"[Book title] covers the constitutional conventions convened in New York, Massachusetts, and Virginia in the 1820s to address fundamental policy issues, such as suffrage, legislative apportionment and representation, governmental structures, and freedom of religion. The clash between democracy, liberty, and property is conspicuous in the debates reprinted here. These particular state conventions are significant for their influence over neighboring states' constitutions and for their forceful debates among such leading statesmen as John Adams, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Marshall."--Jacket.

Before the Civil War, the history of American democracy was state-centered. Under the constitutional system as it then existed, the states had virtually exclusive jurisdiction over almost all matters of concern to the average citizen. State government and state policy were pretty much a reflection of state constitutional systems, and the state constitutions, in turn, were the product of state constitutional conventions. These constitutional conventions were held to frame a body of supreme and fundamental law that defined the government, including its powers and limitations. By the 1820's, time had brought transforming changes in society and new political ideas that demanded expression in fundamental law. New conventions that would liberalize the existing constitutional system were held in which statesmen of a new generation engaged in great debates on the sources and ends of government with the surviving giants of a dying age. They confronted each other on the most controversial issues of the age. The issues varied from state to state, but everywhere they were sharply contested and the debates were the most profound since the first conventions that ratified the Constitution of the United States. In this book, the author focuses on the three greatest conventions of the period, those of Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia. -- From Foreward.

The ideas of ‘predistribution’ and the property-owning democracy have recently emerged as the central features of the progressive social liberal response to the problems of poverty, unemployment, economic insecurity, burgeoning socio-economic inequality, and economic instability, none of which the more familiar institutions of welfare state capitalism seem able effectively to solve. These social liberal proposals for institutional reform have, however, been rejected by ‘neo-classical’ liberals who have attempted to modernize and revitalize the traditional classical liberal case for a set of ‘market democratic’ laissez-faire institutions. This book makes a fresh attempt to demarcate an area of common ground between the positions occupied by classical and social liberals by identifying a set of institutional arrangements to which both can agree, while at the same time recognizing that there will be many important issues about which liberal (and non-liberal) political and social thinkers will continue strongly to disagree. Drawing on ideas and arguments identifiable within a particular branch of the left-libertarian tradition, the book develops market democratic interpretations of the ideas of predistribution and the property-owning democracy, and presents a powerful case for an institutional reform which constitutes a genuinely progressive alternative to more familiar social democratic institutions. By identifying progressive predistributive institutions as essential conditions both for the effective protection of 'market freedom' and for the maximization of the substantive opportunities of the least advantaged members of society, the book shows how these institutions may be justified on grounds which both classical and social liberals may reasonably be expected to endorse.

The formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment have all been attributed to the “early modern” period. Nearly everything about its history remains controversial, but one thing is certain: it left a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history. The concepts of liberty, equality, property, human rights and revolution born in those turbulent centuries continue to shape, and to limit, political discourse today. Assessing the work and background of figures such as Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Spinoza, the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Ellen Wood vividly explores the ideas of the canonical thinkers, not as philosophical abstractions but as passionately engaged responses to the social conflicts of their day.

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