Rights and Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Structure

Transcending the commonplace that conservative constitutional interpretation is chained to the naked textual content of the doc itself, the eminent political thinker Russell Kirk lays the inspiration for a conservative understanding of the “residing Structure” in a basic fashionable research of the social, cultural, and political inheritance of the American Founding. Respect for the nation’s “unwritten structure”-the collective customs, mores, and conventions of the nation-will, Kirk argues, concurrently restrain judges’ temptations to social engineering from the bench and endow the Structure with the flexibleness essential to survive the passage of a long time and centuries. This reasoned and urbane contribution to our understanding of the Structure confounds facile liberal-conservative dichotomies. First revealed in 1990 as The Conservative Structure, this essential ebook has been completely revised and tremendously expanded, with a brand new introduction by Russell Hittinger. Considered one of Kirk’s most unique works, Rights and Duties attracts a conservative portrait of “a revolution not made however prevented,” of a Structure owing extra to British whiggery and the Frequent Legislation than to Locke and the Enlightenment.