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

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

Autor Aziz Rana
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 5 noi 2026

Prin lucrarea The Constitutional Bind, Aziz Rana propune o reevaluare radicală a modului în care societatea americană a ajuns să venereze un text juridic pe care mulți îl consideră astăzi inadecvat pentru provocările democratice contemporane. Găsim în această carte o teză provocatoare: actuala cultură a „romantismului constituțional” nu este o moștenire directă a părinților fondatori, ci o construcție ideologică specifică secolului al XX-lea. Autorul demonstrează cum transformarea Constituției într-un obiect de cult a servit consolidării puterii globale a SUA, mascând în același timp limitările structurale ale documentului.

Descoperim aici o analiză istorică riguroasă, organizată cronologic în patru secțiuni majore. Prima parte explorează incertitudinea constituțională din perioada 1887-1917, când experimentele politice erau încă posibile. Ulterior, volumul urmărește cum cele două Războaie Mondiale și Războiul Rece au impus o loialitate constituțională rigidă, transformând documentul într-un simbol al identității naționale în lupta împotriva amenințărilor externe. Considerăm că elementul distinctiv al cărții este efortul de a scoate la lumină vocile critice — de la socialiști la mișcările de decolonizare — ale căror proiecte alternative au fost marginalizate sau șterse din memoria colectivă.

Acoperă aceeași arie tematică precum A Machine That Would Go of Itself de Michael Kammen, dar cu o abordare mult mai critică față de legătura dintre constituționalism și imperialismul american. În timp ce alte lucrări se concentrează pe percepția publică a simbolurilor, Aziz Rana integrează istoria dreptului cu cea a securității naționale, oferind o perspectivă interdisciplinară asupra modului în care „idolatrizarea” textului a blocat reformele structurale profunde pe plan intern.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780226854526
ISBN-10: 0226854523
Pagini: 824
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 53 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm această carte cercetătorilor și studenților la drept sau științe politice care doresc să înțeleagă rădăcinile crizei democratice din SUA. Cititorul câștigă o perspectivă demitizată asupra ordinii constituționale americane, învățând cum un document legal a fost transformat într-un instrument de securitate națională. Este o lectură esențială pentru a înțelege de ce reformele politice fundamentale par atât de greu de realizat în sistemul american actual.

Despre autor

Aziz Rana este profesor de drept la Cornell Law School, specializat în istoria dreptului constituțional american și în studiul democrației. Cercetările sale se concentrează pe intersecția dintre securitatea națională, cetățenie și evoluția imperiului american. Prin expertiza sa juridică și istorică, Rana oferă o analiză profundă a modului în care ideile despre libertate și egalitate au fost modelate de politica externă și de expansiunea globală a Statelor Unite în ultimul secol.

Descriere scurtă

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.

Notă biografică

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.

Cuprins

Preface: 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

Recenzii

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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 is essential to the struggle for a democratic constitution."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"A meticulous account. . . .Rana shows that the standing accorded to the Constitution as an [authoritative expression] is an almost entirely twentieth century phenomenon."

"With The Constitutional Bind, Aziz Rana has performed an important service, bringing readers’ attention to a vibrant strain of constitutional criticism over the nation’s past century."

"Weaving together legal, political, cultural, and intellectual history, Rana traces how the Constitution came to be the central pillar of political discourse and American identity over the course of the twentieth century…In this moment of constitutional ferment, his book should have a significant impact on constitutional history and theory, on law school pedagogy, and on activists and politicians hoping to build a more free and equal democracy."

“Rana argues that the contemporary focus on individual reforms has precluded meaningful thought about the quality of the Constitution in its totality as a foundation for democratic governance...This is a vital book that deserves the attention of anyone concerned with American political thought.”

"What is to be done about the anti-democratic and minoritarian elements baked into the Constitution, from the Electoral College to the geographic apportionment of the US Senate?...In the face of an ascendant authoritarian regime that is attacking and degrading our institutions, amid extreme political polarization and mistrust, this represents a daunting proposition. But such a bottom-up project has never been more necessary. If we wish to bring about a society that extends meaningful freedom to all citizens at home, we must vigorously confront the perennial obstacles to revising America’s political identity and practices. This, as Aziz Rana so brilliantly argues, is the project of our times."

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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."