An examination of the nature and significance of the comprehensive ways of thinking exemplified by some recent contributions to American constitutional thought

Thesis

American Constitutional scholarship is at present unsure of its aims and purposes; this unsureness makes a re-assessment of our ways of thinking about what the Constitution is and means appropriate. Three thinkers much respected in the Constitutional community, John Marshall Harlan III, Ronald Dworkin, and Robert Cover, provide examples of what the best or ideal way of thinking about American Constitutional politics might be. The differences among the comprehensive ways of thinking practiced by these three men are reflected in the forms of their reasoning, in their treatments of metaphorical and distinctive language, in their views of what interpretation is, in their responses to the problem of civic education, and, most generally, in their opinions of what good reasoning is and what the place of reason in the American regime is. Harlan's comprehensive way of thinking, a way which stresses the superiority of a form of reasoning guided by Constitutional purposes to two other forms of reasoning, "mechanical" interpretation and “unguided speculation," has a good claim to be the Constitutional way of thinking but nonetheless may perhaps be inappropriate to contemporary Constitutional politics and scholarship. The difficulty of deciding whether Harlan's or Dworkin's or Cover's way of thinking best comprehends the experience of the Warren Court may be partly responsible for the contemporary unrest in American Constitutional scholarship.

Authors: Eisgruber, CLM

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-r1jzyo5a7
• Type of award: MLitt
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Democracy; representative government; Politics; United States; American constitutional thought; Political science; representation; United States Constitution; Political sociology
• Subjects: Democracy; United States Constitution; Representative government and representation; Political sociology; Political science; United States -- Politics and government