Gordon Wood, in the Radicalism of the American Revolution and in his chapter entitled “The History of Rights in Early America” in The Nature of Rights at the American Founding and Beyond edited by Barry Shain, says:
…several of the states wrote into their Revolutionary constitutions declarations, like that of New Hampshire, that “government is instituted [...]
I use the phrase “common good” in opposition to individual rights in the previous post because some term must be used, and “common good” comprehends other phrases with related meanings. The Federalists and Anti-Federalists themselves did use this phrase, but they also spoke of the “public” or “general” good, the “common,” “public” or “general” [...]
Scholarship often tends to present such debates in literature reviews in cartoonish extremes, partly due to a desire to easily categorize the work of the many academics writing about the founding. Nonetheless, such categorizations can be useful and not without truth. When it comes to classical liberalism, as one recent survey of the literature puts [...]
One doesn’t become good by not doing evil, one becomes good by doing good.
So say the wise: in the past, now, and forever.
We ought to aim for the bulls eye rather than merely attempting to not hit the wall behind it. (This is not to say that we should pretend there is no difference [...]
A moonlit evening unveils a wondrous claritas to the senses. While true of many circumstances in which the air is exceptionally clear, the light in the darkness has unique way of shortening the height of trees and the distances between things, inviting one to walk the universe at will with the heavens seemingly close at [...]
Cross posted from the Castoff Review.
Speaking of “great books” and education, see this selection from an interview with Charles Taylor, philosopher:
At the time of Max Weber – maybe we nostalgically magnify that – and even slightly later, you found that philosophy students in Germany, were given an incredibly broad course in Greek philosophy and the [...]
Continuing on the same themes that came across in a previous post and its quotations from Colleen Sheehan on the issue…
As Bernard Bailyn argued in a postscript (“Fulfillment: A Commentary On The Constitution”) written a quarter century after he published the very book which provided much of the matter for the rise of the classical [...]
Cross posted from the Castoff Review.
There is a small and mostly unnoticed renaissance of sorts occurring in this country, arising out of a renewed interest in the study of fundamental ideas and the serious books which explicate them. Check out this WSJ article by Emily Esfahani-Smith describing students from 12 to 17 who willingly [...]
The problem with scholarship on the founding is that it is often explicitly based upon interpretations of political philosophy generally, and these interpretations are neatly packaged into -isms and then argued to be the cause of the creation of the United States of America. The approach relies on creating certain philosophic parameters, or assuming [...]