The Multiple Constitutions of Constitutional History

Extract

One of my few unrepressed childhood memories is of a high-school field trip to the Massachusetts State House in Boston. The docent, a hapless but not entirely innocent volunteer, addressed us in a tone of perky condescension usually reserved for precocious six-year-olds. Thus, when he stood before an object of local veneration—the state constitution of 1780, I think, or perhaps one of the royal charters—and clucked, “Now class, does anyone know what ‘constitution’ means?,” it was with casual adolescent malice that a voice from the back answered, “Yeah, it has something to do with metabolism.”