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Thursday, April 7, 2011

Liberty, the Tea Party, and the Founders' Views of Rights


The Tea Party has an overly simplistic view of rights and of history (as their very name attests). I haven't blogged on this topic a while because I was finishing a book about this topic and getting it into print. It is now out. It is a book that takes on the simplified view of rights in the founding period.


If you follow the rhetoric of the Tea Party and the others that share their "liberty-first" philosophy, they often appeal to a concept of natural rights or individual rights that they say is endorsed by the American founders and is evident in the Declaration of Independence. If the founders endorsed natural rights and the Declaration of Independence does the same, then we must do so also.

The fact is that the notion of natural rights is extremely problematic. Anyone with a philosophy background knows that most modern philosophers since the end of the seventeenth century have had significant doubts about natural rights as a concept, even though it was pretty smart and interesting in its time. That story is worth telling in another context.

But what is often misunderstood is that the American founders themselves had doubts about the concept of natural rights. They were reading some of the philosophers like Hume who expressed doubt about John Locke's philosophy of natural right for example. Even Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, may have had significant doubts about natural rights when writing the Declaration.

It is clear, moreover, that there was no single unified view of rights among the founders. Jefferson did not agree with James Wilson or John Adams for example on what the foundation of American rights should be. The Declaration far from declaring a unified view of rights actually is covering up a series of disagreements among the founders on the foundation of American rights.

What does all this mean? It means that the Tea Party and other libertarians and "liberty-first" advocates oversimplify history in attempts to shore up their own philosophy of rights by appealing to the American founding. It is this part of their argument that I demolish in my book Liberty in America's Founding Moment.