THE LANGUAGE OF RIGHTS came quite naturally to the colonists; it was, they thought, their native tongue. As many historians have argued – since the eighteenth century – the original English settlers had carried all their rights with them, and passed these rights on to their descendants as a birthright even a patrimony.
The belief that Brits and Americans enjoyed unparalleled liberty in the exercise of their rights permeated their political science and even the popular culture of the time. However, the frequency and enthusiasm with which they celebrated their rights and liberties also gave those terms a rather shoddy impression. In fact, no word was used more with various meanings and values than liberty.
Along with life and property, it was one of the great triad of inalienable natural rights. Yet, for the colonists, liberty was also a state of mind, the sense of personal security that enabled citizens to exercise other rights free from the fear of tyrannical rule. As French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu put it:
“The Political liberty of the subject is a tranquility of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety.”
Liberty was also a behavior that was often defined in relation to its deviant opposite, extravagance or even recklessness. Therefore, much as the concept of rights often implied a set of duties and obligations, so true liberty had to be exercised with restraint. Moreover, thinking systematically about rights involved distinguishing the – inalienable natural rights that individuals could never renounce from those – alienable rights whose exercise was subject to the regulatory power of the state, or in other words, the manner of laws.
Most scholars presume the class of alienable rights comprised all other rights that existed in the state of nature but which had subsequently been placed under the control of society. However, in most activities that constituted the realms of life, liberty, property, and religion were subject to regulation by the state – that is, so far as no obvious landmarks marked the boundaries beyond which its authority could not intrude, if and only if its actions met requirements of law.
We believe that there exists gaps and various silences in the U.S. Constitution and many scholars have sought to reconstruct the larger intellectual context that shaped the contours of American thinking of the eighteenth century. We also believe that without the understanding and influences of Montesquieu, Locke, and Hobbes on their American contemporaries – Madison, Jefferson, Randolph and Adams – furthermore, without reading the colonists’ writings it would be indeed very difficult to understand their reasoning.
Yet, in finale for this installment, one must appreciate that everyone who influenced the Constitution was in fact a person who was the product of The Enlightenment.
