Download or read book The Concept of Constitution in the History of Political Thought written by Arkadiusz Górnisiewicz and published by De Gruyter Open. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of the present volume is to discuss the notion of constitution from the perspectives of history of political thought. Its scholarly intention is to go beyond the approach concentrating on the formal understanding of constitution and bring forward more complex historical and philosophic-political interpretations. Our point of departure was the need to revive the somehow neglected distinction between the idea of constitution as an act of conscious law-giving activity and the notion of constitution conceived as the set of fundamental political rules derived from the very nature of political regime and its historical development.

Download or read book Constitutions and Political Theory written by Jan-Erik Lane and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jan-Erik Lane begins by examining the origins and history of constitutionalism, the doctrine that the state must be regulated by means of a set of institutions that guarantee citizen rights and procedural accountability. He then examines the structure of the state in order to identify the essential elements that constitutional institutions regulate. Lane asks why constitutions exist, and how they matter for society. Finally he seeks out the requirements for a fair and democratic constitution by referring to three key concepts in political theory: justice, equality and the rule of law. The book also offers a comparative survey of formal constitutional arrangements in different countries, and an analysis of how constitutions develop in practice, through the implementation of constitutional and administrative law in a country's courts.

Download or read book Democracy and the History of Political Thought written by Patrick N. Cain and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-06-23 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a fresh perspective on current democratic theory and practice by recovering the rich evaluations of democracy in the history of political thought. Each author addresses a single thinker’s reflections on the virtues and defects of democracy and the relationship between democracy and other regimes. Together, these essays explore the tensions within the democratic way of life that arise from an attachment to equality, liberty, citizenship, law, and the divine. Above all, this work aims at recovering a more complex understanding of democracy, connecting the perennial questions of political philosophy to the perplexities and crises of modern democracy.

Download or read book Original Meanings written by Jack N. Rakove and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-04-21 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From abortion to same-sex marriage, today's most urgent political debates will hinge on this two-part question: What did the United States Constitution originally mean and who now understands its meaning best? Rakove chronicles the Constitution from inception to ratification and, in doing so, traces its complex weave of ideology and interest, showing how this document has meant different things at different times to different groups of Americans.

Download or read book The Courts the Constitution and Parties written by Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin and published by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.. This book was released on 2001 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: McLaughlin, Andrew C. The Courts, The Constitution and Parties. Studies in Constitutional History and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912. vii, 299 pp. Reprinted 2001 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 00-058812. ISBN 1-58477-155-0. Cloth. $95. * "This volume is composed of five papers or addresses. Two of them are careful historical discussions of the origin of the American doctrine that courts can declare acts of the legislature void; a third shows the influence of theories of political philosophy upon the ante-bellum controversy regarding the nature of the Union; and the remaining two consider the significance of American political parties and their real function in popular government. The two papers first mentioned seem to be contributions of great and permanent value to the discussion of their topic. The style of all of these essays is easy and delightful and their argument sane, thoughtful, and persuasive." J.P.H. Harv. L. Rev. 26:280-281 cited in Marke, A Catalogue of the Law Collection at New York University (1953) 377.

Download or read book Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency written by Ben Lowe and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the political ideas behind the construction of the presidency in the U.S. Constitution, as well as how these ideas were implemented by the nation’s early presidents. The framers of the Constitution disagreed about the scope of the new executive role they were creating, and this volume reveals the ways the duties and power of the office developed contrary to many expectations. Here, leading scholars of the early republic examine principles from European thought and culture that were key to establishing the conceptual language and institutional parameters for the American executive office. Unpacking the debates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, these essays describe how the Constitution left room for the first presidents to set patterns of behavior and establish a range of duties to make the office functional within a governmental system of checks and balances. Contributors explore how these presidents understood their positions and fleshed out their full responsibilities according to the everyday operations required to succeed. As disputes continue to surround the limits of executive power today, this volume helps identify and explain the circumstances in which limits can be imposed on presidents who seem to dangerously exceed the constitutional parameters of their office. Political Thought and the Origins of the American Presidency demonstrates that this distinctive, time-tested role developed from a fraught, historically contingent, and contested process. Contributors: Claire Rydell Arcenas | Lindsay M. Chervinsky | François Furstenberg | Jonathan Gienapp | Daniel J. Hulsebosch | Ben Lowe | Max Skjönsberg | Eric Slauter | Caroline Winterer | Blair Worden | Rosemarie Zagarri A volume in the Alan B. and Charna Larkin Series on the American Presidency

Download or read book American Interpretations of Natural Law written by Benjamin Fletcher Wright and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book illustrates the deep roots of natural law doctrines in America's political culture. Originally published in 1931, the volume shows that American interpretations of natural law go to the philosophical heart of the American regime. The Declaration of Independence is the preeminent example of natural law in American political thought?it is the self-evident truth of American society.Benjamin Wright proposes that the decline of natural law as a guiding factor in American political behaviour is inevitable as America's democracy matures and broadens. What Wright also chronicled, inadvertently, was how the progressive critique of natural law has opened a rift between and among some of the ruling elites and large numbers of Americans who continue to accept it. Progressive elites who reject natural law do not share the same political culture as many of their fellow citizens.Wright's work is important because, as Leo Strauss and others have observed, the decline of natural law is a development that has not had a happy ending in other societies in the twentieth century. There is no reason to believe it will be different in the United States.

Download or read book The Politics of the Ancient Constitution written by Glenn Burgess and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The events of the years 1600-1642 have been argued over intensively by historians. Central to these arguments has been a search for the causes of the English Revolution. Many recent historians have denied that the Revolution had any long-term causes, and they have begun to see the period before 1642 in its own terms. These historians have suggested that before the 1640s English politics was based on consensus rather than conflict or opposition. Glenn Burgess examines the implications of these recent revisions of the early Stuart period for the history of political thought. This book is primarily a study of the political ideas of common lawyers--the ideology of the "Ancient Constitution"--and looks closely at the ideas of such men as Sir Edward Coke and John Selden. On this Dr. Burgess builds a general interpretation of early Stuart political thought. He argues that before 1625 ideological consensus was maintained in England, not because everyone agreed with everyone else, nor because there was no conflict over matters of principle, but because there were agreed conventions that held together seemingly contradictory political theories. Burgess examines the history of political thought in relation to professional groups--civil and common lawyers, and clerics, primarily--and in terms of the distinctive discourses they produced. After 1625 the boundaries between their discourses began to dissolve and political disputes became more threatening to the nation's stability. Through this approach, Burgess is able to show why it was that a period of "ideological consensus" was also a period of bitter political conflict.

Download or read book Classics of American Political and Constitutional Thought written by Scott J. Hammond and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 1236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From James I's Address Before Parliament (1610) to Joseph R. Biden, Jr.'s Learned Hand Dinner Address Before the American Jewish Committee (2005), this two-volume set offers an unparalleled selection of key texts from the history of American political and constitutional thought.

Download or read book A Theory of Liberty written by H. N. Hirsch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1992. A Theory of Liberty seeks to change the way we think about the American constitution. The focus of the book is the legal status of minority groups in the United States a topic at the top of the current political agenda. Arguing that minority rights were vitally important to the founding fathers, H. N. Hirsch presents an original and provocative look at issues such as affirmative action, abortion, and the rights of children, lesbians and gay men, mental patients, and the physically disabled. In an analysis which blends history, philosophy, law, and social science, Hirsch attacks both liberals who hide from history and conservatives who push for "original intent." He argues that we can remain faithful to the most basic intent of the founding fathers without losing our ability to reinterpret the Constitution against the backdrop of contemporary social "facts." Hirsch exposes the errors and hypocrisy of the current Supreme Court majority, and argues that the Constitution’s liberty can and should be interpreted to protect the rights of minority groups. Timely and controversial, this title offers a challenging look at some of America’s most basic ideological commitments, and will appeal to anyone concerned with the current state of American law or the treatment of minority groups.

Download or read book Constitution Making Under Occupation written by Andrew Arato and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The attempt in 2004 to draft an interim constitution in Iraq and the effort to enact a permanent one in 2005 were unintended outcomes of the American occupation, which first sought to impose a constitution by its agents. This two-stage constitution-making paradigm, implemented in a wholly unplanned move by the Iraqis and their American sponsors, formed a kind of compromise between the populist-democratic project of Shi'ite clerics and America's external interference. As long as it was used in a coherent and legitimate way, the method held promise. Unfortunately, the logic of external imposition and political exclusion compromised the negotiations. Andrew Arato is the first person to record this historic process and analyze its special problems. He compares the drafting of the Iraqi constitution to similar, externally imposed constitutional revolutions by the United States, especially in Japan and Germany, and identifies the political missteps that contributed to problems of learning and legitimacy. Instead of claiming that the right model of constitution making would have maintained stability in Iraq, Arato focuses on the fragile opportunity for democratization that was strengthened only slightly by the methods used to draft a constitution. Arato contends that this event would have benefited greatly from an overall framework of internationalization, and he argues that a better set of guidelines (rather than the obsolete Hague and Geneva regulations) should be followed in the future. With access to an extensive body of literature, Arato highlights the difficulty of exporting democracy to a country that opposes all such foreign designs and fundamentally disagrees on matters of political identity.

Download or read book From Vienna to Chicago and Back written by Gerald Stourzh and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Conscience and the Constitution written by David A. J. Richards and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At stage center of the American drama, maintains David A. J. Richards, is the attempt to understand the implications of the Reconstruction Amendments--Amendments Thirteen, Fourteen, and Fifteen to the United States Constitution. Richards evaluates previous efforts to interpret the amendments and then proposes his own view: together the amendments embodied a self-conscious rebirth of America's revolutionary, rights-based constitutionalism. Building on an approach to constitutional law developed in his Toleration and the Constitution and Foundations of American Constitutionalism, Richards links history, law, and political theory. In Conscience and the Constitution, this method leads from an analysis of the Reconstruction Amendments to a broad discussion of the American constitutional system as a whole. Richards's interpretation focuses on the abolitionists and their radical commitment to the "dissenting conscience." In his view, the Reconstruction Amendments expressed not only the constitutional arguments of a particular historical period but also a general political theory developed by the abolitionists, who restructured the American political community in terms of respect for universal human rights. He argues further that the amendments make a claim on our generation to keep faith with the vision of the "founders of 1865." In specific terms he points out what such allegiance would mean in the context of present-day constitutional issues. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book The Political Theory of the American Founding written by Thomas G. West and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a complete overview of the Founders' natural rights theory and its policy implications.

Download or read book A History of American Political Thought written by A. J. Beitzinger and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2011-08-05 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a descriptive analysis and critical discussion of the origins, development, and interrelationships of American political ideas against the background of the birth, growth, and crises of the republic and the major historical movements of thought. Main emphasis is on the idea of constitutionalism and related concepts of higher law, liberty, justice, equality, democracy and the balanced state, as well as underlying notions of human nature, motivation, and behavior.

Download or read book A Preface to American Political Theory written by Donald S. Lutz and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 1992-09-03 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald Lutz begins A Preface to American Political Theory by explaining what the book doesn't do. It doesn't begin with a panegyric to the American founding. It doesn't answer the following questions: "What are the basic principles in the U.S. Constitution? What were the intentions of the founders with respect to (fill in your own topic)? What is the meaning of pluralism, or separation of powers, or democracy, or (fill in your own concept)?" In short, it doesn't provide an overview of the content, development, or major conclusions of American political theory. What it does do is provide "a pre-theoretical analysis of how to go about studying questions like the ones above-how to conceptualize the project, how to proceed in looking for answers, how to avoid the logical traps peculiar to the study of American political theory." Lutz sets out to emancipate American political theorists from empiricism and inappropriate European theories and methadologies. The end result is to establish the foundation for the systematic study of American behavior, institutions, and ideas; to provide a general introduction to the study of American political theory; and to illustrate how textual analysis, history, empirical research, and analytic philosophy are all part of the enterprise. Designed for students and scholars in all disciplines, including political science, history, and legal studies, A Preface to American Political Theory doesn't provide answers to central continuing issues in American political theory. Rather, it provides an effective, sophisticated entree into the study of American political theory. Readers will be armed with the intellectual tools to engage in systematic study and makes them aware of the pitfalls they will inevitably encounter.

Download or read book Crisis and Constitutionalism written by Benjamin Straumann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crisis and Constitutionalism argues that the late Roman Republic saw, for the first time in the history of political thought, the development of a normative concept of constitution--the concept of a set of constitutional norms designed to guarantee and achieve certain interests of the individual. Benjamin Straumann first explores how a Roman concept of constitution emerged out of the crisis and fall of the Roman Republic. The increasing use of emergency measures and extraordinary powers in the late Republic provoked Cicero and some of his contemporaries to turn a hitherto implicit, inchoate constitutionalism into explicit constitutional argument and theory. The crisis of the Republic thus brought about a powerful constitutionalism and convinced Cicero to articulate the norms and rights that would provide its substance; this typically Roman constitutional theory is described in the second part of the study. Straumann then discusses the reception of Roman constitutional thought up to the late eighteenth century and the American Founding, which gave rise to a new, constitutional republicanism. This tradition was characterized by a keen interest in the Roman Republic's decline and fall, and an insistence on the limits of virtue. The crisis of the Republic was interpreted as a constitutional crisis, and the only remedy to escape the Republic's fate--military despotism--was thought to lie, not in republican virtue, but in Roman constitutionalism. By tracing Roman constitutional thought from antiquity to the modern era, this unique study makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of Roman political thought and its reception.