Some Linear Thoughts on a Cyclical Vision

This essay is an appreciation and critique of Jack Balkin's book, The Cycles of Constitutional Time. While admiring Prof. Balkin's capacious intellectual vision, the essay is skeptical of the central proposition encapsulated in the book’s title – that history, particularly American constitutional history, moves in identifiable cycles. It also expresses doubts that such cycles, if they exist, are those described by Professor Balkin. The essay raises the general question of whether the physical, demographic, and political circumstances of the young and rapidly changing United States have remained sufficiently stable over 230 years to support any cyclical historical phenomena. And it focuses particularly on one of Professor Balkin's cycles, that of "constitutional rot." It questions the evidence he advances for the existence of cyclical constitutional rot, with special attention to the period before and after the Civil War