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The New Yorker
A Critic at Large
March 29, 2021 Issue

When Constitutions Took Over the World

Starting in the eighteenth century, citizens were promised their
rights in print. Was this new age spurred by the ideals of the
Enlightenment or by the imperatives of global warfare?

By Jill Lepore

March 22, 2021

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constitution
Early constitutions could be instruments of tyranny or platforms for
populism.Illustration by Mike McQuade; Source images from Getty

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In 1947, Kurt Godel, Albert Einstein, and Oskar Morgenstern drove
from Princeton to Trenton in Morgenstern's car. The three men, who'd
fled Nazi Europe and become close friends at the Institute for
Advanced Study, were on their way to a courthouse where Godel, an
Austrian exile, was scheduled to take the U.S.-citizenship exam,
something his two friends had done already. Morgenstern had founded
game theory, Einstein had founded the theory of relativity, and
Godel, the greatest logician since Aristotle, had revolutionized
mathematics and philosophy with his incompleteness theorems.
Morgenstern drove. Godel sat in the back. Einstein, up front with
Morgenstern, turned around and said, teasing, "Now, Godel, are you
really well prepared for this examination?" Godel looked stricken.

To prepare for his citizenship test, knowing that he'd be asked
questions about the U.S. Constitution, Godel had dedicated himself to
the study of American history and constitutional law. Time and again,
he'd phoned Morgenstern with rising panic about the exam. (Godel, a
paranoid recluse who later died of starvation, used the telephone to
speak with people even when they were in the same room.) Morgenstern
reassured him that "at most they might ask what sort of government we
have." But Godel only grew more upset. Eventually, as Morgenstern
later recalled, "he rather excitedly told me that in looking at the
Constitution, to his distress, he had found some inner contradictions
and that he could show how in a perfectly legal manner it would be
possible for somebody to become a dictator and set up a Fascist
regime, never intended by those who drew up the Constitution." He'd
found a logical flaw.

Published in the print edition of the March 29, 2021, issue, with the
headline "The Age of Consent."
[lepore-jil]
Jill Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a professor of
history at Harvard and the author of fourteen books, including "If
Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future."
More:American HistoryConstitutionBooksAlbert EinsteinDemocracyWars

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