Hoyos Reviews Edling, "A Hercules in the Cradle"

Another review of interest from JOTWELL: Roman Hoyos (Southwestern Law School) reviews A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State (2014), by Max Edling (King's College). Here's an excerpt:

In A Hercules in the Cradle Edling challenges [traditional views about the early American fiscal-military state] by demonstrating how the federal government used the powers delegated to it by the 1789 Constitution to build a state with enormous extractive powers. Instead of reading the story of the American state backwards and comparing it to modern states, or evaluating it in light of modern theories of the state, Edling reads it forward comparing it to its contemporaries. Most fundamentally Edling interrogates the objectives of the early American state, and its ability to accomplish them. In other words, rather than asking whether the early American fiscal-military state was “weak” or “strong”, he asks whether it was effective.

Read on here.