A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics and Law 1791 and 1991

by Edited by Michael James Lacey , Knud Haakonssen

• ISBN13: 9780521446532
• ISBN10: 0521446538
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1992-11-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Written by leading authorities in history, philosophy, jurisprudence and political theory, the essays in this volume provide new insights into the variable and changing contents of the rights thinking and consciousness that lie at the core of American political culture and shape its central political institutions. Based on the current state of scholarly understanding and intended to provide a fresh sense of orientation into the complexities of the separate topics covered, the studies focus on two distinct "moments" in the American experience: the eighteenth-century period of founding that produced the Bill of Rights as an element in the Constitutional settlement, and the contemporary moment, marked by a new historical consciousness of the difficulties of interpreting rights in changing contexts and thus by the continuing search for a properly grounded philosophical jurisprudence adequate to meet the ethical, social, and political conflicts of the present.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	viii
Introduction: History, historicism, and the culture of rights	1	(18)
Michael J. Lacey
Knud Haakonssem
From natural law to the rights of man: a European perspective on American debates	19	(43)
Knud Haakonssen
The Bill of Rights and the American Revolutionary experience	62	(36)
James H. Hutson
Parchment barriers and the politics of rights	98	(46)
Jack N. Rakove
Rights and wrongs: Jefferson, slavery, and philosophical quandaries	144	(71)
Charles L. Griswold, Jr.
Practical philosophy and the Bill of Rights: perspectives on some contemporary issues	215	(51)
William A. Galston
The development of modern American legal theory and the judicial interpretation of the Bill of Rights	266	(100)
William W. Fisher III
The British, the Americans, and rights	366	(74)
Alan Ryan
Appendix: The Constitution and the Bill of Rights	440	(21)
About the authors	461	(2)
Index	463