“The radical person an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible close to betterment oregon alteration their government, whenever it beryllium recovered adverse oregon inadequate to the purposes of its institution.”
–James Madison, failed First Amendment to the US Constitution introduced into Congress, 1789
*
We the People. The Constitution of the United States is made of things that are born, live, thrive, decay, and die: insects, animals, plants, ideas. In bid to signifier a much cleanable Union. Each of its elements began, agelong ago, successful the loamy earth, hatching and creeping oregon slipping, slick and squealing, from the womb of the mind. Establish justice, insure home tranquility. The substance is written connected parchment made from sheep, fleeced, their hides soaked successful lime, stretched and dried. Provide for the communal defense. The ink came from the buds of oak leaves, swollen to the size of musket balls by the eggs of wasps. Promote the wide welfare. Its words were shaped by quills fashioned from the feathers of molting geese. Secure the blessings of liberty. Its lofty, momentous ideas came from the minds of men, agelong since dead, and from the books they read. To ourselves and our posterity. Of the astir 2 100 written constitutions, the Constitution of the United States—the astir influential constitution successful the world—is besides among the oldest, a relic, arsenic brittle arsenic bone, arsenic hard arsenic stone. Do ordain and establish.
But the U.S. Constitution is neither bony nor stone. It is an detonation of ideas. Parchment decays and ink fades, but ideas endure; they besides change. The Constitution attempted to lick past problems having to bash not lone with the radical and their rulers, the operation of government, and the quality of rights, but besides with the knowability and endurance of law. Ingeniously, it accounted for the transition of time.
The U.S. Constitution is neither bony nor stone. It is an detonation of ideas. Parchment decays and ink fades, but ideas endure; they besides change.
The U.S. Constitution was intended to beryllium amended. “The full intent of the Constitution,” Supreme Court justness Antonin Scalia erstwhile said, “is to forestall a aboriginal nine from doing whatsoever it wants to do.” This is not true. One of the Constitution’s founding purposes was to forestall change. Another was to let for alteration without violence. Amendment is truthful indispensable to the American law tradition, truthful methodical and truthful full a conception of endurance done adaptation, that it tin champion beryllium described arsenic a philosophy.
This book, a past of the Constitution, argues that the doctrine of amendment is foundational to modern constitutionalism. Amendment is besides a constitution’s mechanics for the prevention of insurrection. This publication aims to chronicle the origins of amendment, to place the conditions nether which amendment is possible, to analyse wherefore the signifier of amendment has been abandoned, and to reckon with the question of whether the Constitution tin endure without it.
A authorities of laws and not of men
Every ordered nine is governed by a acceptable of halfway rules, customs, and principles. This is existent for each taxon that lives successful a structured community: a battalion of wolves oregon a pod of whales, a hive of honeybees oregon a colony of ants, a herd of cervid oregon a flock of geese, a clan of elephants oregon a people of apes and adjacent a wood of trees. Only humans devise constitutions. Devising constitutions, oregon cardinal laws, is truthful elemental to quality nine that the corporate noun mightiness beryllium a constitution of humans.
Since agelong earlier the keeping of records, humans erected governments, codified laws, anointed rulers, imposed oregon banned spiritual practices, federated oregon severed states, claimed territory, and established sovereignty. Once penning was invented, rulers of past quality societies began signaling laws, etching them into clay and chromatic successful the anticipation that they would last, binding 1 procreation to the next. The Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu, the oldest surviving written law, was carved into sunbaked clay tablets 4 1000 years ago. It declared that the king had “banished malediction, unit and strife” from the land. Three 100 years aboriginal the Code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi was etched into an eight-foot-tall slab of achromatic stone, weighing 4 tons, declaring Hammurabi anointed by God “to bring astir the regularisation of righteousness successful the land, to destruct the wicked and the evil-doers; truthful that the beardown should not harm the weak.” Sometime astir 1300 BCE, Yahweh, the Hebrew god, issued 10 commandments to the prophet Moses, according to the Book of Deuteronomy, “and helium wrote them successful 2 tables of stone.” Ancient Chinese written instrumentality dates to the Zhou Dynasty successful the sixth period BCE, inked onto jiǎndú, strips of bamboo.
Laws govern people; constitutions govern governments. Nearly each constitutions are assemblages, arsenic an eighteenth-century English governmental philosopher erstwhile explained, gatherings unneurotic “of institutions and customs, derived from definite fixed principles of reason, directed to definite fixed objects of publick good.” The thought that the entity of a constitution is the communal bully dates to antiquity. When Aristotle wrote Politics astir 350 BCE, forming its letters by pressing a pen made of reed upon papyrus made from the soaked and woven pith of the stalks of a sedge that grew connected the slope of a river, helium divided constitutions into those “which purpose astatine the communal advantage” and “are close and just” and “those which purpose lone astatine the vantage of the rulers” and “are deviant and unjust.” Most were unjust.
Many ineligible instruments harvester the constituting of governments with the assigning of territory and the proclaiming of laws. Whether to telephone these records constitutions is debatable; immoderate are much similar treaties; others are much similar transgression codes. The prophet Muhammad drew up the now-lost Ṣaḥīfa successful 622 CE, establishing a pact betwixt definite Muslims and the Jews of Medina. Sometimes scholars construe the Arabic connection s.ah.ı¯fa arsenic “scripture,” sometimes arsenic “constitution.” In 1215 CE, extracurricular London, King John of England signed a parchment made of sheepskin known arsenic the Magna Carta, the large charter, guaranteeing his noblemen “all the liberties written retired below, to person and to support for them and their heirs.” Meant to last, it was astir instantly annulled, adjacent though aboriginal generations of English politicians liked to telephone it England’s “ancient constitution.”
Other past constitutions person lasted longer. About 1450 CE, Dekanawidah, the Great Peacemaker, and delegates from the Five Nations of the Iroquois, oregon Haudenosaunee—Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, and Mohawk—adopted an statement known arsenic the Gayanashagowa oregon Great Law of Peace and often referred to arsenic a constitution, which they recorded connected wampum, a airy and acheronian signifier of shells strung together. It begins, “I works the Tree of Great Peace.” It was meant to grow, basal and branch.
Committing a constitution to penning offers stability…but it besides presents a problem: however is simply a authorities established by a written constitution to beryllium altered but by its destruction?
The revolutionary thought that the ruled alternatively than the rulers determine the rules emerged lone haltingly. In 1765 Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, began drafting the Nakaz, oregon constitution, to proclaim her sovereignty and warrant her subjects liberty and equality. To see it, she called for an assembly of 564 elected representatives—elected by everyone, including women and peasants, with fifty-four seats allotted for Muslims—to conscionable successful Moscow successful 1767. The people of quality events turned upside down successful 1776—the ruled became their ain rulers—when the United States declared independency and stated what Thomas Jefferson described arsenic self-evident truths: “that each men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with definite unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to unafraid these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their conscionable powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever immoderate Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to change oregon to abolish it.” Four years aboriginal the radical of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ratified a caller constitution, written by John Adams, whose aim, arsenic Adams wrote, was to found “a authorities of laws and not of men.” They wrote that constitution down, ink connected parchment. It is inactive successful force: it is the law. It besides inactive exists, successful a depository successful Boston, sealed successful a double-paned bulletproof solid lawsuit filled with a premix of argon and helium state to sphere it from the forces of decay: h2o and oxygen and sunlight.
All written constitutions incorporate unwritten elements, arsenic invisible arsenic those glass-boxed gases. “The ineffable rights of mankind are not to beryllium rummaged for, among aged parchments, oregon musty records,” Alexander Hamilton advised seekers successful 1775. “They are written, arsenic with a sunbeam, successful the full measurement of quality nature.” A written constitution’s powerfulness comes not from the words themselves but from the beingness breathed into it, oregon what Montesquieu called “the tone of laws,” ethereal and adjacent enchanted. James Madison warned that aboriginal authorities constitutions—the archetypal was written successful 1776—offered small much than “parchment barriers” to those who would question to defy them. “The Constitution of a state is not the insubstantial oregon parchment upon which the compact is written,” John Quincy Adams agreed. “It is the strategy of cardinal laws, by which the radical person consented to beryllium governed, which is ever expected to beryllium impressed upon the caput of each individual, and of which the written and printed copies are thing much than the evidence.”
All the same, a written constitution is simply a antithetic carnal from an unwritten one. Committing a constitution to penning offers stability, a signifier of endurance akin to inheritance, but it besides presents a problem: however is simply a authorities established by a written constitution to beryllium altered but by its destruction?
Amend your ways
The U.S. Constitution drew from past ideas, but it was besides thing caller and genuinely revolutionary, an eighteenth-century invention: a assemblage of cardinal instrumentality drafted and ratified by representatives of an invented polity—a constituency—known arsenic the People, binding them to their authorities by an enactment of consent. It was meant to transcend mean instrumentality by establishing cardinal principles, structures, powers, and rights. Printed, copied, and circulated among an extraordinarily literate population, the Constitution executed a covenant and allowed, too, for the exertion of powerfulness implicit immense distances. The U.S. Constitution is not a database of commandments, similar the Code of Hammurabi oregon the laws Moses recovered etched connected tablets, engraved successful stone, a monument. Nor is it a signifier of scripture.
Unlike each of these, but precise overmuch similar the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which has been amended much than a 100 times, it was meant to beryllium revised, updated, and improved. The eighteenth period was an property not lone of gyration and empire but besides of enlightenment animated by the thought of progress—political, scientific, economic, technological, and moral. By acold the astir extremist innovation of the U.S. Constitution, and of authorities constitutions, was the proviso they made for their ain repair and betterment by the radical themselves, to the extremity it whitethorn beryllium a authorities of laws and not of men.
This mechanics for betterment is called amendment. In English, the verb amend goes backmost to astir the twelfth century, erstwhile it meant to close a fault; to repair an omission; to hole what’s broken; oregon to amended successful a motivation sense: to marque thing better. The connection shares a root, 4 of its 5 letters, and astir the entirety of its meaning, with the verb mend. (Both words came to Middle English by mode of the Old French verb amender.)
_______________________________
Excerpted from We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution by Jill Lepore. Copyright © 2025 by Jill Lepore. Used with support of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a part of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. We the People has been shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize.
English (US) ·