Maintenance of Revolutionary Values

Though the values and institutional structure of the American system of constitutional liberty have to some extent exhibited extraordinary continuity, it has evolved with the growth of the American social and political order and successive political crises. The Revolutionary era saw the emergence of 2 or 3 closely related ideas about man and his relation to the state, which served as the foundations of America's constitutional democracy-the ideas of limited government, natural rights, and the concept of an open society. It is the theory of natural law, natural right, the compact theory of the state, and limited government that Jefferson incorporated in the Declaration of Independence. But it cannot be assumed that the Declaration and the Revolution completed the union between natural rights and human equality. In many respects the sociopolitical structure out of which they came was not democratic at all. For instance, it still tolerated slavery. The Bill of Rights provided a statement of natural and historical rights translated into law. Today, constitutional rights in the areas of equality, the dimensions of an open society, and nationalization of constitutional liberty have changed substantially from those of the Revolutionary era.