Deconstructing the Republic ─ Voting Rights, the Supreme Court, and the Founders' Republicanism Reconsidered

Just as Friedrich Hayek once argued that the "fatal conceit" of socialists and social democrats was the idea that political institutions have the knowledge necessary to regulate social and economic life, so Peacock (public law, Utah State U.) argues that the "fatal conceit" of the Supreme Court since the 1960s was that it had the knowledge to reconstruct American republicanism from the top down in accordance with a preconceived vision of "fairness." Nowhere is this more clear than in the Court's decisions in the reapportionment and Voting Rights Act cases of the 1960s, which he argues substituted multicultural republicanism for Madisonian republicanism by going beyond affirming the right to vote and instead guaranteeing the right to "effective" representation and an "undiluted vote." This development, Peacock argues, has led to a situation in which race has been effectively, and divisively, institutionalized in American government. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Anthony A. Peacock teaches public law in the political science department at Utah State University.