Rights Talk and Rights

Abstract

This is an age of rights. Though often deplored by all variety of ideologues (e.g., T. Smith; MacIntyre, 64; Tushnet; Pollis and Schwab), rights discourse, like Sherman’s army, has marched relentlessly on, overwhelming everything in its path. The American concern with rights, however, is hardly a new thing. The General Assembly of Maryland in 1638 declared that all free persons of the province “Shall have and enjoy all such rights, liberties immunities, privileges and free customs within the province as any natural born subject of England” (W.H. Brown, 41); in 1641 the Massachusetts colony legislated no less than seventeen “rights, liberties, and privileges” (Collections, 216-19); and in 1677 West New Jersey issued a charter prominently featuring rights (Boyd, 83–89). In short, America’s aggressive preoccupation with rights is a theme sounded since the society’s earliest days. As one scholar declared, “No thread runs through the tangle of American politics more clearly than rights” (Zuckert, Republic, 10). In controversy after controversy—gun control, same sex marriage, sexual harassment, above all, abortion—rights continue to frame and dominate current discourse. An academic and former presidential national security adviser, looking beyond this nation’s borders, called rights “the single most magnetic idea of the contemporary time” (Brzezinski, 256).