faced against their need to establish and maintain self-government rather than
based on long-term solutions to future generation's problems. The early Americans lived in small
communities that needed local rules based on their commonly-held values and beliefs to live
harmoniously that may not fit squarely in large-scale societies present in contemporary highly
diversified culture. Hence, as the progressives argue, that the constitution of today, having been
unchanged for over three hundred centuries is outmoded and irrelevant.
By assessing the nature and form of the proto-constitutions and state documents, Lutz discovered
twenty-four other documents that were classified as "covenant" (although seldom referred to as
covenants in the present-day interpretation of the word), federating document or documents
uniting state colonies. The documents bore remarkable similarity and purpose to covenants. Lutz
also classified eighty-six constitution-like documents written before 1722, forty-two documents
written in England for American colonists before 1735, twenty-four federating or uniting
documents intended to unite the colonies or States, and eighteen early constitution documents.
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While the classification of the founding documents does not seem to support the broad title of the
article, Lutz’s analysis of the founding documents ends with a classification of the materials.
Little is understood about the covenantal nature of the documents compared with the other
categories, i.e., compact, contract, and organic act. One reason is the fact that only a few uses the
term “covenant” even though many documents have covenantal features in them.1
In conclusion, Lutz sought to investigate the evolution of the national (Federal) constitution
drawing understanding from state documents classified as a covenant, compacts, contracts and
organic act that found their way to the Constitution of the Republic. The title of the article, "from
Covenant to Constitution," can be misleading since, according to Lutz classification, there were
only twenty-four out of 170 documents that had covenantal elements in them. How did the
covenant-like and non-covenant documents influence the development of the Constitution is an
important question the article could address more clearly. Here, Fischer (1998) could be useful.2
According to Fischer, the term "federalism" was derived from the word “covenant,” which is also
“testament” of the new testament Bible. According to Fischer (1998), the word "federal" came
from “foedus” a Latin word for “covenant” in the Vulgate Old Testament Bible, strengthening
the belief in the Covenantal theology. To some extent, Lutz (1998:102) demonstrated the role of
the proto-constitutions and state documents in developing the national (Federal) constitution.
More information is required to understand how the early records made it to the national
constitution to strengthen faith in the Bible and God’s providence over the Constitution.
