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Has American democracy outstripped its constitutional accommodations?

Faith in the resilience and adaptability of the US Constitution rests on a long history of finding new ways to make the system work. In The Adaptability Paradox, political scientist Stephen Skowronek examines the rearrangements that regenerated the American government in the past and brings that experience to bear on our current predicament. He shows how a constitution framed in writing some 230 years ago can run into serious difficulties directly related to its long and impressive history of adaptation.

Skowronek connects questions about the Constitution’s adaptability to the challenges of democratization. For most of American history, serial rearrangements of constitutional relationships widened the government’s purview as a national democracy without giving either nationalism or democracy free rein. Skowronek argues that the politics of adaptation shifted fundamentally with the “Rights Revolution” of the 1960s and `70s when American national democracy approached the inclusion of all its citizens on equal footing. Since then, power and authority have been reconfigured in ways that have steadily magnified conflicts over the essentials of good order. Conservatives aim to dismantle a Constitution that progressives are intent on building upon, and the consensus necessary for a constitutional democracy to function effectively has all but evaporated. No longer a socially bound framework for national action, the Constitution has become an abstract matrix of possibilities, a disembodied opportunity structure open to starkly different, mutually unacceptable futures.

Rather than being liberated by this unbound Constitution, the American people now appear entrapped by it. Is it possible that the development of American democracy has exhausted the adaptive capacities of the Constitution? A timely reminder that constitutional democracies do not survive on faith alone, The Adaptability Paradox is a sober appraisal of the unfamiliar ground on which we now tread.

An eye-opening account of how Americans came to revere the Constitution and what this reverence has meant domestically and around the world.

Some Americans today worry that the Federal Constitution is ill-equipped to respond to mounting democratic threats and may even exacerbate the worst features of American politics. Yet for as long as anyone can remember, the Constitution has occupied a quasi-mythical status in American political culture, which ties ideals of liberty and equality to assumptions about the inherent goodness of the text’s design. The Constitutional Bind explores how a flawed document came to be so glorified and how this has impacted American life.

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 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.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

An eye-opening account of how Americans came to revere the Constitution and what this reverence has meant domestically and around the world.

Some Americans today worry that the Federal Constitution is ill-equipped to respond to mounting democratic threats and may even exacerbate the worst features of American politics. Yet for as long as anyone can remember, the Constitution has occupied a quasi-mythical status in American political culture, which ties ideals of liberty and equality to assumptions about the inherent goodness of the text’s design. The Constitutional Bind explores how a flawed document came to be so glorified and how this has impacted American life.

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 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.

The Ecosystem Approach in Anthropology serves as a foundational methodology guide for modern ecological and environmental anthropology. The book advocates for a rigorous, integrative approach to studying human societies by framing them as deeply interconnected components of larger biological ecosystems. Moran gathers a diverse cohort of leading researchers to demonstrate how abstract ecosystem concepts can be translated into concrete, empirical field practices across varying environments, ranging from tropical rainforests to arid landscapes. By bridging the gap between cultural anthropology and natural sciences like ecology, soil science, and demography, the volume offers critical frameworks for quantifying energy flows, resource consumption, and human-environmental feedback loops, making it an indispensable resource for analyzing complex social-ecological systems and anthropogenic environmental changes.

Why did enduring traditions of economic and political liberty emerge in Western Europe and not elsewhere? Representative democracy, constitutionalism, and the rule of law are crucial for establishing a just and prosperous society, which we usually treat as the fruits of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, as Western European societies put the Dark Ages behind them.

In The Medieval Constitution of Liberty, Salter and Young point instead to the constitutional order that characterized the High Middle Ages. They provide a historical account of how this constitutional order evolved following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. This account runs from the settlements of militarized Germanic elites within the imperial frontiers, to the host of successor kingdoms in the sixth and seventh centuries, and  through the short-lived Carolingian empire of the late eighth and ninth centuries and the so-called “feudal anarchy” that followed its demise. Given this unique historical backdrop, Salter and Young consider the resulting structures of political property rights. They argue that the historical reality approximated a constitutional ideal type, which they term polycentric sovereignty. Salter and Young provide a theoretical analysis of polycentric sovereignty, arguing that bargains between political property rights holders within that sort of constitutional order will lead to improvements in governance.

A thoughtful examination of how to recenter decency in politics and public life, told through conversations between long-time historian and public servant Peter Hennessy and influential friends, decision makers, and leaders. 

Having surveyed eighty years of the UK's political and constitutional journey, Hennessy prepares to bid farewell to public life. And he’s left with one thought: that the essential quality of decency needs to be placed—once again—back at the heart of public life and public discourse. But what does decency look like today, where does it spring from, and how might we all play a role in recentering it in public life? In The Politics of Decency, Hennessy considers such issues alongside a group of people who might pick up his baton. After inviting public servants, colleagues, and those he has long admired, along with younger voices from politics and public life, into his home for conversations about what decency means to them, he reflects on what they have shared with him. Hennessy’s interest in this question springs from a concern about constitutional proprieties, but these conversations range much further afield—from the constitution to service delivery, from schooling to social media. What he hears is both worrying and uplifting: a sense that there is a problem, a real commitment to tackle it, and ideas for how that might be done—and what role all of us can play in doing it.

Exploring the constitution that transformed governance, citizenship, and political culture across the Hispanic Atlantic world.

In March 1812, while Napoleon’s brother Joseph sat on the throne of Spain and the armies of France occupied much of the country, legislators elected from Spain and its overseas territories met in the Andalusian city of Cádiz. There, as the cornerstone of a government in exile, they drafted and adopted the first liberal constitution in the Hispanic world, a document that became known as the Cádiz Constitution of 1812.

The 1812 Constitution was extremely influential in and beyond Europe, and this collection of essays explores how its enduring legacy not only shaped the history of state-building, elections, and municipal governance in Iberian America, but also affected national identities and citizenship as well as the development of race and gender in the region.

A bold blueprint for governing a global, heterogeneous monarchy, the Constitution represented a rupture with Spain’s Antiguo Régimen (Old Regime) in numerous ways—in the limits it placed on the previously autocratic Bourbon monarchs, in the admission to its governing bodies of deputies from Spain’s American viceroyalties as equals, and in its framers’ vociferous debate over the status of castas (those of mixed ancestry) and slaves. The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World covers these issues and adopts a transatlantic perspective that recovers the voices of those who created a vibrant political culture accessible to commoners and elite alike.

The bicentenary of the Constitution of 1812 offered scholars an excellent moment to reexamine the form and role of constitutions across the Spanish-speaking world. Constitutionalism remains a topic of intense debate in Latin America, while contemporary Spain itself continues to seek ways to balance a strong central government with centripetal forces in its regions, notably the Basque and Catalan provinces. The multifaceted essays compiled here by Scott Eastman and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea both shed new light on the early, liberal Hispanic societies and show how the legacies of those societies shape modern Spain and Latin America.