| Recommended Readings from University of Texas At Austin Faculty | |
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William S. Livingston is Professor of Government and was the Senior Vice President at The University of Texas at Austin from 1995 to August 2007. The author of Federalism and Constitutional
Change and the editor of The Legacy of the Constitution, Dr. Livingston is a specialist in British and Commonwealth government, comparative federalism, and American constitutionalism. Dr. Livingston writes:
Many excellent books examining the history of our American Constitution have been published over the years. This list describes a few that I have found particularly useful.
Readers interested in the story of the Constitutional Convention would do well to consider Catherine Drinker Bowen's Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September, 1787 (Little,
Brown, 1966) - still the best one-volume account available. Useful introductions to the historical period include Edmund S. Morgan's The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (University of Chicago Press, 1992), as well as Gordon S. Wood's The
Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (University of North Carolina Press, 1969). The Federalist, an extraordinary collection of essays written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, captures the powerful arguments
made on behalf of the Constitution by its advocates.
Biographical studies provide an excellent approach to understanding Constitutional origins, and many first-rate comprehensive biographies exist. Look at, for example, H. W. Brands' The First American: The Life and
Times of Benjamin Franklin (Doubleday, 2000), Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Press, 2004), James T. Flexner's Washington, the Indispensable Man (Little, Brown, 1969), and David McCullough's John Adams (Simon & Schuster,
2001). Richard Brookhiser illuminates an interesting and lesser-known participant in his Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, The Rake Who Wrote the Constitution (Simon & Schuster, 2003). Other useful and readable works include
Robert A. Goldwin's From Parchment to Power: How James Madison Used the Bill of Rights to Save the Constitution (American Enterprise Institute, 1997) and Joseph J. Ellis' Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf,
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Gretchen Ritter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Director of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Goldbugs
and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and The Constitution as Social Design: Gender and Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order (Stanford University Press, 2006). Dr. Ritter writes:
The Constitution should be thought of as a living document. It begins with the phrase "We, the People." The community invoked and created in the phrase "We, the People" stands at the center of the institutional
framework and political community that the Constitution defines. On the one hand, the Constitution outlines the power and offices of the national government. On the other hand, it suggests a civic order in which the government and
"the People" have a set of rights and duties toward one another. Civic membership, to the extent that it speaks to the reciprocal relationship between the people and the government, is at the heart of the constitutional order.
The question is - who belongs to the community invoked by the phrase "We, the People"? Membership in that community has changed over time. Once, "the People" did not include African Americans or Native Americans, and
it only dimly included women. Today it might be worth considering the terms on which we include immigrants and homosexuals in the American community.
Approaching constitutional development through debates over civic membership allows for new insights into one of the central paradoxes of American history - namely, how it is that a nation founded on universalist
principles of equality is so marked by a history of hierarchy, subordination, and exclusion. How can Thomas Jefferson be both the author of the Declaration of Independence and the master (and father) of slaves? How can the legacies of
slavery, coverture, immigrant exclusion, Indian extermination, and relocation camps be made consistent with a history that includes the Declaration, the Bill of the Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Four Freedoms, and the "I
Have a Dream" speech? Many resolve this contradiction by imagining that liberal individualism and equality constitute the core truth about America, while practices of subordination do not represent the nation's spirit or destiny and
are better understood as historical remnants that in time were swept away by the power of American political ideals. Such a portrait is seductive, not least for the subordinated groups who invoke it to advance claims of inclusion. Yet
it is also a troublesome misrepresentation for a nation that often proves willing not only to retain and reformulate certain forms of social hierarchy, but to generate new institutions and practices of political and social exclusion.
It makes more sense, then, to begin from the premise that both hierarchy and equality have been central to the principles and practices of the American constitutional order.
At different moments in our history, those who were excluded or who were not included on equal terms fought for their right to be regarded as first-class citizens and members of the American constitutional community.
They have aspired to be a part of the American Dream. Here are a few examples of their pleas (and some of the responses to them), many of which invoke the Declaration of Independence, as well as the U.S. Constitution:
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Jeffrey K. Tulis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at The University of Texas at Austin. His publications include The Presidency in the Constitutional Order (LSU,
1981) and The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, 1987). He is currently writing a book on the problem of institutional deference, and he is co-editor of the Johns Hopkins Series in Constitutional Thought. Dr. Tulis writes:
The best way to begin to understand the meaning of the American Constitution is to read the arguments of those who supported and those who opposed the original design in 1787. Today we take for granted many of the most
important and effective features of the Constitution. It is useful to go back to a time when the proposed Constitution was new and controversial. Supporters of the Constitution called themselves Federalists, and they succeeded in
labeling their opponents Anti-federalists. The best Federalist arguments were written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay writing together as "Publius." There are many good and inexpensive paperback editions of their
essays, titled The Federalist. The best Anti-federalist arguments were written by men (and one woman, Mercy Warren) using pseudonyms, such as Federal Farmer, Brutus, Agrippa, Cato and Centenal. Good selections of these essays include
Cecelia Kenyon, ed., The Antifederalists, and Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Anti-federalist.
Herbert Storing has also written the best summary of the political thought of both sides of the constitutional fight in What the Anti-federalists Were For (University of Chicago Press). This original debate
continues to play itself out in later political and historical controversies, as can be seen in essays by Richard Hofstadter, Martin Diamond, Wilson Carey McWilliams, Robert Dahl, James Ceaser, and Gordon Wood in Robert H. Horwitz,
ed., The Moral Foundations of the American Republic (University Press of Virginia).
Some scholars question whether we actually live under the same Constitution as our founding, or whether our Constitution has changed in the face of major historical changes, such as the Civil War or the New Deal in the
1930s. Good books taking opposite sides on this question include Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Harvard University Press), and Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided (University of Chicago Press). Finally, some have
tried to articulate general theories of what our Constitution means and how it operates. Good books that do this include: Sotirios Barber, On What the Constitution Means (Johns Hopkins University Press), Sanford Levinson,
Constitutional Faith (Princeton University Press), and Christopher Eisgruber, Constitutional Self-Government (Harvard University Press). |
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Keith E. Whittington was a visiting professor at The University of Texas Law School in 2005-2006 and is a professor of politics at Princeton University. He is the author of Constitutional Interpretation: Textual
Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review and of Constitutional Construction: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning. Dr. Whittington writes:
There are a tremendous number of excellent and accessible books that examine the American constitutional experience from a variety of perspectives. On the American founding and the origins of the Constitution, a
terrific starting point is Gordon Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (W.W. Norton, 1972), which shaped a generation of scholarship on American political culture. More recent is the Pulitzer Prize-winning
Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Vintage, 1997), by Jack Rakove, which gives particular attention to James Madison and his concerns, triumphs and disappointments in pushing for the
creation of the Constitution.
On our efforts to put the Constitution into practice, Bruce Ackerman's The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2005), Ken
Kersch's Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Michael Klarman's From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the
Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2004) give surprising new accounts of some of the political and legal controversies that have shaped the country that we live in today. |
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