Laissez-Faire and Liberty: A Re-Evaluation of the Meaning and Origins Of Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism

1985 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Les Benedict
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Due Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Dred Scott ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Intellectual Foundations

Until recently, historians of American constitutionalism agreed that, except for the infamous Dred Scott decision, the most unfortunate decisions of the Supreme Court were those that incorporated the notion of laissez-faire into the Constitution in the late nineteenth century. These decisions permitted the Court to frustrate efforts to secure a more just economic order in the United States until the 1930s. The intellectual foundations of laissez-faire constitutionalism have been so alien to most legal scholars since the 1930s (and equally unintelligible to many even earlier) that they have found it difficult to believe these decisions were the result of efforts to enforce ‘neutral’ principles of constitutional law, to utilize the terms of Herbert Wechsler's famous analysis. They could not conceive of the Court's rhetoric about liberty and due process as anything but cant, a subterfuge designed to camouflage other purposes.

Moral Philosophy, the United States Supreme Court, and the Nation’s Character, 1860–1910

1997 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Warren Bailey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
New Deal ◽  
United States Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
United States Supreme ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Laissez Faire

The charge that the United States Supreme Court exercised a conservative influence upon the nation’s constitutional life during the period from 1864 to 1938 is impossible to refute. The Supreme Court during the period from the end of the Civil War to the New Deal era has been portrayed as having largely abdicated its obligation to protect society’s common interests in favour of a laissez-faire constitutionalism reflecting the social and political views of new and powerful economic interests. The judicial conservatism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries conflicted with the political ideals of Progressives and with the direction taken by American policy-makers since the acceptance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. Historians have labelled the Court’s laissez-faire conservative style as undesirable, if not consciously immoral.Nevertheless, the problem of understanding the ideas which lay at the foundation of judicial conservatism should be addressed. General legal historians have preferred to begin and end their inquiries into early influences on the judicial mind with a short overview of legal education and leave aside the possible influence of college studies. In recent years, historians have broadened their investigations of the intellectual underpinnings of late nineteenth-century legal thought in an attempt to provide the sort of synthetic account of legal thought suggested by Perry Miller’s Life of the Mind—a work which attempts to connect the thought of leading members of the bar to intellectual currents outside the legal sphere. The result has been a limited rehabilitation of the Supreme Court’s reputation during the Gilded Age.

Japanese Multinationals in the United States: Continuity and Change, 1879–1990

1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mira Wilkins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Direct Investment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

A great deal of attention has recently been focused on the extent of Japanese direct investment in the United States. In the following historical survey, Professor Wilkins details the size and scope of these investments from the late nineteenth century, showing that Japanese involvements in America have deep historical roots. At the same time, she analyzes the ways in which late twentieth century Japanese direct investment differs from the earlier phenomenon and attempts to explain why it has aroused such concern among both business leaders and the general public.

Rebuilding the City, Leaving it behind

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wells
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Fringe ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Suburban Developments ◽  
The City

As U.S. cities burgeoned in the late nineteenth century, their environmental problems multiplied. In response, some urban elites worked to rebuild the city to alleviate its environmental ills; others relocated to more environmentally enticing surroundings in new suburban developments. For members of both groups, new forms of transportation infrastructure profoundly shaped how they responded to the era's environmental crisis. Whereas efforts to rebuild and retrofit downtown were hampered by the difficulties and expense of working in densely built and populated areas, efforts to build on the urban fringe faced few serious obstacles. As a result, the most significant late nineteenth-century attempts to use transportation to remake city dwellers' relationships with nature in the United States - including tools developed with an eye on rebuilding dense city centers - exercised far greater influence on the expanding periphery of cities than on their environmentally fraught cores.

Conclusions

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker R. Berghahn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
Merger Wave ◽  
Oligopolistic Market ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Market Organization ◽  
Financial Power

This concluding chapter summarizes the major points of the preceding chapters. For the period up to World War I, it became clear that the elites of the United States, and its businessmen on the East and West coasts in particular, saw their country as a highly dynamic and modern industrial and financial power. Based on the idea of a competitive capitalism, American big business, in the wake of the great merger wave of the late nineteenth century and congressional legislation that had banned the formation of cartels and monopolies, developed in the direction of an oligopolistic market organization. These developments shaped corporate attitudes and practices toward the domestic and international economy from 1900 onward. No less important, the emergence of the United States as a major industrial power stirred Britain and Germany into responses to the American challenge.

John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Famous Book ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.

1917

Peyote Effect ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 44-54
Author(s):  
Alexander S. Dawson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
First Amendment ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Indian Agents ◽  
The U.S

This chapter explores the first sustained efforts to enact a federal ban on peyote in the United States. Missionaries and Indian Agents began pressing for a ban in the late nineteenth century, only to be thwarted by Native American peyotists and their allies in the Bureau of American Ethnology, who argued both that peyote worship should be protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and that it was not deleterious to the health of individual peyotists. By 1917, however, state governments were beginning to pass local bans, with the first prohibitions passed in Colorado and Utah. In early 1918, the U.S. House of Representatives took up the cause, holding hearings on a proposed ban. The record of those hearings offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways that racial anxieties were articulated through anxieties over peyotism in the early twentieth century. The ban passed the House but failed in the Senate.

“Groaning for the Latter Day”

2021 ◽  
pp. 212-246
Author(s):  
John Howard Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Corruption ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Inequities ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Two new religious movements, Mormonism and Millerism, established a foundation upon which a heretofore invisible, gloomy eschatology that had long occupied the margins of American Protestantism stepped out into the limelight in the late nineteenth century. Gaining popularity during and after the Civil War, dispensationalist premillennialism posited that the world is fundamentally fallen, and that only Christ’s personal intervention could bring on the Millennium. To some among this growing band of radical evangelicals, the United States’ spiritual failings, political corruption, and social inequities meant that it was beyond redemption. Others still clung to the belief in America’s millennial destiny, arguing that only the United States may stand against the Antichrist at the latter day, joining with Christ and his angels in the final assault against Satan in the inevitable Battle of Armageddon.

16. Human Trafficking

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea M. Bertone
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Global Issue ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter examines how the international community has defined and framed the issue of human trafficking over the last century, and how governments such as the United States have responded politically to the problem of human trafficking. Contemporary concerns about trafficking can be traced back to a late nineteenth-century movement in the United States and Western Europe against white slavery. White slavery, also known as the white slave trade, refers to the kidnapping and transport of Caucasian girls and women for the purposes of prostitution. The chapter first considers the definitions of human trafficking before discussing the anti-white slavery movement and the increase in international consciousness about the trafficking of women. It then traces the origins of the contemporary anti-human trafficking movement and analyses how trafficking emerged as a global issue in the 1990s. It also presents a case study on human trafficking in the United States.

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