Seminar #1 on the the Preamble to the Natural Rights Constitution of the Liberty States of America: Re-Connecting the New Constitution to the Declaration of Independence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Thomas Vass
Keyword(s):  
Natural Rights ◽  
Declaration Of Independence

Natural Rights Dissected and Rejected: John Lind's Counter to the Declaration of Independence

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil L. York
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sacred Text ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Essential Component ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Holy Writ

James Oliver Robertson intended no sacrilege when he called the Declaration of Independence a sacred text, an essential component of what has become American “holy writ.” It is now venerated as a founding document of the national civil religion. The Declaration, Robertson emphasized, reflects an expectation that the new United States would becomethenation among all nations. As celebrated now, independence then provided the political means to achieve a social end, that social end being a better life for Americans, their new nation acting as an exemplar for the larger world. Or, as Stephen E. Lucas put it, the Declaration of Independence went through an “apotheosis,” through which, over the years, Americans have come to “see its original purpose in universal terms almost wholly divorced from the events of 1776.”

The Declaration of Independence and the Mystery of Equality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
Individual Property ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
Individual Property Rights

What were the meanings of “all men are created equal” for the signers of the Declaration, and how was the phrase understood in different states? The chapter traces the natural rights origins of the Declaration and how the idea of natural equality affected ideas and policy on slavery, race, and religion, especially in Massachusetts and Virginia. Public figures everywhere recognized a conflict between their deep commitment to individual property rights and their assertion of equal human rights. Concern for social stability in a time of revolution influenced ideology and practice.

The Church and the Garrison State

1939 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-190
Author(s):  
Jerome Kerwin
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Multiplication Table ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Divine Origin ◽  
Inalienable Rights ◽  
Higher Law ◽  
The Church ◽  
Garrison State

IN Declaration of Independence the Fathers of this Republic declared that there are certain self-evident truths and that man is endowed by his Creator with inalienable rights. The idea of natural law and its consequent natural rights was stoutly maintained and to this natural law American Revolutionists appealed against the injustices that a written law would not redress. Above the state and its constitution and written enactments was a higher law of divine origin and purpose. That law was universal, unalterable, and immutable. It was as fixed and certain as die mathematical propositions of the multiplication table or the simple arithmetical statement that two plus two equals four.

MONTESQUIEU'S NATURAL RIGHTS CONSTITUTIONALISM

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Rahe
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The One

AbstractWhen Woodrow Wilson, in the course of his campaign for the Presidency in 1912, attacked Thomas Jefferson and Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, he knew what he was about—for the constitutionalism articulated by the latter and embraced, in turn, by the Framers of the American Constitution was a systematic attempt to put into practice something very much like the first principles spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. Montesquieu was not a doctrinaire. He feared that, in his own country and elsewhere, revolution would eventuate in the establishment of a despotism, and so he gently, quietly promoted unobtrusive reform. But the cautious, prudential political science that he outlined in his Spirit of Laws was anything but value-free. If the American framers found his legislative science of use, it was because the hatred of despotism and love for liberty animating its author was grounded in an account of natural right closely akin to the one, espoused in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, that had inspired their revolution.

Interlude

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-138
Author(s):  
Michael D. Hattem
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
The Past ◽  
British America

This interlude explores the emergence of natural law as a primary feature of patriot rhetoric in the early 1770s. Once colonists had begun questioning the British past and its relationship to their current circumstances, adopting natural law arguments more widely allowed them to continue to argue the same principles they had previously based on the British past by universalizing them under the rhetoric of “natural law” and “natural rights.” In the years just prior to independence, arguments based on the authority of the past began to diminish in favor of natural law arguments. This shift is evident in the most important revolutionary texts from this period: Thomas Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and the Declaration of Independence.

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