New from Harvard University Press:
America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community, by
Robert L. Tsai (American University). The Press explains:
The U.S. Constitution opens by proclaiming the sovereignty of all citizens: “We the People.”
Robert Tsai’s
gripping history of alternative constitutions invites readers into the
circle of those who have rejected this ringing assertion—the defiant
groups that refused to accept the Constitution’s definition of who “the
people” are and how their authority should be exercised.
America’s Forgotten Constitutions is the story of America as
told by dissenters: squatters, Native Americans, abolitionists,
socialists, internationalists, and racial nationalists. Beginning in the
nineteenth century, Tsai chronicles eight episodes in which
discontented citizens took the extraordinary step of drafting a new
constitution. He examines the alternative Americas envisioned by John
Brown (who dreamed of a republic purged of slavery), Robert Barnwell
Rhett (the Confederate “father of secession”), and Etienne Cabet (a
French socialist who founded a utopian society in Illinois). Other
dreamers include the University of Chicago academics who created a world
constitution for the nuclear age; the Republic of New Afrika, which
demanded a separate country carved from the Deep South; and the
contemporary Aryan movement, which plans to liberate America from
multiculturalism and feminism.
Countering those who treat constitutional law as a single tradition,
Tsai argues that the ratification of the Constitution did not quell
debate but kindled further conflicts over basic questions of power and
community. He explains how the tradition mutated over time, inspiring
generations and disrupting the best-laid plans for simplicity and order.
Idealists on both the left and right will benefit from reading these
cautionary tales.
Two blurbs, from two big names:
“Tsai’s recovery of the
constitutional plans of dissenting political communities challenges our
sense of a stable constitutional history. America’s Forgotten Constitutions
masterfully exposes the disturbingly shaky foundations of
constitutional identity; yet it also shows the (mildly reassuring)
consistency of constitutional thinking, even among white supremacists,
land-grabbers, and moralistic ideologues.”—Sarah Barringer Gordon
“For two centuries, dissenters from the American mainstream have drawn inspiration from the U.S. Constitution—and chafed at it. Tsai
elegantly maps the margins of our constitutional landscape to reveal
one of the Framers’ great forgotten legacies. A brilliantly conceived
book.”—John Fabian Witt
More information is available
here, at the book's HUP website. Read about the book's journey
here, at Tsai's site.
