The Nature of Rights at the American Founding and Beyond |
| |
| Edited by Barry Alan Shain |
| 352 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 |
| Cloth 978-0-8139-2666-7 • $45.00 |
| Constitutionalism
and Democracy |
| January 2008 |
 |
Americans have been claiming and defending rights since long before
the nation achieved independence. But few Americans recognize
how profoundly the nature of rights has changed over the past
three hundred years. In The Nature of Rights at the American
Founding and Beyond, Barry Alan Shain gathers together essays
by some of the leading scholars in American constitutional law
and history to examine the nature of rights claims in eighteenth-century
America and how they differed, if at all, from today’s understandings.
Was America at its founding predominantly individualistic or,
in some important way, communal? Similarly, which understanding
of rights was of greater centrality: the historical "rights
of Englishmen" or abstract natural rights? And who enjoyed
these rights, however understood? Everyone? Or only economically
privileged and militarily responsible male heads of households?
The contributors also consider how such concepts of rights have
continued to shape and reshape the American experience of political
liberty to this day. Beginning with the arresting transformation
in the grounding of rights prompted by the American War of Independence,
the volume moves through what the contributors describe as the
"Founders’ Bill of Rights" to the "second"
Bill of Rights that coincided with the Civil War, and ends with
the language of rights erupting from the horrors of the Second
World War and its aftermath in the Cold War. By asking what kind
of nation the founding generation left us, or intended to leave
us, the contributors are then able to compare that nation to the
nation we have become. Most, if not all, of the essays demonstrate
that the nature of rights in America has been anything but constant,
and that the rights defended in the late eighteenth century stand
at some distance from those celebrated today.
Contributors:
Akhil Reed Amar, Yale University * James H. Hutson, Library of
Congress * Stephen Macedo, Princeton University * Richard Primus,
University of Michigan * Jack N. Rakove, Stanford University *
John Phillip Reid, New York University * Daniel T. Rodgers, Princeton
University * A. Gregg Roeber, Pennsylvania State University *
Barry Alan Shain, Colgate University * Rogers M. Smith, University
of Pennsylvania * Leif Wenar, University of Sheffield * Gordon
S. Wood, Brown University
Barry Alan Shain, Associate Professor of Political
Science at Colgate University, is the author of The Myth of
American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political
Thought
and Man, God, and Society: An Interpretive History
of Individualism.
