Revolution and Constitutionalism in Britain and the U.S.
Revolution and Constitutionalism in Britain and the U.S.

Author: David A. J. Richards

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-02

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1000965430

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In Revolution and Constitutionalism in Britain and the U.S.: Burke and Madison and Their Contemporary Legacies, David A. J. Richards offers an investigative comparison of two central figures in late eighteenth-century constitutionalism, Edmund Burke and James Madison, at a time when two great constitutional experiments were in play: the Constitution of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the U.S. Constitution of 1787. Richards assesses how much, as liberal Lockean constitutionalists, Burke and Madison shared and yet differed regarding violent revolution, offering three pathbreaking and original contributions about Burke’s importance. First, the book defends Burke as a central figure in the development and understanding of liberal constitutionalism; second, it explores the psychology that led to his liberal voice, including Burke’s own long-term loving relationship to another man; and third, it shows how Burke’s understanding of the political psychology of the violence of “political religions” is an enduring contribution to understanding fascist threats to political liberalism from the eighteenth-century onwards, including the contemporary constitutional crises in the U.S. and U.K. deriving from populist movements. Mixing thorough research with personal experiences, this book will be an invaluable resource to scholars of political science and theory, constitutional law, history, political psychology, and LGBTQ+ issues.

The Revolutionary Constitution
The Revolutionary Constitution

Author: David J. Bodenhamer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 019991303X

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The framers of the Constitution chose their words carefully when they wrote of a more perfect union--not absolutely perfect, but with room for improvement. Indeed, we no longer operate under the same Constitution as that ratified in 1788, or even the one completed by the Bill of Rights in 1791--because we are no longer the same nation. In The Revolutionary Constitution, David J. Bodenhamer provides a comprehensive new look at America's basic law, integrating the latest legal scholarship with historical context to highlight how it has evolved over time. The Constitution, he notes, was the product of the first modern revolution, and revolutions are, by definition, moments when the past shifts toward an unfamiliar future, one radically different from what was foreseen only a brief time earlier. In seeking to balance power and liberty, the framers established a structure that would allow future generations to continually readjust the scale. Bodenhamer explores this dynamic through seven major constitutional themes: federalism, balance of powers, property, representation, equality, rights, and security. With each, he takes a historical approach, following their changes over time. For example, the framers wrote multiple protections for property rights into the Constitution in response to actions by state governments after the Revolution. But twentieth-century courts--and Congress--redefined property rights through measures such as zoning and the designation of historical landmarks (diminishing their commercial value) in response to the needs of a modern economy. The framers anticipated just such a future reworking of their own compromises between liberty and power. With up-to-the-minute legal expertise and a broad grasp of the social and political context, this book is a tour de force of Constitutional history and analysis.

The Royalist Revolution
The Royalist Revolution

Author: Eric Nelson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-10-06

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 067473534X

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Winner of the Society of the Cincinnati History Prize, Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey Finalist, George Washington Prize A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2015 Generations of students have been taught that the American Revolution was a revolt against royal tyranny. In this revisionist account, Eric Nelson argues that a great many of our “founding fathers” saw themselves as rebels against the British Parliament, not the Crown. The Royalist Revolution interprets the patriot campaign of the 1770s as an insurrection in favor of royal power—driven by the conviction that the Lords and Commons had usurped the just prerogatives of the monarch. “The Royalist Revolution is a thought-provoking book, and Nelson is to be commended for reviving discussion of the complex ideology of the American Revolution. He reminds us that there was a spectrum of opinion even among the most ardent patriots and a deep British influence on the political institutions of the new country.” —Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Wall Street Journal “A scrupulous archaeology of American revolutionary thought.” —Thomas Meaney, The Nation “A powerful double-barrelled challenge to historiographical orthodoxy.” —Colin Kidd, London Review of Books “[A] brilliant and provocative analysis of the American Revolution.” —John Brewer, New York Review of Books

The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution
The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution

Author: Jack P. Greene

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-10-25

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1139492934

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Using the British Empire as a case study, this succinct study argues that the establishment of overseas settlements in America created a problem of constitutional organization. The failure to resolve the resulting tensions led to the thirteen continental colonies seceding from the empire in 1776. Challenging those historians who have assumed that the British had the law on their side during the debates that led to the American Revolution, this volume argues that the empire had long exhibited a high degree of constitutional multiplicity, with each colony having its own discrete constitution. Contending that these constitutions cannot be conflated with the metropolitan British constitution, it argues that British refusal to accept the legitimacy of colonial understandings of the sanctity of the many colonial constitutions and the imperial constitution was the critical element leading to the American Revolution.

Power and Liberty
Power and Liberty

Author: Gordon S. Wood

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0197546919

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Written by one of early America's most eminent historians, this book masterfully discusses the debates over constitutionalism that took place in the Revolutionary era.

The U.S. Constitution
The U.S. Constitution

Author: David J. Bodenhamer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 0195378326

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The U.S. Constitution: A Very Short Introduction explores the major themes of American constitutional history --federalism, the balance of powers, property, representation, equality, and security -- and illustrates how the Constitution has served as a dynamic framework for legitimating power and advancing liberty.

From Vienna to Chicago and Back
From Vienna to Chicago and Back

Author: Gerald Stourzh

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-02-15

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 0226776387

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Spanning both the history of the modern West and his own five-decade journey as a historian, Gerald Stourzh’s sweeping new essay collection covers the same breadth of topics that has characterized his career—from Benjamin Franklin to Gustav Mahler, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Charles Beard, from the notion of constitution in seventeenth-century England to the concept of neutrality in twentieth-century Austria. This storied career brought him in the 1950s from the University of Vienna to the University of Chicago—of which he draws a brilliant picture—and later took him to Berlin and eventually back to Austria. One of the few prominent scholars equally at home with U.S. history and the history of central Europe, Stourzh has informed these geographically diverse experiences and subjects with the overarching themes of his scholarly achievement: the comparative study of liberal constitutionalism and the struggle for equal rights at the core of Western notions of free government. Composed between 1953 and 2005 and including a new autobiographical essay written especially for this volume, From Vienna to Chicago and Back will delight Stourzh fans, attract new admirers, and make an important contribution to transatlantic history.

The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution
The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution

Author: John Phillip Reid

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780226708966

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"Liberty was the most cherished right possessed by English-speaking people in the eighteenth century. It was both an ideal for the guidance of governors and a standard with which to measure the constitutionality of government; both a cause of the American Revolution and a purpose for drafting the United States Constitution; both an inheritance from Great Britain and a reason republican common lawyers continued to study the law of England." As John Philip Reid goes on to make clear, "liberty" did not mean to the eighteenth-century mind what it means today. In the twentieth century, we take for granted certain rights—such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press—with which the state is forbidden to interfere. To the revolutionary generation, liberty was preserved by curbing its excesses. The concept of liberty taught not what the individual was free to do but what the rule of law permitted. Ultimately, liberty was law—the rule of law and the legalism of custom. The British constitution was the charter of liberty because it provided for the rule of law. Drawing on an impressive command of the original materials, Reid traces the eighteenth-century notion of liberty to its source in the English common law. He goes on to show how previously problematic arguments involving the related concepts of licentiousness, slavery, arbitrary power, and property can also be fit into the common-law tradition. Throughout, he focuses on what liberty meant to the people who commented on and attempted to influence public affairs on both sides of the Atlantic. He shows the depth of pride in liberty—English liberty—that pervaded the age, and he also shows the extent—unmatched in any other era or among any other people—to which liberty both guided and motivated political and constitutional action.