Columbus in the Twilight Zone: Bruce Ackerman's “Discovery” of the Constitution

Abstract

If Bruce Ackerman is right, the most contentious issues of modern constitutional theory have been fought out on a map that misses the most significant features of our political landscape. For the last decade constitutional theorists have hotly debated whether the U.S. Constitution is best understood through one or the other of an amazing variety of philosophical traditions including Lockean liberalism, Kantean ethics, hermeneutic theory, and the Atlantic Republican tradition. On Ackerman's account these theorists have failed to appreciate the uniquely American innovations in democratic theory and practice, as they strived mightily to fit them into the glass slipper of European political theory. In We the People, and two more promised volumes, Ackerman sets out to redescribe our constitutional past and reinterpret our present impasses in light of his of America's great invention in 1787-dualist democracy. Like Columbus's discovery of America, the five hundredth anniversary of which is being celebrated and critiqued this year, Ackerman's self-pronounced discovery of the Constitution raises troubling questions. How do we come to grips with our dependence on a past we cannot help but reshape by rethinking? How can we escape the reproduction of the processes of domination that marked the past? To his great credit Ackerman wrestles with these problems. The continent he claims for us is empowering in its rediscovered