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.
Choice
"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."
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."
The New Rambler
"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."
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."
The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
"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."
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."
Inside Higher Ed
"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."
The Chronicle of Higher Education - Noah Feldman
"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."
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."
Theory & Event
"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."
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.
