Download or read book Property and the Pursuit of Happiness written by Edward J. Erler and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-07-26 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Edward Erler brings a lifetime of study of political philosophy, the American founding, and the US constitution to the central role of property in American constitutional thought. Erler argues that the Founders considered the natural right to property as the comprehensive right that included every other right. In this sense they followed political philosopher John Locke, but at the same time made significant improvements on Locke, making it moral and political, something they called the “pursuit of happiness.” In the past century, this understanding of the right to property—derived from the principles of the Declaration of Independence—has been challenged by the rise of progressivism, which places promoting community welfare above the protection of individual rights as the central role of government. This has led to the administrative state’s unrelenting attacks on the right to private property, which have effectively ended the right to property as it was understood by the founders. Property and the Pursuit of Happiness offers a learned and wide-ranging discussion of the values at the core of America’s founding that will be of interest to all readers seeking to understand the founders’ vision and the profound challenges to it today.
Download or read book The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era written by Carli N. Conklin and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single text, the Declaration of Independence. In this insightful volume, Carli Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety of intellectual traditions, and explores its usage in two key legal texts of the Founding Era, the Declaration and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. For Blackstone, the pursuit of happiness was a science of jurisprudence, by which his students could know, and then rightly apply, the first principles of the Common Law. For the founders, the pursuit of happiness was the individual right to pursue a life lived in harmony with the law of nature and a public duty to govern in accordance with that law. Both applications suggest we consider anew how the phrase, and its underlying legal philosophies, were understood in the founding era. With this work, Conklin makes important contributions to the fields of early American intellectual and legal history.
Download or read book Property and Freedom written by Richard Pipes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A superb book about a topic that should be front and center in the American political debate" (National Review), from the acclaimed Harvard scholar and historian of the Russian Revolution An exploration of a wide range of national and political systems to demonstrate persuasively that private ownership has served over the centuries to limit the power of the state and enable democratic institutions to evolve and thrive in the Western world. Beginning with Greece and Rome, where the concept of private property as we understand it first developed, Richard Pipes then shows us how, in the late medieval period, the idea matured with the expansion of commerce and the rise of cities. He contrasts England, a country where property rights and parliamentary government advanced hand-in-hand, with Russia, where restrictions on ownership have for centuries consistently abetted authoritarian regimes; finally he provides reflections on current and future trends in the United States. Property and Freedom is a brilliant contribution to political thought and an essential work on a subject of vital importance.
Download or read book The Catholic Thing written by Robert Royal and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Catholic "thing" - the concrete historical reality of Catholicism as a presence in human history - is the richest cultural tradition in the world. It values both faith and reason, and therefore has a great deal to say about politics and economics, war and peace, manners and morals, children and families, careers and vocations, and many other perennial and contemporary questions. In addition, it has inspired some of the greatest art, music, and architecture, while offering unparalleled human solidarity to tens of millions through hospitals, soup kitchens, schools, universities, and relief services. This volume brings together some of the very best commentary on a wide range of recent events and controversies by some of the very best Catholic writers in the English language: Ralph McInerny, Michael Novak, Fr. James V. Schall, Hadley Arkes, Robert Royal, Anthony Esolen, Brad Miner, George Marlin, David Warren, Austin Ruse, Francis Beckwith, and many others. Their contributions cover large Catholic subjects such as philosophy and theology, liturgy and Church dogma, postmodern culture, the Church and modern politics, literature, and music. But they also look into specific contemporary problems such as religious liberty, the role of Catholic officials in public life, growing moral hazards in bio-medical advances, and such like. The Catholic Thing is a virtual encyclopedia of Catholic thought about modern life.
Download or read book In Pursuit of Happiness written by William B. Scott and published by Bloomington : Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1977 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Pursuit of Happiness written by Daniel Greenberg and published by The Sudbury Valley School. This book was released on 2005 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study which explores the lives of more than a hundred former students aged 21-49 who spent their formative years at the Sudbury Valley School. It examines in depth their values, their character, and their careers, drawing extensively on their own words.
Download or read book And the Pursuit of Happiness written by Maira Kalman and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Energized and inspired by the 2008 elections, celebrated illustrator Maira Kalman traveled to Washington, D.C., launching a year-long investigation of American democracy and its workings. The result is an artist’s idiosyncratic vision of history and contemporary politics. Whether returning to America’s historical roots at the Lincoln archive and Jefferson’s Monticello, or taking the pulse of the present day at a town hall meeting in Vermont, an Army base in Kentucky, and the inner chambers of the Supreme Court, Kalman finds evidence of democracy at work all around us. Her route is always one of fascinating indirection, but one that captures and shares in hundreds of beautiful, colorful reasons why we are proud to be Americans.
Download or read book The Economics and Ethics of Private Property written by Hans-Hermann Hoppe and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of socialism across Eastern Europe - as manifested most dramatically by the events of the forever memorable November 9, 1989, when the Germans of East and West reunited, moved and overjoyed, on top of the Berlin Wall - has added more support and urgency to the central thesis of this volume than I had ever hoped for. Whether the following studies deal with economic topics, such as employment, interest, money, banking, business cycles, taxes, public goods, or growth; with philosophical problems as the foundations of know ledge, and of economics and ethics in particular; or the reconstruction and theoretical explanation of historical and sociological phenomena such as exploitation, the rise and fall of civilizations, international politics, war, imperialism, and the role of ideas and ideological movements in the course of social evolution - each ultimately contributes to but one conclusion: The right to private property is an indisputably valid, absolute principle of ethics and the basis for continuous 'optimal' economic progress. To rise from the ruins of socialism and overcome the stagnation of the Western welfare states, nothing will suffice but the uncompromizing privatization of all socialized, that is, government, property and the establishment of a contractual society based on the recognition of the absoluteness of private property rights. *** In writing the following studies I received help from many sides. Special thanks go to my wife Margaret, who again took on the task of de Germanizing my English; to Llewellyn H.
Download or read book Declaring Independence written by Jay Fliegelman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preoccupied with the spectacle of sincerity, the quest for a natural language led paradoxically to a greater theatricalization of public speaking as well as to a new social dramaturgy and a deeply self-conscious performative understanding of selfhood. Concerned with recovering what was assumed but not spoken in the realm of eighteenth-century speech and action, the book treats Jefferson (whose fascination with Homer, Ossian, Patrick Henry, and music theory all relate to the new oratorical ideal) as a conflicted participant in the new rhetoric and a witness to its social costs and benefits
Download or read book In Defense of Property written by Gottfried Dietze and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1995 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Defense of Property focuses on the importance of private property and its protection throughout history. Emphasizing the connection between property and propriety, Gottfried Dietze shows how the universal appreciation of property functions as an ethical institution, securing happiness under law and order.
Download or read book Launching Liberalism written by Michael P. Zuckert and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, prominent political theorist Michael Zuckert presents an important and pathbreaking set of meditations on the thought of John Locke. In more than a dozen provocative essays, many appearing in print for the first time, Zuckert explores the complexity of Locke's engagement with his philosophical and theological predecessors, his profound influence on later liberal thinkers, and his amazing success in transforming the political understanding of the Anglo-American world. At the same time, he also demonstrates Locke's continuing relevance in current debates involving such prominent thinkers as Rawls and MacIntyre. Zuckert's careful reconsideration of Locke's role as "launcher" of liberalism involves a sustained engagement with the hermeneutical issues surrounding Locke, an innovator who faced special rhetorical needs in addressing his contemporaries and the future. It also involves highlighting the novelty of Locke's position by examining his stance toward the philosophical and religious traditions in place when he wrote. Zuckert argues that neither of the dominant ways of understanding Locke's relations to his predecessors and contemporaries is adequate; he is not well seen as a follower of any orthodoxy nor of any anti-orthodoxy of his day, either philosophical or theological. He found a path to innovation that was philosophically radical but which was also able to connect with prevailing and accepted traditions. That allowed him to exercise a practical influence in history rarely, if ever, matched by any other philosopher. Zuckert illustrates that influence by showing how William Blackstone used Lockean philosophy to reshape the common law and how the Americans of the eighteenth century used Lockean philosophy to reshape Whig political thought. Zuckert argues that Locke's philosophy has continuing philosophic and political force, a proposition he demonstrates by arguing that Locke presents a form of political philosophy superior to that of the liberal theorists of our day and that he has solid rejoinders to contemporary critics of liberalism.
Download or read book The Enlightenment written by Ritchie Robertson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 1008 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.
Download or read book Failing America s Faithful written by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blending inspirational memoir with a religious and political rebuke of American Christianity, the oldest daughter of Senator Robert F. Kennedy delivers a rousing call to arms for spiritual renewal.
Download or read book My Private Property written by Mary Ruefle and published by Wave Books. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author of Madness, Rack, and Honey ("One of the wisest books I've read in years," according to the New York Times) and Trances of the Blast, Mary Ruefle continues to be one of the most dazzling poets in America. My Private Property, comprised of short prose pieces, is a brilliant and charming display of her humor, deep imagination, mindfulness, and play in a finely crafted edition. Personalia When I was young, a fortune-teller told me that an old woman who wanted to die had accidentally become lodged in my body. Slowly, over time, and taking great care in following esoteric instructions, including lavender baths and the ritual burial of keys in the backyard, I rid myself of her presence. Now I am an old woman who wants to die and lodged inside me is a young woman dying to live; I work on her. Mary Ruefle is the author of Trances of the Blast; Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism; and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She has published ten other books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed!; she is also an erasure artist whose treatments of nineteenth-century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries as well as published in the book A Little White Shadow. Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.
Download or read book The Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-author of the groundbreaking Empire and Multitude, Michael Hardt examines the Declaration of Independence and other texts by Jefferson, arguing that his powerful concept of democracy provides a biting critique of the current American administration. Introducing this collection of Jefferson’s writings, Michael Hardt makes a powerful case for re-examining the foundational writings of this American revolutionary in order to reignite the dialogue that first conceived of a “land of the free.”
Download or read book Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity written by Catherine Ingraham and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this suggestive inquiry into the operations of linearity in architectural theory and practice, the author investigates the line as both a conceptual and literal force in architecture. She approaches the subject from philosophical, theoretical, practical and historical points of view.
Download or read book Liberty Property and the Foundations of the American Constitution written by Ellen Frankel Paul and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover title: Liberty, property & the foundations of the American constitution. Includes bibliographies and index.
