Conservatives and the Constitution
Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism

Recovers a contested, evolving tradition of conservative constitutional argument that shaped the past and is bidding to make the future.

Ken I. Kersch (Author)

9780521193108, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 March 2019

428 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.8 cm, 0.73 kg

'The book is a multi-layered tour de force explanation of the rise and unification of the conservative legal movement. It is a wide-ranging intellectual history of the birth and evolution of ideas, written in the best tradition of American Political Development studies. The book is dense in every positive sense and Kersch promises that this is just the first of a trilogy.' Richard L. Pacelle, Law and Politics Book Review

Since the 1980s, a ritualized opposition in legal thought between a conservative 'originalism' and a liberal 'living constitutionalism' has obscured the aggressively contested tradition committed to, and mobilization of arguments for, constitutional restoration and redemption within the broader postwar American conservative movement. Conservatives and the Constitution is the first history of the political and intellectual trajectory of this foundational tradition and mobilization. By looking at the deep stories told either by identity groups or about what conservatives took to be flashpoint topics in the postwar period, Ken I. Kersch seeks to capture the developmental and integrative nature of postwar constitutional conservatism, challenging conservatives and liberals alike to more clearly see and understand both themselves and their presumed political and constitutional opposition. Conservatives and the Constitution makes a unique contribution to our understanding of modern American conservatism, and to the constitutional thought that has, in critical ways, informed and defined it.

1. The intellectual archipelago of the postwar American right
2. The alternative tradition of conservative constitutional theory
3. Stories about markets
4. Stories about communism
5. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christian stories
6. Right-wing Roman Catholic stories
Conclusion: the development of constitutional conservatism.

Subject Areas: Constitutional & administrative law [LND], Law & society [LAQ], Political parties [JPL], Conservatism & right-of-centre democratic ideologies [JPFM], Political ideologies [JPF], Political science & theory [JPA], History of the Americas [HBJK]