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 --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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