(Source: HUP)
Harvard University Press has published a new
book on the origins, successes, and threats to revolutionary constitutionalism.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Populism is a threat to the democratic world,
fuel for demagogues and reactionary crowds—or so its critics would have us
believe. But in his award-winning trilogy We the People, Bruce
Ackerman showed that Americans have repeatedly rejected this view. Now
he draws on a quarter century of scholarship in this essential and surprising
inquiry into the origins, successes, and threats to revolutionary
constitutionalism around the world. He takes us to India, South Africa, Italy,
France, Poland, Burma, Israel, and Iran and provides a blow-by-blow account of
the tribulations that confronted popular movements in their insurgent campaigns
for constitutional democracy. Despite their many differences, populist leaders
such as Nehru, Mandela, and de Gaulle encountered similar dilemmas at critical
turning points, and each managed something overlooked but essential. Rather
than deploy their charismatic leadership to retain power, they instead used it
to confer legitimacy to the citizens and institutions of constitutional
democracy.
Ackerman returns to the United States in his
last chapter to provide new insights into the Founders’ acts of constitutional
statesmanship as they met very similar challenges to those confronting populist
leaders today. In the age of Trump, the democratic system of checks and
balances will not survive unless ordinary citizens rally to its defense. Revolutionary
Constitutions shows how activists can learn from their predecessors’
successes and profit from their mistakes, and sets up Ackerman’s next volume,
which will address how elites and insiders co-opt and destroy the momentum of
revolutionary movements.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruce Ackerman is Sterling Professor of Law
and Political Science at Yale University and the award-winning author of
eighteen books, including Social Justice in the Liberal State and his
multivolume constitutional history We the People. His book The Stakeholder
Society (written with Anne Alstott) served as a basis for Tony Blair’s
introduction of child investment accounts in the United Kingdom. He contributes
frequently to the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times.
Ackerman is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences and the recipient of the American Philosophical Society’s
Henry M. Phillips Prize for lifetime achievement in jurisprudence.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Introduction: Pathways
I. Constitutional Revolutions
1. Constitutionalizing Revolution?
2. Movement-Party Constitutionalism: India
3. Struggling for Supremacy: South Africa
4. From the French Resistance to the Fourth
Republic
5. Constitutional Revolution in Italy
6. A Progress Report?
II. Elaborations
7. De Gaulle’s Republic: The Outsider Returns
8. Reconstructing the Fifth Republic
9. Solidarity’s Triumph in Poland
10. Solidarity’s Collapse: The Perils of
Presidentialism
11. The Race against Time: Burma and Israel
12. Constitutionalizing Charisma in Iran
13. American Exceptionalism?
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
More info here
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