Reva Siegel | Yale Law School
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.
Law and Political Economy - David Pozen
"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."
Samuel Moyn | author of "Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our
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.
Law & History Review
"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."
Sanford Levinson | author of "Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (
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."
Democratic Left
"The Constitutional Bind is essential to the struggle for a democratic constitution."
Cosmonaut
"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."
Robin D. G. Kelley | author of "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination"
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.
The Nation - Jedediah Britton-Purdy
"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."
Jotwell
"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."
Sanford Levinson | author of "Our Undemocratic Constitution"
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."
Samuel Moyn | Yale University
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.
Library Journal
03/01/2024
Rana (law and government, Boston Coll.; Two Faces of American Freedom) assails what he calls "creedal constitutionalism," in which Americans across the political spectrum venerate the Constitution as an inheritance from founders that obstructs reform, weakens the democratic process, and is rooted in nationalism and imperialism. He argues that creedal constitutionalism has paved the way for reactionary jurists to base court rulings on conjectures about the founders' intentions. Most of his book reconstructs the evolution (starting with 1887) of the Constitution's position in the United States' political spectrum. Rana interrogates creedal and counter-creedal discourses, including socialist, Black radical, and labor movement perspectives. He urges Americans to demand Congress limit presidential powers, abolish the electoral college, and enact judicial term limits and other structural reforms to guarantee rights and foster democracy. Creedal constitutionalism, he argues, is inadequate glue to bind the fracturing nation together. VERDICT An eye-opening and exhaustive look at the U.S. Constitution. This book will reward readers' tenacity and enlighten academics, policymakers, and civic-minded Americans alike.—Michael Rodriguez
Kirkus Reviews
2024-02-09
An account of the evolution of the Constitution, from document to cult object and beyond.
Boston College law professor Rana opens his astute yet dense book with a definition of “creedal constitutionalism,” a fundamentalist adherence to a Constitution that allows a president to be elected despite losing the popular vote; a Senate that awards two seats apiece to even the most thinly populated states; and a Supreme Court that can do such things as eliminate the right to abortion, despite overwhelming popular support for it. The Constitution as we find it today, Rana continues, suffers from “three clear institutional pathologies that feed off each other,” among them the blockage of legislative governance unless the majority party achieves a supermajority, and rule by a minority bloc that privileges white, rural communities in national decision-making. So-called originalists hold that this is all just as it should be. However, Rana argues convincingly that it does not reflect the political or demographic composition of the nation, which is more liberal—and more urban and more ethnically diverse—than its government would suggest. Interestingly, this originalist cult and the de facto worship of the Constitution are relatively modern artifacts, but with widely varying possibilities. During the New Deal era, for example, “for labor groups, commemorating the Bill of Rights became a way of celebrating the freedom of association and freedom of speech guarantees in the First Amendment,” while in the Cold War, it became a kind of litmus test for loyalty. The author closes with the thought that the Constitution must evolve further to “support [the] long-standing effort to build a transformative majority in American society,” one that recognizes how we live and work and redistributes governing authority accordingly.
An accessible if overstuffed work of legal and political history that speaks eloquently to democratic reform.
