This book is on the durability of the design and intent of the American democratic republic. It is a study from the Founding to the present on a developmental theme that shows basic constitutional elements, their expansion, contraction, refinement, evolution, and misdirection over two-plus centuries. The chapters discuss democracy, republicanism, popular sovereignty, separation of powers, federalism, social-cultural conditions, intellectual life, legal and constitutional developments, currents in political thought, military and foreign affairs, economics and economic developments, religion and morality. The book considers the American Constitution in the classical sense of a constitution, as more than just a single document or a few closely related documents.

It was commonly accepted in the early political life of America, Krason points out, that those who made the laws must be subject to them like everyone else. This assumption merges with the fundamental notion enunciated in Jefferson's first inaugural that government must be in the open, a stark contrast to today. Openness was soon eclipsed and by the second third of the nineteenth century, with the Jackson presidency, expansionism in the West, the Civil War, and all their accompanying entanglements America became more than originally conceived of—or is it less?

Unfortunately the practice of politicians advancing themselves economically by their official actions became quickly and firmly implanted. The political style commanded loyalty, and patronage was the result. This reviewer notes that today governing has become so convoluted that at the level closest to the people, as in homeowner associations, there has developed a gap where closed meetings or cryptic minutes without recorded votes keep the ordinary citizen at bay.

Krason, a professor of political science and a lawyer, covers all the presidents and all important Supreme Court decisions. He is mindful of the original plan of mixed government with checks and balances. While the jockeying among branches continued throughout the two hundred years the political ebb and flow is a product of not just the officeholders themselves but the larger milieu and culture. Constitutional amendments, like the sixteenth and seventeenth, had an impact even though they ostensibly did not bear on the subject. Krason wisely observes that the famous court-packing episode of FDR's second term was a legitimate assertion of checks and balances, an often-forgotten principle in recent commentary.

With industrialization and the spread of railroads there was further expansion of government. Grants-in-aid programs led to even more governmental growth in the twentieth century, exacerbating the erosion of federalism with diminished power of the states (although the overall growth of state and national government would mask the greater growth of the national vis-à-vis the states). Krason often alludes to subsidiarity as an abiding principle of government whereby the national government should defer to the states, and the states to local levels, and even to education and local life. There is always an excuse for new programs and legislation abetted by progressive and scientific “efficient” government designs resulting in bureaucracy's increase. Late in the twentieth century even Reagan failed to curtail the drift in grants-in-aid, though the “activist” model of presidency would rate Reagan low.

Themes that recur in the book include the soon implanted individualism; the spread of legal positivism; developments in education, and the inclination wherein public opinion became an infallible indication of the content of moral law; the growth and expansion of secularism with the removal of religious expression from the public arena; the “melting pot” being replaced by discrete peoples; pressures on the family that eventually left 22 percent of households with minor children headed by women; the continuing expansion of the gap between rich and poor; the emergence of a new aristocracy of wealth and a culture of luxury; and wants becoming perceived needs. Prominent economic developments engendered the growth of interest and protest groups; the shift where by the end of the Civil War years two-thirds of those who engaged in the economy worked for someone else instead of being self-employed; corporations run by managers for remote stockholders became the dominant business model, leading to the corresponding advance of the labor movement with its own political dimensions; service jobs increased to 70 percent of total employment, with manufacturing jobs moving abroad, union membership declining from 30 percent to 23 percent, and the deficit shooting up from 35 percent to 55 percent of GDP, while corporate and public debt expanded.

Thinkers considered and commented upon include Henry Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, James Fenimore Cooper, Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Dewey, Brook Adams, Edward Bellamy, Walter Lippmann, Russell Kirk, Reinhold Niebuhr, Erich Fromm, Daniel Bell, C. Wright Mills, and John Rawls.

In the end Krason asks what can be done to restore the democratic republic of the Founders. He offers some modest proposals: better intellectual and moral formation, less TV watching, more reading of good old books, more watching of old moves, homeschooling, enhanced citizenship education, writing officials, seeking fewer material goods, stop looking to government, attend church, don't indulge in popular culture, seek out sound professors, form speakers bureaus, pamphleteer at public facilities, encourage volunteer effort and nonpublic social welfare programs, protest to get government to back off, support officials who would decrease government and who exercise good judgment. He might have mentioned, but did not, the personal economic boycott of those promoting the secularist-individualist-materialism that advances the transformation.

Poignantly in the introduction Krason quotes from a communication of Chief Justice John Marshall to Justice Joseph Story, “I yield slowly and reluctantly to the conviction that our constitution cannot last” (xv). Perhaps the secret is in Krason's early observation that the nation was a people of practical men of affairs, not philosophers. His book is a belated step in the reversal of this shortcoming.

The book has ten chapters, the first an introduction to the themes, and the last a final analysis and conclusion. Accordingly, the history—Krason makes it clear in his introduction that this is not the work of a historian but of a political scientist—is distributed among eight chapters. The eras—1789–1817, 1817–1840, etc.—are logical groupings of varied length. Each chapter treats of all the themes and elements, consistent with Krason's longstanding style. The book has 538 pages, without charts or displays, consisting of 417 pages of compact text and roughly 86 pages of 2468 endnotes. There is a select bibliography and an index, both of which might be expanded to be even more helpful than they already are. Every page, line, word, and endnote should be read. A project for some graduate students might be to scrutinize every endnote that cites Wikipedia to find alternate academic citations. (Wikipedia with its floating content may be standard today, but it leaves the reviewer uncomfortable with its editing and reference process.) There are some other items that can be tweaked, for example, the use of “Shay's rebellion” is vintage Charles Beard uncorrected by Robert Brown, a few typos can be dealt with privately, and many references to “above” and “below” might be handled more felicitously with supra/infra and possibly pages added.