The American Revolution and the Constitution

This timely and essential collection, edited by AEI's Yuval Levin and featuring leading scholars like Jack Rakove, Akhil Reed Amar, Adam White, Colleen Sheehan, and Harvey Mansfield, marks the 250th anniversary of American independence by revisiting the Declaration, natural law, and the birth of democracy, revealing how revolutionary-era state governments and the Western political tradition shaped the Constitutional Convention and the enduring U.S. Constitution.

Featuring original essays by Jack N. Rakove, Akhil Reed Amar, Adam J. White, Colleen A. Sheehan, and Harvey C. Mansfield. 

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. 

The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance. 

In the seventh volume of this series, scholars of American history, law, and politics discuss how the American Revolution unleashed the forces of constitution-making in the United States. As states erected new governments in the wake of independence, they worked to combine traditions of colonial self-government with both classical and novel political theories. 

Studying the revolutionary period shows how it gave birth to a constitutional culture that shaped the delegates and debates that would forge the nation’s enduring Constitution in 1787.

Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University and the author of The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840 (2021).

Harvey C. Mansfield is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government, Emeritus, at Harvard University and the author of The Spirit of Liberalism (1978) and America’s Constitutional Soul (1991).

Jack N. Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science and (by courtesy) law at Stanford University. He is the author of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize for history.

Colleen A. Sheehan is a professor of politics at Arizona State University and the David and Patricia Caldwell Visiting Scholar on the American Founding at the Heritage Foundation.

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times