Abolitionists adopted higher law to oppose the settled law which explicitly recognized chattel slavery in America. Emerson sometimes spoke on higher law but it was not his most comfortable position. Emerson was a Neoplatonist, and it is the gradualism of Neoplatonism that he embraced against the immediatism implied in higher law. But even before Emerson’s 1856 conversion to abolition, starting in 1854 Emerson began moving his self-reliance into Northern-reliance. He was working his way philosophically toward a political activism that he would, finally, enthusiastically embrace. Emerson borrowed from the Neoplatonist Plotinus the word and idea of living “amphibiously,” and that is what he learned to do.

This chapter brings readers’ attention to the fact that throughout United States history, government has been an active and necessary part of building the country. In the colonial period, for example, laws regulating taverns and other businesses proliferated. After the Founding, under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton and the federalists, the central government was seen as the necessary force needed to support an economy that then enabled the country to participate on the world economic stage. The anti-federalists, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, aceded to the need for the government to support the economy in the ways proposed by the Federalists.

The term “identity” often generates questions about the “essence” of the entity being “identified.” Ascriptions of “identity” become controversial inasmuch as given behaviors or traits are viewed as favorable or unfavorable. Within the United States, the rhetorical trope “this is not who we are” has become almost pervasive upon the occurrence of a regrettable, even heinous, act. President Obama had a particular affinity for the phrase. He suggested, for example, that the vicious racism revealed in the 2015 massacre of African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina was aberrant, revealing nothing essential about American culture. The current debate within the United States about the “1619 Project” is all about constitutional and cultural identity. Its adherents argue that American identity is rooted in the white supremacy instantiated in the practice of slavery, dating back to 1619. Opponents emphasize the 1776 Declaration of Independence, with its proclamation that “all men are created equal” and “endowed” with equal “inalienable rights,” as the key marker of American identity. Slavery, which is conceded to have existed, was simply epiphenomenal; “who we are” is defined by the Declaration. Much is thought to ride on ascribing a particular identity to any given country or, more particularly, its constitution.

One of the core themes of Gary Jacobsohn’s work has been his observation that constitutional aspirations tend to develop within a disharmonic constitutional order. Jacobsohn draws our attention to Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass as models for thinking about the unfolding of U.S. constitutional aspirations within a larger framework of constitutional disharmony. This essay revisits Jacobsohn’s theory of constitutional aspiration, including its underlying philosophical premises, and concludes by putting it in dialogue with recent revisionist accounts of the U.S. constitutional order that downplay, deny, or mute the aspirations that Jacobsohn’s body of scholarship highlights and celebrates.

Around the world today, right-wing authoritarian movements labeled populist claim to be vehicles of popular sovereignty. Analysts have debated the definition of populism and the economic and cultural sources of these movements. Few have closely analyzed the “stories of peoplehood” advanced by authoritarian populist movements, or explored how they can be countered by more inclusive and egalitarian stories of peoplehood. This chapter suggests criteria for developing better stories of peoplehood, using the example of American stories that might compete effectively with the Trump movement’s narrative of “making America great again.”

From 1764 to 1776, there was a political crisis regarding the authority of the British Parliament over America. Yet the British case for parliamentary sovereignty was not particularly clear, and by 1774, most Americans argued that Parliament had no authority over internal affairs in America. Even English politicians and lawyers, such William Pitt the Elder and Lord Camden, argued that Parliament had no ability to tax the American colonies. In 1776, the American colonies declared their independence and a war of independence ensued, that Britain lost. But what could explain this disagreement over sovereignty? This chapter looks to several factors for explanation. These include the fact of Britain’s uncodified Constitution, which rendered it unclear which laws were in any case ‘constitutional’. There was also disagreement as to how the British Constitution applied in the colonies. Many Americans asserted that only a shared monarch connected American colonies legally to Britain and to each other, and that colonial assemblies were comparable to Parliament. There was, however, no acceptance of this in Britain, where the doctrine of undivided and unlimited sovereignty was increasingly employed by those in power.

At the end of the eighteenth century a wave of revolutionary constitutions engulfs Western Europe and America. Most of these mark a new start and express the tenets of Enlightenment: rule of law, division of power, fundamental rights and the concept of conditional government power ( social contract).

This chapter reads Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad as a Janus-faced text in American literary history that looks back toward the persistent political conundrums illuminated by twentieth-century American fiction and reconfigures them in generative ways for the twenty-first century. Like earlier twentieth-century neo-slave narratives by Ishmael Reed, Octavia E. Butler, and Toni Morrison, Whitehead’s novel critiques a naïve historical story of inevitable Black progress, and it even flirts with the notion that American democracy and African American oppression are inextricable. But Whitehead rejects fatalistic narratives of inevitable injustice by showing how American normative myths can still be politically efficacious. Establishing himself as a key literary figure in contemporary Black political thought, Whitehead uses the speculative fiction genre to transform celebrated concepts in American political theory – e.g., individual freedom, legal equality, constitutional rights, representative democracy, popular sovereignty – by contextualizing them within Black experiences across time. Ultimately, his political vision amounts to a wary optimism, which Whitehead himself has called a politics of “impossible hope.”

Part I collects writings from Washington’s young manhood and early middle age, up to the time he became commander-in-chief of the American army. These materials reveal the public-spiritedness that was a constant throughout Washington’s life, but they also illustrate the most important change in its orientation. As a young man, Washington’s ambition sought distinction in the service of the Crown, while in his maturity that ambition was turned toward defending the rights of the rising American nation from the injustices that arose from British imperial rule.

English political customs, traditions, and institutions profoundly shaped the American founding, so much so that the major difference between them was that, following the break with Britain, the Americans “wrote down” those customs, traditions, and institutions into their constitutions and statutory laws.1 In 1760, both the British people and the American colonists held that the unwritten English Constitution had created and guaranteed the “rights of Englishmen.”2 This ensemble of abstract principles, maxims, and institutional relations gradually came to supersede the comparatively specific claims based on the individual charters of the separate colonies. For example, when the royal governor of Georgia rejected the man elected by the Georgia Assembly as speaker, John Zubly, in 1772, Zubly first cited the history of parliament as support for the assembly’s right to choose whomever it wanted as a presiding officer and then added: “[A]n Englishman I should think [is] entitled to English laws, which I suppose implies Legislation any where and every where in the British dominions, that this right is prior to any charter or instruction, and is held not by instructions to a Governor but is his [in this instance, the colonist’s] natural right.”3

In 1948, with the end of the British Mandate, Israel declared its independence. Israel based its declaration on the right of self-determination and the fact that the League of Nations and the UN had recognised this right. Israel’s legal position was not that these institutions had granted the right of self-determination of the Jewish people, but that they had recognised an existing right. The Declaration did not refer to the borders of the new State nor to its capital. Whether the Declaration created an independent State as from 14 May 1948 depends on an examination of whether Israel, at the time, fulfilled the Montevideo criteria for statehood.

The first Chilean constitutional republican experience of self government is examined, that includes the Declaration of Independence, the first Constitutions and the new efforts in the construction of an idea of citizenship. The First Republic is a search for an Independent Republic (1810-1830) that gives self government. It was also characterized by the development and creation of republican institutions. One of its main moments is the Declaration of Independence and the constitutional experiments of 1818, 1822, 1823 and 1826 that show a process of political trial and error. The consolidation of the First Republic is at last possible in the 1828 Constitution. The rise of new political agents and the end of the First Republic is finally explained

The chapter traces the historical origins of the right to life from antiquity to the modern era. It encompasses the Code of Hammurabi and the American Declaration of Independence as milestones along a long road.

This chapter explores the ways in which the interracial immediatist abolition movement of the early 1830s fashioned a conception of abolition as the fulfillment of commitments made at the time of the Revolution but which subsequent actions had left unmet. Casting themselves as acting in parallel to the founding fathers and expressing concern for the possibility of transmitting an unfulfilled revolutionary settlement to posterity, abolitionists sought to navigate their relationship with the nation’s founding documents. Attempting to systematize this relationship, some came to argue that the Constitution ought to be interpreted in accordance with the Declaration of Independence. Others would go further and argue that the Declaration was more fundamental than the U.S. Constitution itself. Just as earlier arguments had cultivated a sense of American national identity tied to the principle of equality, these variations furthered the association of the claim that “all men are created equal” with the American sense of self and contributed to the formation of a national identity with significant ideological content.

A transformation of the Declaration of Independence’s symbolism in the 1820s that proved useful for those advancing claims on behalf of black Americans. In the first instance, the Declaration became more closely associated with a commitment to equality. In the second instance, the project of unifying the nation around the sacred text of the Declaration had the effect of providing a written expression of American nationalism as a value-laden concept. This chapter traces the ways in which free black writers sought to exploit both opportunities, ultimately generating an understanding of American citizenship that would inform the wider abolitionist movement of the 1830s. These efforts saw free black writers advance claims upon American citizenship with pamphlets, including David Walker’s Appeal, and the first African American owned and operated newspaper in the United States, Freedom’s Journal. Associating this understanding of the Declaration with the U.S. Constitution provided a framework for understanding the Constitution as committed to an expansive notion of the People and provided an important orientating concept for the abolitionist movement as it evolved into the 1830s.

The last chapter lays out Arendt’s interpretation of the American Revolution and her reading of the Declaration of Independence. She argued that--in the absence of established governments--the American colonists had to govern themselves, and the practical experience of self-government led them to non-theoretical but authentic insights into the nature of power and authority. But instead of rethinking traditional theoretical concepts in light of their experiences, they misconceived their experiences by forcing them into the framework of traditional theoretical concepts. So there was a tension between the implicit insights and the explicit theories of the colonists, Arendt argued: “the old understanding of power and authority...led the new experience of power to be channeled into concepts which had just been vacated.” This tension between implicit insight and explicit theory runs through the Declaration of Independence. Arendt’s reading goes beyond Jefferson’s explicit claims in order to bring to light a non-theoretical but authentic understanding of political power and authority implicit in the text of the Declaration.