In urging the ratification of the Constitution, James Madison had identified one of the central problems of the new American republic, the rivalry of power and liberty. This text focuses on the various constitutional problems that surrounded the need to provide simultaneously a sufficient degree of union and public authority to guarantee defence and order, and a sufficient degree of individual liberty to satisfy the demands and expectations of private citizens who were wary of the arbitrary powers of government.

The subject of religious liberty in the nineteenth century has been defined by a liberal narrative that has prevailed since Mill and Macaulay to Trevelyan and Commager, to name only a few philosophers and historians who wrote in English. Underlying this narrative is a noble dream--liberty for every person, guaranteed by democratic states that promote social progress though not interfering with those broadly defined areas of life, including religion, that are properly the preserve of free individuals. At the end of the twentieth century, however, it becomes clear that religious liberty...

Throughout recorded history, labor to produce goods and services has been a central concern of society, and questions surrounding the terms of labor--the arrangements under which labor is made to produce and to divide its product with others--are of great significance for understanding the past and the emergence of the modern world. For long periods, much of the world's labor could be considered under the coercive control of systems of slavery or of serfdom, with relatively few workers laboring under terms of freedom, however defined. Slavery and serfdom were systems that controlled not only...

This book examines the many different ways in which women achieved public standing and exercised political power in England from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. It shows how rank, property, and inheritance could confer de facto power on privileged women, and how across the centuries the arrogance of birth and title empowered aristocratic women to overawe enfranchised men of lower social standing. The essays contribute to an ongoing -rethinking of the political, - a consequence in part of the rediscovery of the work of Jurgen Habermas by political and social historians....

The fifteenth and final volume of the series The Making of Modern Freedom, this book explores a variety of issues surrounding questions of human rights and freedom in China. The chapters suggest very significant realms of freedom, with or without the protection of law, in the personal, social, and economic lives of people in China before the twentieth century. This was recognized, and partly codified, in the early twentieth century, when legal experts sought to establish a republic of laws and limits. The process of legal reform, however, would be placed firmly in the service of...

"The name: What does one call thus? What does one understand under the name of name? And what occurs when one gies a name? What does one give then? One does not offer a thing, one delivers nothing, and still something comes to be, which comes down to giving that which one does not have, as Plotinus said of the Good. What happens, above all, when it is necessary to sur-name, renaming there where, precisely, the name comes to be found lacking? What makes the proper name into a sort of sur-name, pseudonym, or cryptonym at once singular and singularly untranslatable?" Jacques Derrida thus poses a...

This volume, one of the books in the "Making of Modern Freedom" series, is a collection of essays by eminent historians who explore the relationship between state finance and political development in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe. They analyze how during this period European states were engaged in nearly continuous warfare and how those warfares produced fiscal crises. As a result, rulers were forced to enter into novel fiscal agreements with their subjects, often providing their subjects more political power, in exchange.

The volume begins with two essays on England....

The nine chapters in this book focus on the various constitutional problems surrounding the need to provide simultaneously a sufficient degree of union and public authority to guarantee defense and order, and a sufficient degree of individual liberty to satisfy the demands and expectations of private citizens who were wary of the arbitrary powers of government.