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Product Identifiers
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
ISBN-10022635072X
ISBN-139780226350721
eBay Product ID (ePID)27061944978
Product Key Features
Number of Pages824 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication NameConstitutional Bind : How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them
Publication Year2024
SubjectConstitutions, General, Political Process / Political Advocacy, American Government / National
TypeTextbook
Subject AreaLaw, Political Science
AuthorAziz Rana
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height2.2 in
Item Weight43.1 Oz
Item Length9 in
Item Width6 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional
LCCN2023-028636
ReviewsWith his latest book, The Constitutional Bind , Aziz Rana continues unraveling our undemocratic constitutional regime. . . . The Constitutional Bind will be essential in developing the movement for democracy in the United States., The Constitutional Bind offers one of the most important recent studies of the U.S. Constitution. . . .Ultimately, Rana raises a critical question: Can the existing constitutional framework accommodate the deep reforms needed to address today's political and social challenges? He suggests that moving beyond the Constitution may be necessary to build a truly democratic system capable of confronting the complexities of modern life., Illuminating in his excavation of several important critics of the Constitution whose voices have been stifled and given the uncertain health of the American constitutional order, Rana's book could not be arriving at a better time. It deserves wide readership and, more to the point, discussion., In a meticulous account of how such ideals were actualized in the twentieth century, Rana argues that as the century unfolded the political system became systematically captured by America's only aristocracy, that of wealth., Aziz Rana's epic new book. . . .Rana has performed vital work to recover sources of radical constitutionalism swept aside by the tide of political development and ignored by those who are deeply invested in court-centered visions of order., In his fascinating and powerful new book, Aziz Rana calls this faith in the Constitution's essential goodness 'creedal constitutionalism' and urges Americans to reject it, perhaps along with major parts of the Constitution itself. His book is much more than a progressive critique of Constitution worship: Rana presents a sweeping history of constitutional politics from the late 19th century to the present that reverses much of what Americans have learned to accept about the Constitution's meaning., Rana's book is a powerful and necessary rejoinder to constitutional law professors and their students, producing a lucid account of the counterfactuals discarded in the development of creedal constitutionalism. For historians, too, there is value in Rana's synthetic account. . . . The Constitutional Bind easily earns a place among the most vital works in constitutional law., The Constitutional Bind shows that the eventual triumph of constitutional veneration--and the consolidation of a political culture that treats skepticism as heresy--was bound up with the nation's rise as a global superpower. . . .These are major contributions, and the analysis that bears them out is dazzling in its intellectual acuity and empirical range., Paradigm shifting. Rana argues that Americans' reverence for their Constitution is the cause of our problems--not the remedy--and he recovers histories of resistance and emancipation that provide resources for this generation's freedom struggles., The Constitutional Bind removes the cloak of veneration to reveal a tragically flawed document and generations of critics for whom the U.S. Constitution was an obstacle to democracy, a safeguard of white settler rule, and a barrier to universal freedom. In doing so, Rana has unearthed a dynamic history of alternative democratic movements and imaginaries within the U.S. and beyond. A genuine masterpiece., In his bold new book, The Constitutional Bind , Rana argues against this tendency to 'take our problematic system as a given, and then struggle to patch especially egregious leaks.' Instead of focusing on patchwork measures, he encourages us to think more expansively., The ambition of Rana's project is simultaneously diagnostic, expository, and reconstructive...a grand synthetic work of intellectual history...its very sense of overflowing detail and overlapping narratives relays the richness of American constitutional visions that have been lost., Rana's skeptical historicism is important. His book is readable and lively, a kind of scholarly 'people's' history of the Constitution since 1887. If more people understood the complexity and multivalence of our constitutional tradition, that would be terrific. There is value in acknowledging that the Constitution is flawed, both as a document and as a set of historically unfolding social practices., Rana argues that Americans' worship of the Constitution has, in many ways, led to a politics and a government that fail to serve the fundamental wants and needs of the vast majority of the nation's population. . . .This book is meticulously researched, and the writing is top-quality., This astonishing masterpiece divides the age that came before it from the new era that its appearance opens. Rana's refusal to look away from the disturbing reasons why an American culture of venerating the Constitution took hold will lead more people than ever before to rethink that devotion. No more important book about the Constitution has appeared in a hundred years--if ever., An accessible. . .work of legal and political history that speaks eloquently to democratic reform., One of the most important effects of The Constitutional Bind, in my view, is to unblock the current political imagination. . . .Such continuing faith in the Constitution is profoundly undermined by all the evidence Rana marshals regarding the antidemocratic nature of its central institutional structure and its historical and ongoing imbrication with racial hierarchy and imperialist projects., An eye-opening and exhaustive look at the U.S. Constitution. [ The Constitutional Bind ] will reward readers' tenacity and enlighten academics, policymakers, and civic-minded Americans alike., A meticulous account. . . .Rana shows that the standing accorded to the Constitution as an [authoritative expression] is an almost entirely twentieth century phenomenon.
TitleLeadingThe
Dewey Edition23/eng/20230710
Dewey Decimal342.7302/9
Table Of ContentPreface: Three Centennials 1: The American Constitutional Romance I: Disagreement and Experimentation in the Gilded Age, 1887-1917 2: Settler Crisis and Constitutional Uncertainty 3: Class Narratives and the High Tide of "Constitution Tinkering" 4: The Socialist Constitutional Alternative 5: Developing Universalist Empire in the Philippines II: The Spread of a New Constitutional Citizenship, 1917-1945 6: World War I, the Security State, and Constitutional Loyalty 7: Inclusion and Exclusion in Interwar Americanism 8: Transformation and Preservation in the New Deal 9: The Good War and Constitution Worship III: Consolidating the American Model, 1945-1965 10: Launching the American Century 11: Red Scare Constitutionalism 12: Cold War Reform and the Reframing of American Identity 13: Constitutional Myths and the Victory of the Court IV: Alternative Paths and Constitutional Erasure, 1965-1987 14: Left Resurgence and the Decolonial Project 15: The Rise of Originalist America Conclusion: Constitutional Accounting Acknowledgments Notes Index
SynopsisAn eye-opening account of how Americans came to revere the Constitution and what this reverence has meant domestically and around the world. Some Americans today worry that the Federal Constitution is ill-equipped to respond to mounting democratic threats and may even exacerbate the worst features of American politics. Yet for as long as anyone can remember, the Constitution has occupied a quasi-mythical status in American political culture, which ties ideals of liberty and equality to assumptions about the inherent goodness of the text's design. The Constitutional Bind explores how a flawed document came to be so glorified and how this has impacted American life. In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today's reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home. Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind also sheds light on an array of movement activists--in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics--who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights.
LC Classification NumberKF4541.R357 2024
