The Economic Basis of Politics was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1922, based on lectures Beard delivered at Amherst College. It is Beard’s most theoretical work — a concise argument that the relationship between economic interest and political power is not a modern discovery but a thread running through the entire history of Western political thought.
Beard traces the idea from Aristotle (who argued that the form of government is determined by the distribution of property) through Machiavelli, Harrington, the English Civil War theorists, Madison (whose Federalist No. 10 explicitly identifies economic factions as the main source of political conflict), and the nineteenth-century economists. His point is that the proposition for which he was attacked in 1913 — that the Constitution was shaped by economic interests — was not a radical innovation but a commonplace of Western political philosophy that American hagiography had suppressed.
The book is short, clear, and polemical — it reads as an extended defense of Beard’s earlier work against critics who called him a Marxist. Beard was emphatic that his analysis was not Marxist: Marx had a theory of class revolution; Beard had an observation about the relationship between property and power. The distinction matters, even if many of Beard’s critics refused to acknowledge it.
Collecting The Economic Basis of Politics
First edition (Knopf, New York, 1922): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition: $30–$75
- Revised editions (1934, 1945): $10–$25