Pictures of America

Published Posthumously Gordon S. Wood. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Pp. x, 447. $27.50. Who shall write the history of the American Revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it? Gordon Wood has certainly taken John Adams\u27s despairing question to heart. He has not tried to write the history of the American Revolution. Instead, he has offered us three verbal photographs to illustrate what America was like before, during, and after the Revolution. The people in the last of the pictures have no features in common with those represented in the first one, which is the point that Wood wishes to make. America was transformed in the course of becoming an independent nation. By 1820 America had, moreover, not just changed radically, but it had become uniquely democratic and egalitarian in its politics and daily manners. In these respects it was and remains unlike any other country in the world. To make his before and after argument effective, Wood has chosen to write the equivalent of group portraits, one after the other, not a narrative. It is unlike a movie, in which a story unfolds in motion, effects and causes following one another imperceptibly. just as even revolutionary social change is supposed to move. In the first picture, Monarchy, a portly, bewigged, decoratively attired, and stem patriarch, sits surrounded by offspring and dependents of various kinds, all in deferential attitudes. His lady sits demurely at his side, the oldest son a bit closer to him than the other children. There might be some black house slave and white servant hovering in the background. The second picture, Republicanism, is of several tall and lean males, dressed quite unostentatiously, though not without elegance. They do not put on togas, for theirs is a modem, not a classical style, but many wear swords and other military insignia. Their wives, however, do wear very decoltée gowns inspired by Roman models, and they seem rather more lively than their predecessors. The young people are less stiff and the older and younger ones are all mixed together. There may be fewer white servants, but the black slaves are in exactly the same positions as in the first picture. The third picture, Democracy, is of an open-air barbecue. There is no order among these people at all. They are not even posing to be painted, being far too busy having a good time and consuming all kinds of local delicacies. Dress is casual and so are table manners, if any. Only a couple of black slaves are to be seen, doing the cooking and holding a baby. In the far distance we do notice a cotton field where a lot of black people seem to be very busy. The picture itself is painted with far more skill than the two earlier ones, because the arts and crafts have come a long way in this new consumer society. This is not, perhaps, exactly what Wood meant to show, but it is what one might well see in his three representations of America. And they certainly do serve his main aim: to highlight the changes that in a brief fifty-odd years turned the people of this country from obedient subjects of a monarch into free citizens of a democracy

Human rights, legitimacy, political judgement

This paper grapples with Bernard Williams’s prima vista enigmatic assertion that ‘[w]hether it is a matter of good philosophical sense to treat a practice as a violation of human rights, and whether it is politically good sense, cannot ultimately constitute two separate questions’. Though Williams’s approach to thinking about human rights has a number of affinities with other ‘political’ and ‘minimalist’ understandings, we highlight its distinctive features and argue that it has significant implications for our understanding of human rights along a number of key dimensions. We then proceed to explain how Williams’s way of thinking about human rights coheres with certain aspects of the reasoning of one of the most important international human rights courts, to wit, the European Court of Human Rights. This lends further plausibility to the view that a politically realistic understanding of human rights, of the kind urged by Williams, should be taken seriously, since it is a plausible candidate for the explanation of important aspects of human rights practices. We close by examining the suggestion that thinking in these terms is worryingly conservative

The bitter taste of payback: the pathologising effect of TV revengendas

The thirst for vengeance is a timeless subject in popular entertainment. One need only think of Old Testament scripture; Shakespeare\u27s Hamlet; Quentin Tarantino\u27s Kill Bill or the TV series Revenge, and we immediately conjure up images of a protagonist striving to seek justice to avenge a heinous wrong committed against them. These texts, and others like it, speak to that which is ingrained in our human spirit about not only holding others responsible for their actions, but also about retaliation as payback. This article seeks to problematise the way the popular revenge narrative effectively constructs the vendetta as a guilty pleasure through which the audience can vicariously gain satisfaction, while at the same time perpetuates law\u27s rhetoric that personal desires for vengeance are to be repressed and denied. In particular, the article will demonstrate the way such popular revenge narratives contribute to the pathologising of human desire for payback

The Rule of Law is Dead! Long Live the Rule of Law!

Polls show that a significant proportion of the public considers judges to be political. This result holds whether Americans are asked about Supreme Court justices, federal judges, state judges, or judges in general. At the same time, a large majority of the public also believes that judges are fair and impartial arbiters, and this belief also applies across the board. In this paper, I consider what this half-law-half-politics understanding of the courts means for judicial legitimacy and the public confidence on which that legitimacy rests. Drawing on the Legal Realists, and particularly on the work of Thurman Arnold, I argue against the notion that the contradictory views must be resolved in order for judicial legitimacy to remain intact. A rule of law built on contending legal and political beliefs is not necessarily fair or just. But it can be stable. At least in the context of law and courts, a house divided may stand