The Quarrel over Charles Austin Beard and the American Constitution.

The article presents an examination of the arguments raised by U.S. historian, Charles Austin Beard concerning the U.S. Constitution. It also incorporates the economic materialism and consciousness of class in the U.S. political thought. The suggestion that the Constitution had been a successful attempt to restrain excessive democracy, that it had been a triumph for property, especially personality, for what was to be called business and then big business, seemed blasphemy to many and an act of near treason in the dangerous crisis through which American political faith and practice were passing. If U.S. historian Charles Austin Beard was a Marxist, it was only in the sense that he believed those transformations in the structure of society which themselves condition the relations of social classes and the various manifestations of social life must be traced in the last instance to economic causes. To Beard it was important to point out that a great many people who opposed the Constitution were neither fools nor knaves, and that if there were fools among those who supported the Constitution, there were also a number of knaves.