The Philosophical Roots of the Bill of Rights: The Federalists' and Anti-Federalists' Conceptions of Rights

Extract

The overall aim of the seminar on “The Philosophical Roots of the Bill of Rights” was to gain a better understanding of the basic presuppositions and implications of our Constitutional commitments as expressed in the Bill of Rights, especially as viewed from the perspective of the original debates and compromises that led finally to the enactment of the Bill of Rights. That original perspective was, of course, riven by considerable controversy, above all between the Federalists who supported, and the Anti-Federalists who opposed, the ratification of the original Constitution. The latter were the primary instigators of the movement for a Bill of Rights amending the proposed Constitution, but at the end of the day it was the Federalist outlook, articulated above all by Congressman James Madison, that most fully determined the actual character of the rights that were given Constitutional recognition. Still, this very fact, that an eventual compromise was reached which was at least as satisfying to most leading Federalists as it was to the leading Anti-Federalists who had originally insisted on the amendments—points to the very large measure of agreement on fundamental principles that underlay the debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists.

This agreement on basic moral and political principles becomes most apparent when one contrasts the republicanism of the Americans, the republicanism rooted in a commitment to individual rights, with earlier and alternative forms of republican political theory. This contrast was the theme of the first seminar. I asked the participants to read Plutarch's life of Lycurgus, not only because Plutarch is an author, and this particular short biography is a text, well-known to the American Founders, but even more because the life of Lycurgus contains a vivid and concrete statement of the classical republican ideal that brings out some of the most alien features of that ideal.