The Rebirth of Liberty

by Clarence B. Carson

Book Overview

A new look at an exciting period in American history by an eminent historian. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0910614555
• ISBN13: 9780910614559
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Foundation for Economic Education
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Age Range: 14 to 17 years
• Grade Range: Grades 9 to 12

Customer Reviews

The essential historical context of the US government

"Weak governments do not make libery and property secure; that is the office of powerful governments internally restrained." - Clarence Carson.In my humble opinion, Clarence Carson is the best intellectual historian of the United States, even though his simple style and gift for essentialization may make him appear less "serious" than the more scholarly authors who love to dazzle their restricted readership with an abundance of notes, sources, dates, statistics and minutely detailed anecdotes, but who tend to get all the crucial conclusions wrong.Carson is a rare, reality-oriented historian who gets virtually all of his fundamentals right, from political philosophy to economics. And even when he errs - as when his deeply held religious beliefs make him disparage man's creative abilities or when he reads a Platonic dualism in the Declaration of Independence - his errors have a way of remaining localized, leaving the flow of his arguments uncorrupted.Just as importantly, he is able to give you the substance of past thinkers without any distortion or gross misrepresentation, refusing for instance to label the US form of government a "democracy" ("the democratic features of the American political system are accidents... [Its] essence... is limited government" pp257-8) and providing a clear and accurate knowledge of the original intent of the Founders that puts to shame the more in-depth and usually more myopic scholarly studies.Published in 1973, *The Rebirth of Liberty: the American Republic 1760-1800* covers about the same ground as the first volume and part of the second volume of Carson's *Basic History of the United States*, or section II of his *Basic American Government*, though with a more chronological approach. It deals with the influence of the English heritage, the colonial experience and the Enlightenment on the political ideas of the Founders; chronicles the failures of Great Britain's mercantilism and the consequent acts of rebellion of the colonies, culminating in the winning of the War of Independence; and finally moves on to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the ratification debates and the adoption of the Bill of Rights, ending with two short chapters on the important political decisions made during the first few presidencies, and slightly overstepping the bounds of the subtitle with such court decisions as Marbury vs. Madison and Fletcher vs. Peck.Though he is at his most penetrating when dealing with intellectual history and tends to prove less brilliant and original as soon as he stoops to the more factual levels, Carson delivers here an excellent account of the founding of the US government which provides the reader with the essential context for understanding the beliefs and intentions of its creators- an effort that is all the more laudable as those beliefs and intentions have been drowned in the liberal misinterpretations of the twentieth century.The book is complemented by 60 pages of landmark documents, from the Decla