United States Constitution

"How can anyone claim to really understand our Constitution without knowing what these critical traditions had to say?" —Michael Wallace, Professor of History, John Jay College. "A real contribution to the subject of democracy and liberalism." —John Ehrenberg. "Does a marvelous job of returning the Constitution to its proper sphere, the product of the rough and tumble of politics." — Malcom M. Feely, author of Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State. "The United States Constitution is a provocative book, much needed for overdue rethinking on the Constitution proper and its amendments. By making available "the underside of criticism and protest that has accompanied the Constitution from its inception" the book cuts through a mountainous mass of conventional bombast, one-sided versions and outright fabrications regarding the Constitution. In clarifying what makes the Constitution's clock tick, the book lives up to its subtitle. —Ira Gollobin, National Emergency Civil Rights Committee NEVER BEFORE ASSEMBLED IN A SINGLE VOLUME—the major writings on the Constitution from six critical traditions. Here is THE OTHER SIDE in most of the key disputes over the Constitution from 1789 to the present, the side that was barely heard during the recent Bicentennial celebrations. Yet, it was often the popular side, raising many troublesome questions about the nature of American democracy that still remain to be answered. Now that the applause has subsided, every fair- minded person will want to know what these critics of the Constitution have to say about who did, and is still doing, what to whom, and why. Section 1 outlines the main events and problems that led up to and contributed to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Section 2 concentrates on what actually happened at the convention. Section 3 deals with the two-hundred-year history of interpretations and amendments that followed. Section 4 offers a number of ideas that should prove helpful in constructing the adequate theory of the Constitution that still eludes us. Skillfully woven into one volume the forty contributors include voices as varied as those of Gore Vidal, I.F. Stone, Ralph Nader, E.P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, Sheldon S. Wolin, Joan Hoff, Karl Marx, Jackson Turner Main, Charles A. Beard, and W.E.B. Du Bois joined--perhaps surprisingly--by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Thurgood Marshall.

Jonathan Birnbaum is the editor, with Bertell Ollman, of The United States Constitution: 200 Years of Anti-Federalist, Abolitionist, Feminist, Muckraking, Progressive, and Especially Socialist Criticism (also available from NYU Press). His work has appeared in The Guardian, New Politics, Socialism & Democracy, New Political Science, and other publications. He lives in Illinois.