American Revolution's Emphasis On Individual Rights
The American Revolution was in many ways a conflict over liberty -- a war between the ideology of the old world (as represented by the monarchy and the crown) and the new world (as represented by the Romantic/Enlightenment doctrine illustrated in Thomas Paine's Rights of Man). This paper will discuss the ways in which the early political experiences of our nation's forefathers gave the American political culture a preoccupation with the assertion of individual rights.
Foundational Ideology
The American Revolution was, in a way, a testing ground for the French Revolution that followed -- which gives a better understanding of Revolution in general and the ideas that were at the heart of it. While the Americans drafted their Declaration of Independence in 1776, asserting their individual rights -- the National Assembly of France drafted its Declaration of the Rights of Man a decade later in 1789 -- a document which set the platform for liberty, equality, and fraternity as the cornerstone for politics around the world. Article no. 4 of the French Declaration certainly became part and parcel of the American ethos: "Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights." Article no. 6 would also sum up the American political thought: "Law is the expression of the general will." Such ideas have since, of course, proven themselves to be erroneous. (What, for example, happens when the general will turns bad? Or when the general will is manipulated and incited much like the mob in Julius Caesar? Death by guillotine.).
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