Natural Rights, the Common Good, and the American Revolution (America at 250)

Featuring original essays by Robert P. George, Charles R. Kesler, Michael Zuckert, Daniel E. Burns, and Janice Rogers Brown. 

The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance. In the fourth volume of this series, legal scholars and political scientists examine the many ways in which the founding generation understood the “unalienable rights” immortalized by the Declaration of Independence. 

Although the Declaration described the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as a “self-evident” truth, this characterization belied the Revolutionary era’s complex discourse on the origins of political rights and their role in sustaining a political community. 

Delving into these debates reveals how the American Revolution encoded a productive tension between individual rights and communal responsibilities at the nation’s founding.

Daniel E. Burns is an associate professor of politics at the University of Dallas and a visiting fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

Charles R. Kessler is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books.

Michael Zuckert is the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and clinical professor at Arizona State University.