2 - Enumerating Amendments

Summary

In this chapter, Sanford Levinson examines the practice and implication of appending amendments to the end of the Constitution and inquires how many times the Constitution has amended. The presumptively correct answer number of amendments, at present, is twenty-seven, but those are only textual amendments to the Constitution. “How many times has the United States Constitution been amended” generates what Wittgenstein well described as “mental cramps.” His own belief was that one could cure these cramps by dissolving many traditional questions of philosophy. We could do the same if we adopted a truly minimalist understanding of “constitutionalism” that allowed, for example, anyone designated as the Ruler to rule by absolute discretion. One might proffer this as a variant of Hobbesian constitutionalism, whereby the sovereign people, realizing that nothing else can in fact guarantee them the security they yearn for, delegate their powers to an all-powerful Leviathan. An alternative is what has come to be identified as “liberal constitutionalism,” with the attached meaning of governments that are established through institutions created (and limited) by the constitution itself.