Beard Vs Commager Analysis

My position on the Beard V Commager debate is on Beard’s side. He believed that the Constitution was an economic document that was set up by the founding fathers so that the government could achieve economic results that benefit their personal interests. On the other hand Commager believed the Constitution is essentially a political document, carefully created to stand for years to come and to serve as an example of democracy for people around the world. In the text Beard supports his thesis by giving evidence of the economic interests of elite who wrote the Constitution, and then showing how the structure of the government benefits these specific interests. Commager supports his thesis by naming the two problems that the Constitution worked
This fact is acknowledged by the Virginia Law School conferees. Introducing the symposium, constitutional law professor Mark Graber quotes Richard Hofstadter’s rueful 1968 observation that “Beard’s reputation stands like an imposing ruin in the landscape of American historiography.” He cites historian Gordon S. Wood dismissal of Beard’s economic determinist research method as “so crude that no further time should be spent on it.” Graber states that “no contemporary scholar claims that Beard in 1913 correctly mapped the lines of conflict.” In Graber’s view, the debate over An Economic Interpretation has shifted from a controversy over Beard to a controversy over “uber-Beard.” This allusive term refers to scholars who believe economic interests are the central force, and that they have had valuable normative consequences for American constitutional development. Critics of “uber-Beardian” analysis retort that this discounts the independent influence of ideas on constitutional development. Beard was a fair-minded scholar, committed to “balanced analysis,” who believed that all parties to constitutional conflict were moved by economic interests rather than high
It left out “the whole area of experience in which ideas and interests are jumbled to a degree that the effort to divorce and counterpose them becomes an artificial imposition [on] the realities of history.”
Beard contributed significantly to the revolution in constitutional history and theory that reduced legal principles and judicial decision-making to social and economic forces.
In White’s view, Progressive legal realism brought “skepticism toward the ideal of a ‘rule of law’ in American culture that transcended and constrained the particularistic attitudes and agendas of legal decision makers.” Beard and other Progressive historians imposed “their modernist preconceptions about history, law, judicial decision making, and constitutional interpretation on events from earlier time periods.” Historian Jonathan Gienapp addresses the historiographical dimension of Beardian thought. But he also rejects the universalism of economic determinism.Beard, he asserts, “remains as vital as