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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The writings of the Anti-Federalists serve as a Rorschach test for scholars of American politics. Ostensibly, the standards of political science require us to understand the Anti-Federalists as they understood themselves, but this undertaking is necessarily related to our understanding of the Federalists, the Constitution, and over two hundred years of American government. Thus there [...]