In this highly original book, Robert Nagel demonstrates how contemporary constitutional politics reflect the moral character of American culture. He persuasively argues that judicial decisions embody wider social tendenceies towards moral evasiveness, privatization, and opportunism. Constitutional interpretation, he urges, is often an effort to stifle political disagreement and, ultimately, to censor our own beliefs and traditions. Nagel ranges over such controversial topics as the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork, local resistance to abortion rights, political...

This original work is an unusual effort to relate modern constitutional politics to the moral character of American culture. Writing in non-technical language, Nagel demonstrates how judicial decisions embody wider social tendencies toward moral evasiveness, privatization, and opportunism. He shows that constitutional interpretation is often used to stifle political disagreement and, ultimately, to censor our own beliefs and traditions.

The discussion ranges over such controversial topics as political correctness on the campus and in the case law, resistance to constitutional rights like...

At a time of unprecedented national power, why do so many Americans believe that our nationhood is fragile and precarious? Why the talk--among politicians, academics, and jurists--of "coups d'etat," of culture wars, of confederation, of constitutional breakdown? In this wide-ranging book, Robert Nagel proposes a surprising znswer: that anxiety about national unity is caused by centralization itself. Moreover, he proposes that this anxiety has dangerous cultural consequences that are, in an implosive cycle, pushing the country toward ever greater centralization.
Carefully examining recent...