In a sweeping history of American constitutional thought, Aziz Rana charts how what he calls “creedal constitutionalism”—the veneration of the American Constitution of 1787, grounded in the belief that the document both enshrines a near-ideal institutional system for democratic governance and espouses the essential American ethos—defeated and eventually foreclosed broader forms of constitutional politics in the United States. Most readers will find the stakes of Rana’s argument familiar: he begins by describing the pathologies of institutional design that set the Constitution and the political system it has engendered at odds with authentic democratic governance. These pathologies—fragmented and unequal voter power, widespread veto points, and the rise of the imperial presidency—are well-worn subjects for analysts of American politics, who, like Rana, have observed that most proposals to reform undemocratic institutions are blocked by the very problems they hope to resolve.

But Rana argues that the contemporary focus on individual reforms has precluded meaningful thought about the quality of the Constitution in its totality as a foundation for democratic governance. He sees this narrow focus as symptomatic of a hegemonic culture of “creedalism,” by which the document is “entangled in a broader account of the American people” and anchored in a “belief in a national narrative of unfolding liberty and equality” (p. 10–11). Rana contends that creedalism has come to contain a series of corollaries dear to American elites: that individual liberty requires market capitalism and property rights, that the unique quality of American institutions legitimates the exertion of American power abroad, and that the Supreme Court and legal profession are the proper guardians of American rights and institutional function. If we are to contest these ideas, Rana argues that we require an account of how creedalism came to be and what alternatives it suppressed.

This book proposes to offer that account, weaving together intellectual, political, social, and legal history. It proceeds in four parts, largely chronologically between the Constitution’s first and second centennial. According to Rana, this history reveals that creedalism’s hegemony is a recent phenomenon; across the first century of the American republic, popular and even elite sentiment were generally more critical of the federal Constitution than they were admiring, let alone reverent. Indeed, skepticism of the Constitution remained prevalent among the governing class late into the nineteenth century. What changed? Rana describes several domestic evolutions: as the twentieth century dawned, the closing of the frontier, mass immigration, and the ongoing project of Black emancipation intensified conjoint questions about the status of labor and authentic belonging in the American populace. Business elites turned to the courts to quell worker rebellion and protect property against redistribution. In parallel, they began to contend that Americanness was defined by respect for the Constitution’s antimajoritarian institutions, the inheritance of an essentially Anglo-Saxon political tradition.

But for Rana, the decisive elite embrace of creedalism occurred in the context of the American colonial war in the Philippines, which led elite thinkers to propose that the Constitution should serve as a model for self-government among “lesser” peoples. The Constitution’s virtue, on this view, was not only the effectiveness of its institutional structures for protecting property but also that it universalized a culture of political liberty that had arisen among white settler peoples. Creedalist discourse worked to legitimate American imperialism—for conservatives casting it as a tutelage of lesser peoples under the force of arms and for progressives distinguishing it from European empire, since it purported to be concerned with the elevation, not subjugation, of colonial peoples.

Creedalism’s rhetorical strength only grew as European national and international orders collapsed into the maw of the First World War. Even as the war and rising left internationalism energized American critics of the Constitution, Rana shows that elites responded by funding wide-ranging efforts—from the American Bar Association to the Ku Klux Klan—to defend the Constitution’s anti-democratic aspects as a bulwark against popular reform by tying them to nativist mass politics, crafting a shared, racialized concept of the American nation grounded in the Constitution.

Rana’s account, then, rebukes the idea that the development of American constitutional thought was a largely domestic affair. As in many other nations, the dominant American self-conception emerged contingently from elite attempts to navigate foreign pressures. This view also helps Rana explain the paradox that persists at creedalism’s center: that the belief in the unique value of American liberty is routinely mobilized to justify state repression of dissent. The initial deployment of creedalism in support of colonial war foreshadowed a pattern that would continue, in which creedalism’s universalist pretensions obscured its foundation in a belief that only certain people, or peoples, could be trusted with the institutions of self-rule.

Who, exactly, belonged in the trusted class changed over time, in response not only to the changing discursive demands imposed by America’s conflicts abroad but also to the success of inclusionary movements at home. Such success, ironically, often bolstered creedalism’s legitimacy by rendering its progressivist teleology more plausible.

The book convincingly shows that creedalism’s coherence and hegemony depend on a profound collective forgetting. If creedalism entails a belief that the Constitution continuously provided the institutional means for stable democracy and a singular national ethos, it is descriptively false, since American life has been marked by instability and minoritarian rule—and because the elements of the Constitution that creedalists believe most central have changed over time. (Rana’s chapter on the rediscovery of the Bill of Rights in the mid-twentieth century is particularly incisive.) If one concedes these historical developments, then it is incoherent to locate an ideal political system or an essential American ethos in the Constitution itself—not just because history demonstrates its inadequacies, but because the institutional and civic progress that liberals celebrate is underdetermined by the Constitution’s text.

These insights offer a basis for rejecting not just the modes of constitutional interpretation in vogue today among conservatives and the liberal center but the larger idea that constitutional interpretation should sit at the center of American political life. If this book, as Rana notes, engages with a liberal subset of legal scholarship that has treated contemporary democratic decision-making as essential to constitutional interpretation, it nonetheless fundamentally diverges from this tradition. Rather than trying to construct a method of left Constitutional interpretation, Rana disavows the project of trying to force a false comity between democratic action and the essentially anti-democratic practice of judicial governance by the lights of an ancient text. Instead, Rana wants to see the study of the Constitution supplanted by a more capacious study of constitutional politics, and he would remove this study from the vice-grip in which legal scholars have held it for the last several decades.

To this end, Rana’s work offers a wide-ranging recovery of prior critics of the Constitution. He joins well-remembered figures like Charles Beard with others whom creedalism pushed to the margins, from members of the Socialist Party of America to anticolonial thinkers abroad and the Black Panther Party. Repeatedly, Rana details these thinkers’ responses to institutional conditions any modern American reader would recognize; the book is a chronicle of memories seized “as they flash up at a moment of danger,” per Walter Benjamin.

However, Rana’s work is intended as a point of embarkation for broader constitutional politics rather than as a manual for their realization. Its inquiry points forward in at least two related directions. First, although he spends time analyzing the fates of individual leftist movements (and the opportunities they missed to transform American constitutionalism, most notably during the New Deal), Rana stops short of offering a systematic account of the reasons why they generally failed to build a mass popular movement for constitutional reform—a movement in which he, like the thinkers whose work he recovers, appears to place his hopes. How, indeed, should those who want to build such a movement overcome the discursive force of creedalism or the state repression it sanctions? Under what circumstances can class allegiances triumph over creedalist American identity? These, of course, are the grand strategic questions of the American left, and Rana can hardly be expected to offer definitive answers.

Second, Rana invites a more sustained development of the materialist aspect of his account, summarized (reductively) as follows: since the Constitution so effectively insulates property from redistribution, wealthy classes rallied to its defense whenever pressed by populist movements; they deployed their hegemony to incorporate constitutional veneration into a racialized nationalism, which they in turn mobilized against those movements from below—most effectively during wartime. Perhaps there is something to discover, in this vein, about how conflicts and class formation within the elite—for instance, in the context of the integration of a national economy and the concomitant growth of federal power—also contributed to creedalism’s rise and to its present strength.

This is a vital book that deserves the attention of anyone concerned with American political thought, and I recommend it accordingly.