Beau Breslin desires to make a breakthrough in the “communitarian-liberal debate” by moving it to the plane of constitutional discourse (pp. 18–19, 109). He describes his study as a work of constitutional theory, but of a generic sort; his constitutionalist standard owes more to John Rawls than to James Madison. “Constitutionalism” refers varyingly to an architectonic vision of political perfection (or “modeling”) and to the limits on political power. The communitarian constitution is caught in a dilemma that arises from these conflicting imperatives.

Breslin recapitulates (fairly, but perhaps at unnecessary length) the familiar critique of liberal theory and practice: Liberal theory rests on an implausibly atomistic understanding of selfhood, which propagates an unreasonable understanding of the requirements of individual freedom; liberal politics systematically discounts or undermines the social foundation on which genuine freedom depends by an overzealous concern for the protection of individual rights. He is aware that the term “communitarianism” is contested and unstable, but he argues that the multifaceted critique of liberalism by Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Michael Walzer, augmented by the “movement” led by Amitai Etzioni, amounts to a coherent vision of an alternative polity. Indeed, Breslin insists that it is time for the communitarians to take responsibility for the comprehensive framework implicit in their myriad criticisms of liberal politics, and he constructs on their behalf a communitarian “city in speech,” as it were (pp. 13–14, 24, 107). Holding communitarians accountable for their emphasis on the “constitutive sources” of the self, he outlines the communitarian constitution, imagining the actual policies that communitarian theory entails (p. 101). His ultimate purpose is to demonstrate that the communitarian polity is essentially incompatible with constitutional principles: No communitarian polity can abide the “external” limitations on popular will that are the hallmark of constitutionalism because communitarianism insists that society be regulated exclusively by “internal” principles, that is, the “shared understandings” or the substantive account of the good life that makes a people what they are (pp. 136–41). “Communal values will always and inevitably clash with constitutional provisions” (p. 143). Like the Platonic city in speech, the communitarian constitution is therefore an impossibility, or a paradox.

The plan of the book is to provide what communitarian thinkers have so far failed to deliver: a positive and systematic account of their alternative to liberalism, and then to subject that framework to the scrutiny of constitutionalism. Breslin suggests that communitarians have failed to appreciate the significance of their critique, which is radical, even revolutionary (pp. 13, 108). He sees the contemporary argument as a struggle over fundamental principles, reminiscent of the debate over ratification of the Constitution. At the same time, he acknowledges that communitarians themselves assure us that “their vision of a political society is little different from the one we currently inhabit” (p. 103). The Communitarian Constitution stands or falls, then, on whether Breslin has understood the implications of communitarian theory better than communitarian theorists themselves. One reason to doubt the author's construction is that several times, the book both maximizes and minimizes the differences between communitarians and liberals, and the reader is left wondering how wide the divide really is (p. 217).

The search for antecedents of the contemporary dispute results in some bold claims. Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus is portrayed as a paradigm case of the antagonism between communitarianism and constitutionalism. Lincoln is a proto-communitarian in his willingness to set aside the constitution to effect “the will of the community” (p. xi). Breslin holds that even in the circumstance of civil war, nothing can prevail over the provision of the constitutional text (p. 25). But one wonders whether this extraordinary example can bear the weight the author attaches to it. Breslin's view almost suggests that the Constitution might indeed be a suicide pact. (He is also critical of the Patriot Act and links it to the same alleged communitarian syndrome [pp. 149 n.75, 215–16].) That the Lincoln who recommended that reverence for the laws and the Constitution become our “political religion” represents the antithesis of constitutionalism is an odd result. One might say that Breslin makes the mistake of forgetting that for Americans, the Constitution is not fundamental law but only the most fundamental law we have. Constitutional government means nothing if it does not place limits on power, and through the American Constitution, the people limit or control themselves by constitutionalizing their sovereignty, by agreeing to limit the expression of that sovereignty to constitutionally authorized means; but the principle of constitutionalism for Lincoln remained the natural rights and equality of human beings, the premise from which “the sovereignty of the people” is derived. Lincoln's controversial decision (in emergency conditions) arguably reflected the right relationship of ends and means, even if his vision of a constitutional government “of, by and for the people” runs afoul of Breslin's strict separation of internal principles and external limits.

The same issue of ends and means could be pressed against Breslin's understanding of the Anti-Federalists, who are also depicted as proto-communitarian in their concern to preserve civic virtue and local identity (pp. 5–11). One wishes that the author had confronted some of the objections to construing the Anti-Federalists as “classical republicans” who promoted a genuine alternative to modern natural rights philosophy, for much hinges on his claim that the Federalist-Anti-Federalist struggle foreshadowed the communitarian–liberal debate. If, as Hebert Storing and Thomas Pangle have argued, both sides of the ratification debate accepted social contract theory and its natural rights foundation, Breslin's claim collapses, and one must wonder whether the gulf between communitarians and liberals is also as great as he suggests.

Although he is aware of the danger of “building a communitarian straw man” (pp. 79, 107–8), Breslin fails to avoid it. It is hard to imagine any communitarian thinkers who would ratify the constitution he has framed for them. Whereas communitarians complain of excessive individualism, emphasize restoring a balance between rights and responsibilities, and even warn of the dangers of promoting community for its own sake, Breslin saddles them with a vision of “communal supremacy” that is nearly totalitarian in its emphasis on promoting social cohesion: “All obstacles, therefore, that may potentially hinder the realization of that primary mission [determination of the common good] must be eliminated” (p. 135; cf. pp. 80, 86, 88, 148–49). Citizens of the communitarian polity “have no recourse from the apparently unfettered grip of the community” (p. 25). This reconstruction of the communitarian position is reminiscent of Patrick Devlin's loose generalizations about moral change and the threat of social “disintegration.” Breslin suggests that the communitarian polity is held hostage by its existing value commitments and can brook no restraints on communal will (pp. 142–43).

Community politics must therefore be essentially preservative and defensive and not real politics at all; but again, which communitarian theorist would endorse such a view? Ironically, in his very efforts to be fair and to acknowledge the diversity of communitarian thought, Breslin finds himself forced to a level of abstraction at which suitably generic versions of communitarian principles become available; but for that very reason, important qualifications or nuances are abandoned. Virtually every communitarian thinker is sensitive to the difference between attempting to create community where it does not or cannot exist and nurturing it where it does; and every communitarian thinker expresses a concern for individual freedom and therewith restraints on the popular will. Despite his comprehensive and sympathetic understanding of communitarian theory (from which the reader will profit), Breslin has substantially altered its claims in the process of refining them. Communitarians respect individual rights and fear majority oppression but question whether that respect must pit freedom and authority against one another in a zero sum game. It is not at all clear that they need a constitution of their own; and surely it is a telling point that they do not seek one.