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Featuring original essays by Robert P. George, Charles R. Kesler, Michael Zuckert, Daniel E. Burns, and Janice Rogers Brown.
The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades.
The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance. In the fourth volume of this series, legal scholars and political scientists examine the many ways in which the founding generation understood the “unalienable rights” immortalized by the Declaration of Independence.
Although the Declaration described the right to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness as a “self-evident” truth, this characterization
belied the Revolutionary era’s complex discourse on the origins of political
rights and their role in sustaining a political community.
Delving into these debates reveals how the
American Revolution encoded a productive tension between individual rights and
communal responsibilities at the nation’s founding.
