Aziz Rana, "The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Aziz Rana, "The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home. Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (U Chicago Press, 2024) also sheds light on an array of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights that Rana reconstructs to forward an ambitious and comprehensive vision for moving past the constitutional bind. Aziz Rana is a Professor and Provost’s Distinguished Fellow at Boston College Law School and the incoming J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government (beginning 2024). Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. He is the editor of Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Episoder(2229)

Francisco Martínez, "The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia" (Cornell UP, 2025)

Francisco Martínez, "The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia" (Cornell UP, 2025)

How can lives and things that are rendered invisible be crucial to identity, politics, and the future? Drawing on experimental ethnographic research in northeastern Estonia, this book offers vivid ans...

28 Apr 54min

Rugged Individualism

Rugged Individualism

In this special student edition of High Theory, Andrew Bennett, Jo Hoffman, Kai North, and Ally Sullivan tell us about Rugged Individualism, a concept they link to Marxist theory. They made this episo...

27 Apr 18min

Sarah Jaffe, "From the Ashes: Grief and Transformation in a World on Fire" (Bold Type Books, 2024)

Sarah Jaffe, "From the Ashes: Grief and Transformation in a World on Fire" (Bold Type Books, 2024)

From the author of Work Won't Love You Back, a stirring examination of how collective grief can ignite powerful change. Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, yet we barely have time to a...

22 Apr 1h 7min

169* Hannah Arendt on Oases (JP)

169* Hannah Arendt on Oases (JP)

Our Recall This Buck series began by speaking with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School about how key ideas—and the actual currency, physical coins and bills— underlying the modern monetary system ge...

18 Apr 31min

Manuel Barcia, "Pirate Imperialism: Trade, Abolition, and Global Suppression of Maritime Raiding, 1825–1870" (Yale UP, 2026)

Manuel Barcia, "Pirate Imperialism: Trade, Abolition, and Global Suppression of Maritime Raiding, 1825–1870" (Yale UP, 2026)

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, imperial powers around the world came into direct confrontation with local resistance in the form of maritime raiding. From the Atlantic basin to the w...

18 Apr 38min

Audrey Borowski, "Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Audrey Borowski, "Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached fro...

17 Apr 1h 1min

Amanda Anderson and Simon During, "Humanities Theory" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Amanda Anderson and Simon During, "Humanities Theory" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Humanities Theory (Oxford UP, 2026) pioneers a new topic: the theory of the humanities. It is an urgent topic right now because the humanities face a suite of forceful new challenges and are in a peri...

17 Apr 1h 8min

Alisa Kessel, "Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Alisa Kessel, "Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Political theorist Alisa Kessel (University of Puget Sound) has an important and impressive new book, Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence. Kessel’s research grew out of...

16 Apr 1h 13min

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