Author Meets Critics: Marc Landy and Dennis Hale Authors of Keeping the Republic: A Defense of American Constitutionalism

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

“The Constitution Is Broken And Should Not Be Reclaimed.” This headline from a New York Times editorial written by Harvard and Yale law professors, is a more hyperbolic expression of a view increasingly prominent in the writings of law professors, journalists, political scientists, and politicians who deem the Constitution to be “broken,” “paralyzing,” “undemocratic,” and “obsolete.” Keeping the Republic: A Defense of American Constitutionalism provides a defense of American Constitutionalism in the face of those criticisms. Such critics often forget what the Constitution attempts to achieve: a republican form of government in a nation as large as an empire. Complicating matters is that America was the first modern state— the first to be shaped by the expectation that government exists to protect natural rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that it had to cope with inherent difficulties modernity poses for republican government – a huge population that is also culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse, as well as incurably commercially minded. The framers recognized that to sustain republican government in such circumstances required both an embrace of modernity and a determination to tame modernity’s most anti-republican excesses. The book argues that this framework for building and constraining a modern state remains the best one for coping with the problems modernity still poses. To more fully appreciate the persistence and endurance of anti-constitutional thinking, the book traces its lineage, starting with the Anti-Federalists and including certain abolitionists; Henry David Thoreau; 19th-century utopians such as Edward Bellamy, Herbert Croly, and Woodrow Wilson; prominent New Deal, Great Society, and New Left anti-constitutionalists, as well as modern political scientists such as Robert Dahl. The penultimate chapter asks the inconvenient question: Why, if the constitutional order is so praise worthy, has confidence in it declined so dramatically? To address this question the book revisits the most critical periods of 20th Century policy transformation—the New Deal and the Great Society as well as the period since the 70s, which has engendered a form of anti-constitutional relations between the courts, the bureaucracy and Congress, which the book labels “stealth government.” It then offers an alternative way of understanding the path to useful political reform: working with the “constitutional grain” rather than against it. The book concludes with a reflection on the art of “thinking constitutionally.”

Sub Unit

• Modern & Contemporary Political Theory

Chair

• Marc K Landy, Boston College

Participants

• Dennis Hale, Boston College

• Jean M Yarbrough, Bowdoin College

• Harvey Mansfield, Harvard University

• Daniel DiSalvo, City College of New York

• Elizabeth Amato, Gardner-Webb University