Conceptual Change And The Constitution

In this volume distinguished historians and political scientists examine the linguistic and conceptual dimension of the American Founding. They analyze political discourse during the short span of years from the Revolution through ratification.

This book defends the claim that politics is a linguistically constituted activity and shows that the concepts which inform political beliefs and behaviour undergo changes related to real political events. Having set out and discussed this theme, the editors and contributors go on to analyse the evolution of thirteen particular concepts, all central to political discourse in the western world. They include revolution, rights, democracy, property, corruption, public interest, public opinion, and ideology. The volume will be illuminating to political theorists, intellectual historians, and philosophers.

Now widely regarded as the best available guide to the study of the Founding, the first edition of Interpreting the Founding provided summaries and analyses of the leading interpretive frameworks that have guided the study of the Founding since the publication of Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution in 1913. For this new edition, Gibson has revised and updated his study, including his comprehensive bibliography, and also added a new concluding chapter on the "Unionist Paradigm" or "Federalist Interpretation" of the Constitution. As in the original work, Gibson argues in the new edition that scholarship on the Founding is no longer steered by a single dominant approach or even by a set of questions that control its direction. He features insightful extended discussions of pioneering works by leading scholars of the Founding--including Louis Hartz, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and Garry Wills--that best exemplify different schools of interpretation. He focuses on six approaches that have dominated the modern study of the Founding-Progressive, Lockean/liberal, Republican, Scottish Enlightenment, multicultural, and multiple traditions approaches-before concluding with the Unionist or Federalist paradigm. For each approach, Gibson traces its fundamental assumptions, revealing deeper ideological and methodological differences between schools of thought that, on the surface, seem to differ only about the interpretation of historical facts. While previous accounts have treated the study of the Founding as the sequential replacement of one paradigm by another, Gibson argues that all of these interpretations survive as alternative and still viable approaches. By examining the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and showing how each has simultaneously illuminated and masked core truths about the American Founding, he renders a balanced account of the continuing and very vigorous debate over the origins and foundations of the American republic. Brimming with intellectual vigor and a based on both a wide and deep reading in the voluminous literature on the subject, Gibson's new edition is sure to reinforce this remarkable book's reputation while winning new converts to his argument.

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 role of the Constitution in American political history is contentious not simply because of battles over meaning. Equally important is precisely who participated in contests over meaning. Was it simply judges, or did legislatures have a strong say? And what about the public's role in effecting constitutional change? In The Civic Constitution, Elizabeth Beaumont focuses on the last category, and traces the efforts of citizens to reinvent constitutional democracy during four crucial eras: the revolutionaries of the 1770s and 1780s; the civic founders of state republics and the national Constitution in the early national period; abolitionists during the antebellum and Civil War eras; and, finally, suffragists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout, she argues that these groups should be recognized as founders and co-founders of the U.S. Constitution. Though often slighted in modern constitutional debates, these women and men developed distinctive constitutional creeds and practices, challenged existing laws and social norms, expanded the boundaries of citizenship, and sought to translate promises of liberty, equality, and justice into more robust and concrete forms. Their civic ideals and struggles not only shaped the text, design, and public meaning of the U.S. Constitution, but reconstructed its membership and transformed the fundamental commitments of the American political community. An innovative expansion on the concept of popular constitutionalism, The Civic Constitution is a vital contribution to the growing body of literature on how ordinary people have shaped the parameters of America's fundamental laws.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Our Changing Constitution" by Charles W. Pierson. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

If one counts the production of constitutional documents alone, the nineteenth century can lay claim to being a 'constitutional age'; one in which the generation and reception of constitutional texts served as a centre of gravity around which law and politics consistently revolved. This volume critically re-examines the role of constitutionalism in that period, in order to counter established teleological narratives that imply a consistent development fromabsolutism towards inclusive, participatory democracy.

This open access book can be downloaded from link.springer.com Legal studies and consequently legal history focus on constitutional documents, believing in a nominalist autonomy of constitutional semantics. Reconsidering Constitutional Formation in the late 18th and 19th century, kept historic constitutions from being simply log-books for political experts through a functional approach to the interdependencies between constitution and public discourse. Sovereignty had to be ‘believed’ by the subjects and the political élites. Such a communicative orientation of constitutional processes became palpable in the ‘religious’ affinities of the constitutional preambles. They were held as ‘creeds’ of a new order, not only due to their occasional recourse to divine authority, but rather due to the claim for eternal validity contexts of constitutional guarantees. The communication dependency of constitutions was of less concern in terms of the preamble than the constituents’ big worries about government organisation. Their indecisiveness between monarchical and popular sovereignty was established through the discrediting of the Republic in the Jacobean reign of terror and the ‘renaissance’ of the monarchy in the military resistance against the French revolutionary and later Napoleonic campaigns. The constitutional formation as a legal act of constituting could therefore defend the monarchy from the threat of the people (Albertine Statute 1848), could be a legal decision of a national constituent assembly (Belgian Constitution 1831), could borrow from the old liberties (Polish May Constitution 1791) or try to remain in between by referring to the Nation as sovereign (French September Constitution 1791, Cádiz Constitution 1812). Common to all contexts is the use of national sovereignty as a legal starting point. The consequent differentiation between constituent and constituted power manages to justify the self-commitment of political power in legal terms. National sovereignty is the synonym for the juridification of sovereignty by means of the constitution. The novelty of the constitutions of the late 18th and 19th century is the normativity, the positivity of the constitutional law as one unified law, to be the measure for the legality of all other law. Therefore ReConFort will continue with the precedence of constitution. (www.reconfort.eu)

The first edition of Alan Gibson's Understanding the Founding is widely regarded as an invaluable guide to the last century's key debates surrounding America's founding. This new edition retains all of the strengths of the original while adding a substantial new section addressing a major but previously unaddressed issue and also significantly revising Gibson's invaluable conclusion and bibliography. In the original edition, which was built upon his previous work in Interpreting the Founding, Gibson addressed four key questions: Were the Framers motivated by their economic interests? How democratic was the Framers' Constitution? Should we interpret the Founding using philosophical or strictly historical approaches? What traditions of political thought were most important to the Framers? He focused especially on the preconceptions that scholars brought to these questions, explored the deepest sources of scholars' disagreements over them, and suggested new and thoughtful lines of interpretation and inquiry. His incisive analysis brought clarity to the complex and sprawling debates and shed new light on the institutional and intellectual foundations of the American political system. Gibson has now added a path-breaking new chapter entitled "How Could They Have Done That? Founding Scholarship and the Question of Moral Responsibility," which reprises and critiques on of the most important and vexing contemporary debates on the American founding. The new chapter focuses on how the men who fought a revolution in the name of liberty and declared to the world that "all men are created equal" could have supported the institution of slavery and even owned slaves themselves, accepted the legal and social subordination of women, and been responsible for Indian removal and genocide against Native Americans. Efforts to criticize or defend the Founders on these issues now constitute a daunting body of scholarship addressing what David Brion Davis has called the "dilemmas of slaveholding revolutionaries." Gibson's astute and fair-minded analysis of this scholarship offers keen insights into how we might move toward more mature and responsible evaluations of the Founders.