best paragraph i have read in a while

...In fact, probably the best paragraph I've read since the last time I posted an excerpt from this guy! This is taken from Tomlins, "Politics, Police, Past and Present." I would really like any of my law student friends out there reading this to give their thoughts on this:

It is important, I think, to ask whether there are other completely different

ways to write constitutional history. The question arises from what

seems to me the essential complacency of American constitutional history:

constitutional history assumes the Constitution. Hence one is always within

the sphere of its possibility. From within, the Constitution appears as a

protean, amoeba-like phenomenon, really an ideology, constitutionalism,

not a text “in the National Archives” (for the text is usually an afterthought—

interpretation is what counts). So here we encounter no argument

over the Constitution, such as “wheather it is good or not,” but

rather over how the assumed promise of the Constitution is properly to be

realized, or extended. Noticeably, exit is not an option. So here the question

is whether realization should occur through one ideology (popular constitutionalism)

as opposed to another (call it elite juridical constitutionalism).

The trope invoked is that of a “world we have lost” that can be ours again.

The people have surrendered their constitution to juridical supremacy.

They/we must take it back. History legitimates the quest.

The genre or mode of constitutional history is romance. In fact,

Kramer’s is an interesting variation on the genre, for although the implication

is that a resurgence of popular constitutionalism will make things better,

Kramer actually professes no blithe confidence in a positive outcome. It

is up to “us.” This verges on what my colleague Bonnie Honig has dubbed

“gothic” romance. One might add that in full gothic mode Kramershould also demonstrate a certain ambivalence, even fear, toward that to

which he is attached. After all, what are “we” going to do with the Constitution

once we have recovered it? Might we not abuse it? Aren’t “we” in

fact deeply crosscut by all those persisting socioeconomic antagonisms and

cleavages that fragment the possibility that there indeed exists something

that we can call “the people” at all? Class, gender, and race are not simply

conveniently imagined categories of scholarly analysis; they are real social

phenomena. How do you construct a “we” out of us and them? How can

one know that popular constitutionalism, once it has taken back the Constitution,

will not devour its professors? Kramer does not think that thought,

or if he does it is only to deny its possibility. His romance of “the people”

is almost pre-political in its faith.