In his 1922 novel, The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald described “irony” as “the Holy Ghost of this later day…a sort of intellectual ‘There!’” That spirit often seizes those too clever for common understanding, too proud to conceal their cleverness, yet too doubtful to commit to alternatives. It is a spirit displayed in much contemporary scholarship (where it often alternates with expressions of moralistic indignation).

Ilan Wurman’s The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction is quite free of such moods. The Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, Wurman argues with the earnestness of a teenaged model builder, focused entirely on making the pieces fit together. The book’s subtitle could be, “It can be done”—and Wurman does it without sneering or huffing. His strongest term for opposing views is “unpersuasive.” It is an admirable performance and a valuable book, though deliberately narrow in range.

In 2017 Wurman published A Debt Against the Living, a book defending “originalist” approaches to the Constitution. I praised it at the time in these pages (“Big Tent Originalism,” Summer 2018). It sought to vindicate James Madison’s argument that those living at a particular moment, as they inherit the benefits and achievements left to them by past generations,