File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9803, message 964


Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 21:41:35 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Tyranny of the Minority



Charles says that Mason, Madison, and other revolutionary American elites
_only_ supported the Bill of Rights under pressure from below. This is
misleading. They did support it under pressure from below, because it
existed, but they also believed in it. Mason was passionate on the
subject. Madison became so. They didn't have to be browbeaten. Charles
also says that states rights wasn't the big thing behind the BoR. Au
contraire. It was almost the only thing behind the BoR. His example of the
2d amendment is a case in point. There's almost no legislative history,
but responsible, as opposed to gun nut, analysis supports the idea that
the issue with the 2A was the right to have a state militia. It goes with
the distrust of he a standing army occasioned by the record of British
colonialism. 

I don't know what bourgeois historians Charles has in mind who downplay
the activity of those whom Charles anachronistically calls "the masses."
Surely not Gordon Wood, the premier historian of the revolution, for
example. Aptheker's not bad, although he's a tad doctrinaire and, at this
point, not entirely up to speedw ith the latest scholarship. But many
bourgeois historians are quite clear on the rule of thea ctive public. In
view of the Antifederalist debates, one could hardly not be and still be a
serious historian.

--jks





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