The Making of Americans, the Teaching of English, and the Future of Culture Studies

Abstract

WAS INTERESTED to find that, although Convention, monarchy, and of the United States were three items listed under What literate Americans know in Professor E. D. Hirsch's provocative book Cultural Literacy, the Constitution was not an index entry. In other words, constitutional matters did not form part of Hirsch's own thinking in the making of his argument. There is nothing in his index between Conservatism and Constructive Hypothesis.' It is my opinion that, if one is going to speak for or plan for that complicated thing called an American, one must think of his or her relationship to the Constitution. In this part of my paper, I consider the argument of the brilliant reinterpretation of the Constitution in Professor Bruce Ackerman's forthcoming book Discover the Constitution.2 Ackerman's understanding of the Constitution is dualist and exceptionalist. The dualism is between normal everyday politics where We the People are not much involved, and the great exceptional moments in political practice--constitutional politics -where We the People are mobilized and involved in the process of change through higher lawmaking. These involvements of We the People in the law are also managements of crisis. Although We the People were mobilized at the time of Reconstruction, it was the crisis of a possible impeachment of the president that brought the Constitutional Amendments. Similarly, in spite of the electoral mobilization of We the People, it was the crisis of a possible court-packing that brought in the activist welfare state of the New Deal. And the changes, from a federalist division of powers, through a nationalist separation of powers, to the consolidation of presidential power, were all the time being reclaimed into the continuation of normal political practice, where We the People are not much involved. In the modern context at New Literary History, 1990, 21: 781-798