The structure of the American civic sphere.

• Author: Zeisberg, Mariah

THE CIVIC CONSTITUTION: CIVIC VISIONS AND STRUGGLES IN THE PATH TOWARD CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY. By Elizabeth Beaumont. (1) Oxford University Press. 2014. Pp. xvi + 343. $49.95.

PEOPLING THE CONSTITUTION. John E. Finn. (2) University Press of Kansas, 2014. Pp. xv + 350. $39.95.

Do citizens alter, transform, remake, and authorize their fundamental law only outside of a particular regime, or from within it as well? What forms of political agency have citizens in the U.S. constitutional polity used in the past to achieve these ends, and which offer themselves today? What is the role of radical critique and radical action in the development of certain hegemonic binaries like "public" and "private," "free" and "slave," the "social" and the "political"? Beyond winning electoral victories or suing for their rights, how else can and do movements transform political structures, ideas, and outcomes in the U.S.?

In a polity whose foundational referent is a text--the U.S. Constitution--these questions about public mobilization and political life are also questions about the links between civic life and the ongoing authority of a constitutional project. Civic life is so important because, in John Finn's words, the "main principles of constitutional architecture, such as the principle of checks and balances, [are] mere parchment barriers but for their grounding in a civic culture that regards them as valuable and insists upon some measure of fidelity to them by political actors and citizens" (p. 85). Both of these works--The Civic Constitution and Peopling the Constitution--interrogate the civic conditions that rest behind the ongoing authority of a constitutional order.

The contribution of both works should be understood from within a paradigm set by two field-defining theoretic propositions: Bruce Ackerman's notion of constitutional dualism and Larry Kramer's constitutional populism. (4) Bruce Ackerman's idea of constitutional "dualism" describes constitutional authority as a creation of citizens who use legal tools--most especially voting, petitioning, and assembling--to periodically influence elite representatives to transform the Constitution's practical meaning. (5) For Kramer, constitutional publics have, in an ongoing way--as voters, jurors, mobs, legislatures, and town halls--been able to mobilize to seize authority over constitutional meaning and especially to seize it away from judges. (6) Both of these approaches are useful, but both have limits. Many have challenged the periodicity of Ackerman's account, as well as the implication that, in John Finn's words, "[i]n most moments ... citizens have little obligation to tend to the Constitution or even to public life" (p. 99). Kramer's work obscures the organizational features of the public's collective action because Kramer never defines who "the people" are, how they may be recognized, or the processes and structures through which they exercise political agency.

Beaumont and Finn have written substantial books that begin to address these problems. For Finn, citizens make the Constitution authoritative by using its text in their deliberations; reasoning about the public good; tending to civic life; arguing and resisting; and voting and petitioning too. Finn's ideal constitutional citizens are highly mobilized, highly educated extraverts, not content to register their preferences in a voting booth or sue for their rights, but instead demanding that the public spaces around them engage constitutionalist values almost relentlessly. His key category is "tending": citizens tend to a constitutional order when they are committed in an active, ongoing way centered on everyday "practices of care" which are grounded in "a specific kind of knowledge, one grounded in the practice of politics and practical experience" (p. 26). For Beaumont, practices of civic deliberation themselves create citizens. In The Civic Constitution, deliberation is the work that unauthorized subjects (colonists, women, slaves) do to transform themselves into recognized constitutional agents. Beaumont calls this a power of "civic founding" (pp. 5-8). Arguing that the Constitution contains no "self-correcting" mechanism (p. 22), Beaumont shows that scholars seeking to understand the ongoing meaning of constitutional text over time should study the citizens whose ideas and actions have transformed public meanings of the text and the structures and the forms of agency through which citizens have claimed and exercised this civic power (pp. 11, 14). Their practices of self-authorization led them to speak in contexts that they were barred from, to sit in areas of exclusion, to use bazaars, fairs, newspaper publications, petitions and assemblies, and most essentially peaceful confrontation to argue for and...