The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840
Akhil Reed Amar. Basic, $40 (882p) ISBN 978-0-465-09635-0
The U.S. collectively talked and wrote its way into being, according to this dazzling constitutional history. Yale law professor Reed (
The Law of the Land) surveys America’s evolving ideas about government and law via discussions of Paxton’s Case, a 1761 Boston legal proceeding about search warrants that challenged parliamentary supremacy and started the colonies’ ideological journey to independence; the 1787 Constitution, which knit sovereign states into a nation; and later constitutional crises over slavery. The author frames this history as a series of “conversations” among the founders in formal congresses and informal letter-writing circles, and among ordinary people through newspapers, pamphlets, cartoons, and elections. Against modern historians and legal scholars who condemn the constitutional order as a bulwark of elite dominion, Amar advances a neo-Federalist defense of it as a deeply democratic, if imperfect, blueprint for stable liberty. This is no arid exercise in legal theory: Amar ties searching constitutional analysis into a gripping narrative of war, popular tumults, political intrigue, and even fashion, highlighted by vivid profiles of statesmen. (Washington and Hamilton are the heroes of the story; Jefferson and Madison come away diminished.) The result is a fresh, invigorating take on America’s founding that puts epic deliberation at the heart of democracy. Photos.
(May)