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I have spoken elsewhere of "our political faith as Americans," meaning thereby "the faith evidently presupposed by our public institutions and normatively attested by our founding documents---above all, by the Declaration of Independencxe and the Constitution." The great value of Beer's book for me is to have provided what I can only regard as an authoritative interpretation and formulation of this American "political faith."

Wiki MarkupTo be sure, Beer's own purpose in writing his book is "to state as fully and accurately as possible that element of American political culture which \ [he calls\] the national theory of federalism" (viii), or, as he also puts it, "to clarify and amplify the national theory of American federalism" (21). In carrying out this purpose, however, he offers, in his own words, an account of "the ideas which inspired the American Revolution and which informed the Constitution," having concluded that "you can find a single coherent viewpoint which makes sense of the federal arrangements of the Constitution" (vii, xi). And what I find of the greatest significance is his account of this viewpoint, which, to my mind, is precisely our "political faith."

Beer's account is all the more valuable, of course, because (1) he expounds this viewpoint against the background of the history of ideas, both sharply contrasting it with the old hierarchic viewpoint classically set forth by Thomas Aquinas and tracing its descent from the republican viewpoint originating in such Commonwealth writers as John Milton and James Harrington; and (2) he develops it throughout in counterpoint with "the old Southern heresy that the Union was nothing more than a compact among the separate states" (x). But what I find in his exposition of "the national idea" is precisely an adequate-which is to say, both appropriate and credibleformulation of my "political faith" as an American.

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