Suchergebnisse

Over the last century and a half, the work of the Constitutional Convention and the motives of the Founding Fathers have been analyzed under a number of different ideological auspices. To one generation of historians, the hand of God was moving in the assembly; under a later dispensation, the dialectic (at various levels of philosophical sophistication) replaced the Deity: "relationships of production" moved into the niche previously reserved for Love of Country. Thus in counterpoint to the Zeitgeist, the Framers have undergone miraculous metamorphoses: at one time acclaimed as liberals and bold social engineers, today they appear in the guise of sound Burkean conservatives, men who in our time would subscribe to Fortune, look to Walter Lippmann for political theory, and chuckle patronizingly at the antics of Barry Goldwater. The implicit assumption is that if James Madison were among us, he would be President of the Ford Foundation, while Alexander Hamilton would chair the Committee for Economic Development.The "Fathers" have thus been admitted to our best circles; the revolutionary ferocity which confiscated all Tory property in reach and populated New Brunswick with outlaws has been converted by the "Miltown School" of American historians into a benign dedication to "consensus" and "prescriptive rights." The Daughters of the American Revolution have, through the ministrations of Professors Boorstin, Hartz, and Rossiter, at last found ancestors worthy of their descendants. It is not my purpose here to argue that the "Fathers" were, in fact, radical revolutionaries; that proposition has been brilliantly demonstrated by Robert R. Palmer in his Age of the Democratic Revolution.

I want to dissent initially from the rather constricting frame of reference that Schubert has established in his paper. He has every right in the world to set rhetorical snares, but I have no intention of walking into them. If I may summarize, Schubert asserts that he is a spokesman for a radical new direction in the study of public law, claiming that the old ways are moribund. He further urges that we should look with envy at the creative function of the social psychologists who supplied the Supreme Court with the banners it carried in Brown v. Board of Education while we were bumbling around with historical and philosophical trivia. He concludes that instead of wasting our time with talmudic disputations on whether the Supreme Court reached the "right" or the "wrong" decisions in specific cases, we should settle down to build a firm "scientific" foundation for our discipline.Not the least amusing aspect of this indictment is that I find myself billed as the defender of the ancien régime, as the de Maistre of public law. Therefore, for the benetfit of the young and impressionistic, let me break loose from Schubert's rhetorical trap: I too think that much of the research done in public law—and, for that matter, in political science generally—has been trivial.