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Moving Beyond the Canon of Traditional Constitutional History: Anti-Federalists, the Bill of Rights, and the Promise of Post-Modern Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Saul Cornell
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Extract

Few aspects of post-structuralist literary criticism have garnered as much attention and provoked as much controversy as the move to challenge the idea of a fixed literary canon of great texts. The implications of deconstructing the canon extend well beyond the study of fiction. All fields of scholarship have a canon of established texts, methodologies, and questions. Critiques of the literary canon resemble the challenge to conventional history posed by the new social history and its efforts to write a history from the bottom up that would supplant traditional historical scholarship. A similar revisionist effort is now only just beginning to emerge in constitutional historiography. Proponents of “a new constitutional history” are seeking to challenge the canon of traditional constitutional history. While this revisionist project has not been cast in post-structuralist terms, the perspective provided by recent critical theory can refine the practice of the new constitutional history.

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Articles
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Law and History Review , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , Spring 1994 , pp. 1 - 28
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1994

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