Description
Book SynopsisWhen Trump won in 2016, his ascendancy was widely viewed as a fluke, an aberration. But time showed it was not a fluke, but the rise of a movement. How did this happen? This book offers a sweeping exploration of the role played by law and legal institutions in preparing the grounds for this rebellious movement.
Trade Review“Pierre Schlag’s essay describes the development—or degeneration—of the American state from one animated by the principles of liberal democracy through the administered state to neoliberalism and now what he calls the dissociative state. Each state form generates tensions that it is unable to resolve, leaving us today facing the possibility that the authoritarian impulses that have grown out of frustration with the state’s failures will come to control a new state form. Schlag tells us that understanding how we got to where we are is the precondition for doing something about it, though he forgoes prescribing simple remedies. This is a bracing and—alas—somewhat depressing account of American constitutionalism today.” —Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School
“This book is intentionally radical, and it makes an exciting and cutting-edge contribution in the fields of legal and political theory and history. It is beautifully written. Its intellectual contributions are major. Its distinctive voice is simultaneously personal, charming, and haunting. In short: it reads like Pierre Schlag.” —Mitchel Lasser, Jack G. Clarke Professor of Law and Director of Graduate Studies, Cornell Law School
Table of Contents
- List of Charts
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- I. Distraction and Catastrophe
- II. The Liberal Democratic State
- III. The Administered State
- IV. The Neoliberal State
- V. The Dissociative State
- VI. The Authoritarian Temptation
- VII. The Contest of Diagnoses
- Coda
- Notes on Method
