Abstract: Ten score and four years ago, our founders brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to proposition that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, among which they counted freedom of speech, assembly, and association, freedom from arbitrary search, seizure, and arrest, and equal treatment by processes of law. The first nation to adopt liberal model of social organization, United States placed enhancement of individual human satisfaction at center of state purpose. Europeans marveled that that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure. It was not that any European would have argued that a just government would ever arbitrarily deny free speech or arbitrarily search, seize, or arrest. The marvel lay in notion that government might be required first to demonstrate its compelling interest in a court of law before it could act-and that indeed there might be some authority other than government itself that would judge how compelling state's interest was as measured specifically against some individual's unalienable rights. Some Europeans, like Alexis de Tocqueville, traveled to United States early in nineteenth century in order to discover how this wondrous political phenomenon held together in spite of divisive atomism implicit in principles to which it was dedicated. And, indeed, just past mid-century union did face its most mortal test. Yet endure it did. By mid-twentieth century endurance came to be taken for granted. And by then wondrous fact about American history had become not how an individualistic, libertarian, and egalitarian society had defied Old World philosophers and met tests of national unity and security, but how a nation so conceived and so dedicated could for so long have failed to fulfill its dedication to liberty and equality. As Paul Murphy writes in his latest book on Constitution in crisis, the abstract notion that an American tradition of civil liberty encompassed a concept of equal rights for all . . . was certainly not compatible with
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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