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The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them

Name: The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them
Brand: University of Chicago Press
SKU: 9780226350721
Price: 44.99 USD
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Contributors:

Aziz Rana

Publisher:

University of Chicago Press

Binding:

Hardcover

Book Category:

Law, Political Science

Book Subcategory:

Constitutional, Constitutions, American Government

Book Topic:

National

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The product is eligible for a complimentary return within 30 days from the date of purchase. Furthermore, individual items are shipped within 24 hours of receiving the order.

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Specifications +

Release Date:

2024-04-16

ISBN 13:

9780226350721

Weight:

2.7 lbs

Size:

9.40 x 6.20 x 1.90 inches

Pages:

824

Mint Condition +

product description

Description

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.

About the Author
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.

The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them

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