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An 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.
Aziz Rana is the incoming J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government at Boston College. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Dissent, n+1, Boston Review, and Jacobin. He is the author of The Two Faces of American Freedom.
Preface: Three Centennials1: The American Constitutional RomanceI: Disagreement and Experimentation in the Gilded Age, 1887–19172: Settler Crisis and Constitutional Uncertainty3: Class Narratives and the High Tide of “Constitution Tinkering”4: The Socialist Constitutional Alternative5: Developing Universalist Empire in the PhilippinesII: The Spread of a New Constitutional Citizenship, 1917–19456: World War I, the Security State, and Constitutional Loyalty7: Inclusion and Exclusion in Interwar Americanism8: Transformation and Preservation in the New Deal9: The Good War and Constitution WorshipIII: Consolidating the American Model, 1945–196510: Launching the American Century11: Red Scare Constitutionalism12: Cold War Reform and the Reframing of American Identity13: Constitutional Myths and the Victory of the CourtIV: Alternative Paths and Constitutional Erasure, 1965–198714: Left Resurgence and the Decolonial Project15: The Rise of Originalist AmericaConclusion: Constitutional AccountingAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
"An accessible. . .work of legal and political history that speaks eloquently to democratic reform."