The Idea of Rights in the Imperial Crisis

Summary

Introduction

Rights were at the heart of the American Revolutionaries' case against Crown and Parliament. Yet there have been few scholarly accounts of the idea of rights in the American Founding. Even in the heated debate which dominated the last generation of revolutionary historiography between those who advanced a classical republican or communitarian interpretation of the Founding and those who defended a liberal or individualistic one, participants eschewed any close examination of what rights meant to the Founding generation. Instead, both sides defined liberalism as a political philosophy which rejected a classical idea of the public good, and defended instead the legitimacy of competing economic and political interests, leaving little room for a less reductive, more rights-based account of the formation of the American republic. Nor have early Americanists engaged with scholars of medieval and early modern European political thought who have been conducting a complicated debate on the origins and meaning of rights—in particular on when the modern idea of an individual natural right was first articulated. To the extent that the idea of rights in the American Founding has been studied, it has been largely as a byproduct of these European debates, with a number of prominent scholars concluding that natural law duties trumped rights in revolutionary discourse, thereby challenging an understanding of the revolution as primarily about individual liberty.