We the People, Volume 2: Transformations - Hardcover

Ackerman, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674948475 ISBN 13: 9780674948471

Publisher: Belknap Press, 1998

Synopsis

Constitutional change, seemingly so orderly, formal, and refined, has in fact been a revolutionary process from the first, as Bruce Ackerman makes clear in We the People: Transformations. The Founding Fathers, hardly the genteel conservatives of myth, set America on a remarkable course of revolutionary disruption and constitutional creativity that endures to this day. After the bloody sacrifices of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party revolutionized the traditional system of constitutional amendment as they put principles of liberty and equality into higher law. Another wrenching transformation occurred during the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt and his New Dealers vindicated a new vision of activist government against an assault by the Supreme Court.

These are the crucial episodes in American constitutional history that Ackerman takes up in this second volume of a trilogy hailed as "one of the most important contributions to American constitutional thought in the last half-century" (Cass Sunstein, New Republic). In each case he shows how the American people--whether led by the Founding Federalists or the Lincoln Republicans or the Roosevelt Democrats--have confronted the Constitution in its moments of great crisis with dramatic acts of upheaval, always in the name of popular sovereignty. A thoroughly new way of understanding constitutional development, We the People: Transformations reveals how America's "dualist democracy" provides for these populist upheavals that amend the Constitution, often without formalities.

The book also sets contemporary events, such as the Reagan Revolution and Roe v. Wade, in deeper constitutional perspective. In this context Ackerman exposes basic constitutional problems inherited from the New Deal Revolution and exacerbated by the Reagan Revolution, then considers the fundamental reforms that might resolve them. A bold challenge to formalist and fundamentalist views, this volume demonstrates that ongoing struggle over America's national identity, rather than consensus, marks its constitutional history.

About this title

About the Author

Bruce Ackerman is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University.

Reviews

In the second volume in his work We the People (volume I, Foundations, appeared in 1991), a noted Yale legal historian looks at the tangled history of constitutional amendments. Two myths sustain the American people, Ackerman suggests. The first holds that the federal government consistently ignores the will of the people, whose mandate must constantly be pressed against its compromised and uncompromising leaders. The second is that our Constitution is so artfully constructed that changing it, for good or bad, is nearly impossible. Drawing on subtle legal argument and a solid command of history, Ackerman goes on to suggest that although the first scenario may seem to be accurate, the second is certainly not; governments have frequently bent the Constitution to serve their ideological ends. He examines at length the development of the 13th and 14th amendments during Reconstruction, amendments that, under the strictest interpretation of constitutional procedure, should not have been passed, since 10 of the then 37 states refused to ratify it, causing Congress to intervene with martial law in those 10 states, all of them southern. While the Southern governments had forfeited their claim to legitimacy by rebelling, Ackerman writes, the people of the Southern states had not forfeited their right to be counted as constituent parts of the Union. Congressional coercion, then, and not our hallowed system of majoritarian consent, led to constitutional modification. A similar process occurred with much New Deal legislation, save that the New Dealers turned to the people to gain assent to ``a sweeping redefinition of the aims and methods of American government''a redefinition that has given constitutional purists and conservatives fits ever since. To reform the government today, Ackerman believes, supermajority, rather than slim-majority, rule would prevent one party or a chief executive from railroading constitutional changes through Congress. Readers well grounded in constitutional law will find Ackermans arguments fascinating and provocative. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674948475
• ISBN 13: 9780674948471
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 538