Abstract
Eric Nelson's The Royalist Revolution begins and ends with the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a moment of no small importance in any history of constitutionalism or the American founding. The book's opening lines recall James Wilson's proposal to create a new federal executive, one that would consist of a single person with sweeping prerogative powers, and one that earned Edmund Randolph's scorn as “the foetus of monarchy.” Many scholars have regarded Wilson's proposals and the subsequent Constitution as a rejection of American Revolutionary principles. According to the traditional narrative about 1787, conservative, aristocratic-leaning politicians capitalized on a combination of government weakness and anxiety about fiscal and political chaos to persuade the nation that the egalitarian and republican ideas of preceding decades were no longer viable .