Authorship, Authority & the Founding: The Significance of the Author for the American Constitution

Abstract

Popular discourse posits that the Founding Fathers, among many other notable attributes, earned the thanks of posterity as the authors of America’s constitution document. Authorship of the Constitution, attributed to the actors of the Philadelphia Convention, is readily invoked within contemporary political discussions. However, it is less common that the implications of this characterization are considered. Placing the claim to authorship against two related literatures, this paper seeks to explore the stakes of the idea that the Framers were the authors of America’s constitutional document. Seeking first to locate the claim to authorship within the context of the emergence of an ideology of authorship and associated conceptions of copyright within the early Republic, the paper will examine the ambiguities involved in the single use of the construction “authors of the constitution” within the Federalist Papers. By then turning to the theoretical discussions initiated by Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What is an Author?”, the paper will explore the significance and consequences of the attribution of authorship within the contemporary period, arguing that the debates concerning the death of the Author enable us a fuller comprehension of the endurance of the constitutional text within American politics and culture.