book chapter · 2024
Debtor Constitutionalism
Cited by 0Abstract and details only
Abstract
Abstract This chapter examines the question of whether political legitimacy in a constitutional democracy is tied to a core text—at least in regimes with written constitutions. Even after the ratification of the United States Constitution, it argues, many Americans continued to believe in, and act upon, the existence of an unwritten constitution not encompassed in the formal Constitution’s text. It traces this unwritten constitution through the prism of the repeated use of Indian costume as part of a carnivalesque form of protest in which participants in these insurrectionary actions argued that the norms of the unwritten constitution were being violated, regardless of what the formal constitutional text or its privileged interpreters might say. E. P. Thompson described “counter-theatre” as one consistent element of English crowd actions of the late eighteenth century. American mobs engaged in their own form of theater, which included white men dressing as Native Americans. The symbol of the white man in native dress took on powerful symbolic meaning during the Revolution, and it persisted as a trope of popular protest long into the nineteenth century. Indeed, the chapter’s analysis pushes constitutional history across the presumed boundary of 1787, which is supposed to separate an era in which Americans regarded extrajudicial mob protest as legal from one in which the new constitutional text assumed a monopoly on legality. In this story, the triumph of the written Constitution may not have become complete until at least the 1840s, if it did even then.
Cite this paper
Peterson, F. (2024). Debtor Constitutionalism. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197680995.003.0011
Peterson, Farah. “Debtor Constitutionalism.” 2024, pp. 231–56, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197680995.003.0011.
Peterson, Farah. 2024. “Debtor Constitutionalism.” https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197680995.003.0011.
Peterson, F. (2024) ‘Debtor Constitutionalism’. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197680995.003.0011.
@incollection{peterson2024debtor,
title = {{Debtor Constitutionalism}},
author = {Peterson, Farah},
pages = {231--256},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1093/oso/9780197680995.003.0011}
}Made from the index record. Check names, capitalisation and page numbers against the paper. Need another style? AI for Research has over 10,000.