This book persuasively shows that our central constitutional disagreements are not about the written text, but about unwritten ideas and understandings. Thomas succeeds in showing that this distinction between the unwritten and written is a misleading one and that the Constitution is most notably a work of applied political theory. All justices appeal to the underlying political theory of the document, a theory that in many cases they often disagree about. The book
nicely draws on historical and contemporary examples to advance this argument.
George Thomas is Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions and Director of the Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of The Madisonian Constitution and The Founders and the Idea of a National University: Constituting the American Mind, and co-author of the two-volume American Constitutional Law: Essays, Cases, and Comparative Notes. He has published
numerous scholarly articles on Constitutional Law and American Constitutionalism, and his essays have appeared in The Atlantic and The Washington Post. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Huntington Library, and is the recipient of the Alexander George Award from the American Political Science
Association.