Counterculturalism Rightly Understood

The subtitle of this book signals its countercultural thrust, as well as indicates its inspiration in the thought of the nineteenth century American Catholic social and political thinker, Orestes Brownson (1803-1876). He wrote about, and put into currency, the notion of “the unwritten Constitution.” Brownson “thought a humane political order must be reflective of a people's history, as well as their deeper cultural, philosophical, and theological assumptions about humans, society, and God. This unwritten constitution of a people must anchor their extant constitutional settlement.” Therefore, to understand America, and American constitutionalism more broadly, one needs to consider the necessary, the chosen, and even the providential, connections between the written Constitution and the complex social order it presupposed. Hence the book's title, A Constitution in Full.