Rights Talk: The Impoverishment Of Political Discourse

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Simon and Schuster, 2008 M06 30 - 242 páginas
Political speech in the United States is undergoing a crisis. Glendon's acclaimed book traces the evolution of the strident language of rights in America and shows how it has captured the nation's devotion to individualism and liberty, but omitted the American traditions of hospitality and care for the community.

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Contenido

TWO The Illusion of Absoluteness
18
THREE The Lone RightsBearer
47
FOUR The Missing Language
76
FIVE The Missing Dimension of Sociality
109
SEVEN Refining the Rhetoric of Rights
171
Notes
185
Index
211
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Página 171 - Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.
Página 118 - Where the State is the only environment in which men can live communal lives, they inevitably lose contact, become detached, and thus society disintegrates. A nation can be maintained only if, between the State and the individual, there is intercalated a whole series of secondary groups near enough to the individuals to attract them strongly in their sphere of action and drag them, in this way, into the general torrent of social life.
Página 23 - THERE is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of . property ; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world} in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.
Página 57 - If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.
Página 33 - The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying " This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
Página 54 - The initiation of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from individuals ; generally at first from some one individual.
Página 18 - THE third absolute right, inherent in every Englishman, is that of property : which consists in the free use, enjoyment, and disposal of all his acquisitions, without any control or diminution, save only by the laws of the land.

Acerca del autor (2008)

Mary Ann Glendon is the Emerita Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University. She is also a former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. Glendon has done work related ot human rights, comparative law, and political theory.

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