By: R Richard Schweitzer

R Richard Schweitzer — Sat, 11 Jul 2015 16:22:18 +0000

A quick read of that draft’s 40 pages may be inadequate for my analysis that these scholars appear to conflate (or not distinguish) rights and power; then attempt to work out relative quantifications of elements of power.

For those who share the view that all “Rights” require contra-posed obligations, this draft is inadequate, since it avoids confronting that concept *directly;* but, perhaps inadvertently, implies its existence in narrating the exercise of power (electoral, e.g.) to impose obligations which support or defend the draft’s concept of “Rights.”

There is no denying that imposing obligations by various forms of power (physical, economic or ideological) can create and sustain a “Right” (which becomes an expression of that power – Feudal Rights, e.g.).

The paper might have more “meaning” if in the earlier parts the authors identified the obligations necessary to support each of the classifications they purport to deal with, explore how those obligations arise, with what qualifications – and whether they are “imposed” or are spontaneously recognized, accepted and performed in the segments of, or over all in, a social order.

By: JKB

JKB — Sat, 11 Jul 2015 16:03:31 +0000

I’ve recently been reading some of the work of F.J. Stimson from the turn of the 20th century on the Constitution, law, etc. The excerpt below from a 1907 paper seems to describe our own federalist system in terms as a means to balance the limited/open access orders:

That Democracy, besides grasping the reins of government,
now also, for the first time in history, conscious of its power to
create Laws, for its very first act should have sought to curb it-
self in Constitutions, State or National, would argue a wisdom
and self-restraint almost superhuman were it not for the his-
torical explanation [ancient liberties of the Anglo-Saxons].
This explanation is not alone the training
of a thousand years that, we fondly think, makes the English-
speaking people unique in its power to rule itself; it is a much
more definite and recent cause, less clearly understood and, for
obvious reasons, at the time less rarely adverted to.

This was,
in brief, the desire of the American people on the one hand to
protect their liberties from the possibly aristocratic, or auto-
cratic, Federal Government they were about to create; and on the
other the desire of the propertied classes, of the Federalists them-
selves, to protect their rights from the recently created omnipotent
State Legislatures.

Broadly speaking, the latter is the function
of the State constitution, the former of the Federal; and thus
the sides became curiously inverted and, even in some cases, the
contents curiously mixed, the statesmen who worked for the one
caring little for the other.

Antitheses are dangerous; yet it is
true that it was the People, under Jefferson, who said to the
Federal Constitution, ” Thus far shalt thou go and no farther ” ;
it was the educated, propertied classes, the Federalists at home in
their State capitals, who said the same thing to the State Legis-
latures, to whose local government their lives and personal liberties
and private fortunes were to be entrusted.

Both in the main are
aimed at securing liberty; but the one rather political liberty,
in and from their Government at Washington; the other rather
personal liberty, for themselves and their possessions at home.

Source: The Constitution and the People’s Liberties
by Stimson, F. J.
https://archive.org/details/jstor-25105808

Comments on: I Would Not Publish This Paper

By: R Richard Schweitzer

By: JKB