Book Review: Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas and Moral Conflict

The key to understanding the significance of Lincoln's clash with Douglas lies in the former's awareness of what Burt, following H. L. A. Hart, terms the "implicitness" of "concepts" (roughly the prevailing overarching values of a constitutional settlement such as "liberty," "order," "equality" and so on) and the way these are articulated - though never to the point of semantic exhaustion - by specific "conceptions" of them (arrived at by later generations who always have to work out their meaning under different historical conditions). In the American context what matters is the intuitive promissory note sounded by the unequivocal commitment of the Declaration of Independence to the equality of all - and not just some - men (and, "implicitly," women). [...]the concepts of "freedom" and "equality" had been reconceived as no longer dependent on the "unfree" and "unequal" status of others.