Bonding Word and Polity: The Logic of American Constitutionalism

William F. Harris

American Political Science Review, 1982, vol. 76, issue 1, 34-45

Abstract: Fundamental to the logic of American constitutionalism is the bonding of language and politics, the equivocal linkage of two quite different orders of composition. Unabashedly, the constitutional enterprise purports to infuse writing with power and to shape power with the written word. Such a theory of what it means to organize a political order according to a written design should systematically regulate the ongoing processes of constitutional interpretation. The result is a two-text framework of interpretive methods which is justified by the nature of the American constitutional enterprise, a system of signification that coordinates constitutive language, the authoritative modeling of the polity in words, and political legibility, the readability of the resulting scheme of government in operation. The Interpretable Constitution, as such a construct, reflects in its divisions the interconnection between document and polity and demonstrates the bond and tension between the Constitution as a linguistic artifact and the constitution as a political product.

Date: 1982
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