highlights:
Preface to 50th anniversary edition
“…the Revolutionary generation created the basic transformation of the meaning of rights on what would prove to be the cusp of emerging modernity.”
“Britain’s ‘constitution’ was famous for its protection of Britons’ freedoms. But what was it? It was what was constituted—a loose bundle of statutes, common law, and sanctioned practices, without explicit boundaries. In the course of the American struggle with Britain a new meaning emerged; the term ‘constitution’ remained but was transformed. It came to mean a written, foundational structure of powers and rights superior to and controlling any subsequent enactments.”
the idea of rights were “indistinguishable in the past from privileges and liberties granted by rulers and municipalities—gifts, as it were, entangled in ancient customs and inscribed in statutes and royal decrees. But as the struggle to find more secure grounds for resistance to Britain’s powers developed, so did the transformation of the nature of rights, from sanctified privileges to the natural endowments of humanity based on the principles of reason and justice. None of the Revolutionary writers sought to repudiate the heritage of common and statutory law. Their aim was to establish the source of writes in the laws of nature and the fundamental endowments of humanity, beyond the reach of legislative powers and executive mandates.”
Bailyn commenting on the “Americans’ obsession with Power”: “It was not one among many concerns; it was their central concern. Power and its ravages engrossed their minds; they wrote about it again and again, elaborately and imaginatively…”
pamphlets from the early 1700s “overflowed with examples of the havoc wrought by power—power unfettered, power released, power allowed to tear at the vitals of free institutions and at the liberties of ordinary folk.”
American colonists were fascinated by once-free states that fell into despotism (like Denmark)