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The Constitutional Bind

How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them

by Aziz Rana

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Length 30 hours 27 minutes

Language English

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Summary
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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.

Politics & Economy Nonfiction

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, the Boston Review, and Jacobin. He is the author of The Two Faces of American Freedom.

Audiobook details

Author Aziz Rana

Narrator narrator

ISBN 9780226840543

Length 30 hours 27 minutes

Language English

Publisher University of Chicago Press

Publication date April 19, 2024

Edition Unabridged

Genres Politics & Economy & Nonfiction

Reviews

“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.”

— Samuel Moyn | author of "Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times"

“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."

— Sanford Levinson | author of "Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It)"

“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.”

— Robin D. G. Kelley | author of "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination"

“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.”

— Reva Siegel | Yale Law School

"An accessible. . .work of legal and political history that speaks eloquently to democratic reform."

— Kirkus

"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."

— Library Journal

"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."

— Jotwell

"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."

— Law & History Review

"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."

— Jedediah Britton-Purdy, The Nation

"The Constitutional Bind is essential to the struggle for a democratic constitution."

— Democratic Left

"With 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."

— Cosmonaut

"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."

— David Pozen, Law and Political Economy

"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."

— Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

"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."

— Noah Feldman, The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The Constitutional Bind

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Reviews