This persuasively argued, decidedly partisan work aims to recover the original United States Constitution by describing its genesis, ratification, and mandate from the perspectives of its original framers. Openly challenging contemporary orthodoxy, M. E. Bradford employs principles of legal, histori...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Bibliographische Detailangaben

1. Verfasser:	Bradford, Melvin E. 1934- (VerfasserIn)
Format:	Buch
Sprache:	English
Veröffentlicht:	Athens u.a. Univ. of Georgia Press 1993
Schlagworte:	USA > The United States Constitution Constitutional history > United States Ratifikation USA
Zusammenfassung:	This persuasively argued, decidedly partisan work aims to recover the original United States Constitution by describing its genesis, ratification, and mandate from the perspectives of its original framers. Openly challenging contemporary orthodoxy, M. E. Bradford employs principles of legal, historical, rhetorical, and dramatic analysis to reveal a Constitution notably short on abstract principles and modest in any goal beyond limiting the powers of the government it authorizes. From the beginning of Original Intentions, two sharply divergent convictions about the Constitution emerge. Bradford, arguing from a nomocratic viewpoint, regards the Constitution as an essentially procedural text created expressly to detail how the government may preside over itself not its people. He decries the currently predominant teleologic view, which is based upon the "principles" embodied by the Constitution, and holds that the document was designed to achieve a certain kind of society By this view, he says, our fundamental laws have been blanketed by a heavy layer of ad hoc solutions to problems they were never intended to address, and then further obscured by the melioristic meddlings of judges, legislators, lawyers, scholars, and journalists. Bradford first shows that the Constitutional convention of 1787 was an enterprise guided by the delegates' hesitancy to impose a higher order over their local, practical, and vastly differing interests. Though all the states would ratify the Constitution, he says, each would interpret it in unique ways. Bradford underscores the dearth of lofty idealism among the original framers by detailing British influences on their political ethos. British common law, on which the framers heavily relied, evolved from a tradition of deliberate responses to practical needs and circumstances, not deductions from abstract utopian designs In light of these factors, Bradford examines the ratification debates of Massachusetts, South Carolina, and North Carolina - three states that together exemplified the vast range of interests to be accommodated by the Constitution. Next Bradford highlights classic teleologic distortions. Discussing religion and the first amendment, he establishes a pervasive commitment to Christianity among the framers and challenges our notions about the separation of church and state. Warning against anachronistic readings of the Constitution, Bradford also analyzes the rhetoric of the framers to reinforce our awareness of their desire for a government that would contain their multiplicities, not seek to resolve them. In a reading of the Reconstruction amendments (thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen) Bradford argues that they had only a modest impact on the Constitution's original design
Beschreibung:	XXIV, 165 S.
ISBN:	0820315214