Constitutional Interpretation Quotes

I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

[quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots

The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates—the course of events—over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone’s.

But gay marriage is coming to America first and foremost because marriage here is a secular concern, not a religious one. The objection to gay marriage is almost invariably biblical, but nobody's legal vows in this country are defined by interpretation of biblical verse - or at least, not since the Supreme Court stood up for Richard and Mildred Loving. A church wedding ceremony is a nice thing, but it is neither required for legal marriage in America nor does it constitute legal marriage in America. What constitutes legal marriage in this country is that critical piece of paper that you and your betrothed must sign and then register with the state. The morality of your marriage may indeed rest between you and God, but it's that civic and secular paperwork which makes your vows official here on earth. Ultimately, then, it is the business of America's courts, not America's churches, to decide the rules of matrimonial law, and it is in those courts that the same-sex marriage debate will finally be settled.

So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a “rational” or “realistic” view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy.

Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "... a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution?

Never accept the conservative interpretation of the Constitution. Never accept the conservative limitations placed on our political, civil, and social rights. They have literally always been wrong, and they are wrong now. Justice is not one constitutional option among many—it is a requirement of a free and equal society. Demand nothing less.

All so-called ‘quantitative’ data, when scrutinized, turn out to be composites of ‘qualitative’ – i.e., contextually located and indexical – interpretations produced by situated researchers, coders, government officials and others. The

You do not have to think very hard to figure out what happens to a democratic society (more accurately a democratic republic) when long-standing interpretations of the 'rules of law' are mangled to reflect the personal desires of a handful of extremely wealthy people…

The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted…Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature…we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. [Final passage in "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, by Roland Barthes, Trans. Stephen Heath (1977)]

Hamilton was not the master builder of the Constitution: the laurels surely go to James Madison. He was, however, its foremost interpreter, starting with The Federalist and continuing with his Treasury tenure, when he had to expound constitutional doctrines to accomplish his goals. He lived, in theory and practice, every syllable of the Constitution. For that reason, historian Clinton Rossiter insisted that Hamilton’s “works and words have been more consequential than those of any other American in shaping the Constitution under which we live.

Gradually it became clear that it is a fundamental error to try to give the sexual act a psychological interpretation, to attribute to it a psychic meaning as if it were a neurotic symptom. But this is what the psychoanalysts did. On the contrary: any idea occurring in the course of the sexual act only has the effect of hindering one's absorption in the excitation. Furthermore, such psychological interpretations of genitality constitute a denial of genitality as a biological function. By composing it of non-genital excitations, one denies the existence of genitality. The function of the orgasm, however, had revealed the qualitative difference between genitality and pregenitality. Only the genital apparatus can provide orgasm and can discharge sexual energy completely. Pregenitality, on the other hand, can only increase vegetative tensions. One readily sees the deep rift which formed here in psychoanalytic concepts.

The Bible stands as the supreme Constitution for all mankind, its laws applying equally to all who live under its domain, without exception or special interpretation.

originalism is the worst form of constitutional interpretation, except for all the others.

In a country ruled by laws, it seemed to me that nothing was more important than removing politics from the process of choosing judges. During previous administrations in California, governors had often handed out judgeships to friends and cronies like prizes at a company picnic. Not only had this produced a lot of inferior judges, it had placed a number of partisans on the bench who believed that putting on the black robes of a judge gave them a license to rewrite the laws. I wanted judges who would interpret the Constitution, not rewrite it.

judicial review has permitted the Justices of the Supreme Court to impose their own biases, prejudices, and desires on the rest of the nation under the guise of constitutional interpretation.

By their actions, the Founding Fathers made clear that their primary concern was religious freedom, not the advancement of a state religion. Individuals, not the government, would define religious faith and practice in the United States. Thus the Founders ensured that in no official sense would America be a Christian Republic. Ten years after the Constitutional Convention ended its work, the country assured the world that the United States was a secular state, and that its negotiations would adhere to the rule of law, not the dictates of the Christian faith. The assurances were contained in the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797 and were intended to allay the fears of the Muslim state by insisting that religion would not govern how the treaty was interpreted and enforced. John Adams and the Senate made clear that the pact was between two sovereign states, not between two religious powers.

This Is My Creed I believe first in God, the same God in which my ancestors believed. I believe in Jesus Christ and that he is my saviour. Second, I believe in the Constitution of the Republic of the United States of America, without interpretation, as it was written and meant to work. I have given my sacred oath “to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic.” I intend to fulfill that oath. Third, I believe in the family unit and, in particular, my family unit. I have sworn that I will give my life, if it is required, in defense of God, the Constitution, or my family. Fourth, I believe that any man without principles that he is ready and willing to die for at any given moment is already dead and is of no use or consequence whatsoever. William Cooper August 3, 1990

orthodox Christianity in the Western world today too greatly slights the mysticism and mystical principles which are fundamental to Christianity and which constituted the pristine Christianity of ancient times. In other words, too much thought is given to the literal meaning of words and the material interpretation of all of the principles involved in Christianity, which leaves almost a total neglect of the pure mysticism that makes possible a real understanding or spiritual comprehension of Christianity in its original form.

In a direct response to African Americans patrolling Oakland, California, and “copwatching,” Republicans in California passed the Mulford Act, which banned open carry of loaded firearms in California. Who signed that law? Republican patron saint and then governor of California Ronald Reagan. The absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment is new, but using gun rights or gun control, as necessary, to maintain racial dominance is old.

In 1905, the Supreme Court of the United States applied the rule to the country’s founding document: “The Constitution is a written instrument. As such its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted it means now.

Before the Thunderhead, governments had constitutions and massive tomes of laws - yet even then, they were forever debated and challenged and manipulated. Wars were fought over the different interpretations of the same doctrine.

Along with such things as free and regular elections and an independent judiciary empowered to interpret the constitution (not necessarily written), civil disobedience used with due restraint and sound judgment helps to maintain and strengthen just institutions.

He interprets the desires of the great peasant mass to be owners of land, owners of their means of production, of their animals, of all that which they have long yearned to call their own, of that which constitutes their life and will also serve as their cemetery.

child was left out in the cold, bearing the stigma of being different. It is this one child that our Constitution is concerned about—his tranquillity, his health, his safety, his conscience. What a kindly old document it is, and how brightly it shines, through interpretation after interpretation!

But I bring up my background in the law because hatred is a pretty big reason I’ve written this book. Not the healthiest emotion, I know, but for me it’s clarifying. What conservatives do and try to do through the Constitution and the law is disgusting. They use the law to humiliate people, to torture people, and to murder people, and tell you they’re just “following orders” from the Constitution. They frustrate legislation meant to help people, free people, or cure people, and they tell you it’s because of “doctrinal interpretative framework.” They use the very same legal arguments that have been used to justify slavery, segregation, and oppression for four hundred years on this continent and tell you it’s the only “objective” way of interpreting the law.

model-dependent realism. It is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth.

The Constitution is a limitation of the government, not on private individuals--that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government--that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens' protection against the government. Instead of being a protector of man's rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator; instead of guarding freedom, the government is establishing slavery; instead of protecting men from the initiators of physical force, the government is initiating physical force and coercion in any manner and issue it pleases; instead of serving as the instrument of objectivity in human relationships, the government is creating a deadly, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of nonobjective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats; instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim--so that we are fast approaching the stage of ultimate inversion; the stage where the government is "free" to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may only act by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of humanity, the stage of rule by brute force.

Very great, in short, is the prerogative of constitutive instances; for they are of much use in the forming of definitions (especially particular definitions) and in the division and partition of natures; with regard to which it was not ill said by Plato, "That he is to be held as a god who knows well how to define and to divide.

I can’t believe you would represent a killer like that Jake. I thought you were one of us. xxx ‘Gotta have a lawyer, Helen. You can’t put the boy in the gas chamber if he doesn’t have a lawyer. Surely, you understand.’ xxx ‘...I can’t imagine doing that for a living, representing killers and child rapists and such.’ ‘How often do you read the Constitution?’ ‘...the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, says that a person accused of a serious crime must have a lawyer. And that’s the law of the land.

despite the experience of other indigenous societies whose precolonial religious identities have been either annihilated or reduced to a minority by the coloniser, in Bharat, the failure of the very same coloniser to significantly convert the indigenous population to his faith is interpreted as proof of his secular and purely mercantile intent.

A Supreme Court Justice writing about constitutional theory is like a dog walking on his hind legs; the wonder is not that it is done well but that it is done at all.

This is what originalists do when confronted with an area of law that was originally vague or open for interpretation: they make some shit up.

The Court has a special responsibility to ensure that the Constitution works in practice. While education, including the transmission of our civic values from one generation to the next, must play the major role in maintaining public confidence in the Court's decisions, the Court too must help maintain public acceptance of its own legitimacy. It can do this best by helping ensure that the Constitution remains "workable" in a broad sense of the term. Specifically, it can and should interpret the Constitution in a way that works for the people of today.

Wilson argued further, as he had to, that the federal courts are not bound to the Constitution. “The weightiest import of the matter is seen only when it is remembered that the courts are the instruments of the nation’s growth, and that the way in which they serve that use will have much to do with the integrity of every national process. If they determine what powers are to be exercised under the Constitution, they by the same token determine also the adequacy of the Constitution in respect of the needs and interests of the nation; our conscience in matters of law and our opportunity in matters of politics are in their hands.”10 Moreover, the only legitimate opinions the federal courts can render are those that endorse and promote the expansion of federal power. “[T]hat if they had interpreted the Constitution in its strict letter, as some proposed, and not in its spirit, like the charter of a business corporation and not like the charter of a living government, the vehicle of a nation

Some have argued that as language is the medium of knowledge, that which comes in the form of language constitutes a text; since language is interpreted by the individual, the reading by the individual gives meaning to the text; therefore each time a text is read by a different individual it acquires a fresh meaning. Taken to its logical conclusion, this denies any generally accepted meaning of a text and is implicitly a denial of attempts at historical representation or claims to relative objectivity, since the meaning would change with each reading. However, the prevalent views are more subtle.

For Ginsburg, therefore, the #MeToo movement, in which women used social media and other platforms to demand the same respect in the workplace as their male colleagues, was a vindication of her vision that women should empower themselves by joining the workplace in numbers and refusing to tolerate unequal treatment, intentional or unintentional. Ginsburg believes that the Constitution should be interpreted to root out unconscious biases that subordinate women. But as she recognized decades ago, true equality requires that men and women work together to root out unconscious bias in families and in the workplace.

Soteriological concepts are like aesthetic concepts in this respect. They’re always subject to multiple interpretations, and their meaning is constituted by the communities of practice and thought in which they figure.

The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution, – it will be from no lack of constitutional powers on its part, but only because the President has the nation behind him, and the Congress has not.” “The chief instrumentality by which the law of the Constitution has been extended to cover the facts of national development has of course been judicial interpretation, – the decisions of the courts. The process of formal amendment of the Constitution was made so difficult by provisions of the Constitution itself that it has seldom been feasible to use it; and the difficulty of formal amendment has undoubtedly made the courts more liberal, not to say lax, in their interpretation than they would otherwise have been. The whole business of adaptation has been theirs, and they have undertaken it with open minds, sometimes even with boldness and a touch of audacity...” “The old theory of the sovereignty of the States, which used so to engage our passions, has lost its vitality. The war between the States established at least this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers... We are impatient of state legislatures because they seem to us less representative of the thoughtful opinion of the country than Congress is. We know that our legislatures do not think alike, but we are not sure that our people do not think alike...

To not do so because some old dead white people didn’t have the knowledge or decency to do the same is not an alternative theory of legal interpretation. It’s the promulgation of evil hiding behind the banality of cowardice.

In such revisions of history lay the roots of the noble Lost Cause—the belief that the South didn’t lose, so much as it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert E. Lee was a contemporary King Arthur; that slavery, to be sure a benevolent institution, was never central to the South’s true designs. Historical lies aside, the Lost Cause presented to the North an attractive compromise. Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks. That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself.

The naive view of reality therefore is not compatible with modern physics. To deal with such paradoxes we shall adopt an approach that we call model-dependent realism. It is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth.

As one leading Supreme Court scholar, Sanford Levinson, has noted, Supreme Court cases necessarily deal only with the “litigated Constitution,” those provisions that are open to interpretation and become fodder for lawyers and judges.

The Right is General - It might be supposed from the phraseology of this provision that the right to keep and bear arms was only guaranteed to the militia but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent. The militia as has been elsewhere explained consists of those persons who under the law are liable to the performance of military duty and are officered and enrolled for service when called upon. But the law may make provision for the enrollment of all who are fit to perform military duty or of a small number only or it may wholly omit to make any provision at all and if the right were limited to those enrolled the purpose of this guaranty might be defeated altogether by the action or neglect to act of the government it was meant to hold in check. The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is that the people from whom the militia must be taken shall have the right to keep and bear arms and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose.

In public at least, Roberts himself purports to have a different view of the Court than his conservative sponsors. "Judges are like umpires," he said at his confirmation hearing. "Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them." Elsewhere, Roberts has often said, "Judges are not politicians." None of this is true. Supreme Court justices are nothing at all like baseball umpires. It is folly to pretend that the awesome work of interpreting the Constitution, and thus defining the rights and obligations of American citizenship, is akin to performing the rote […] task of calling balls and strikes. When it comes to the core of the Court's work, determining the contemporary meaning of the Constitution, it is ideology, not craft or skill, that controls the outcome of cases.

Theories in the natural sciences which have been replaced by others which do the same job better are of no interest to the current practice of science. This cannot be the case where those theories have helped to constitute what they interpret or explicate. The

But I bring up my background in the law because hatred is a pretty big reason I’ve written this book. Not the healthiest emotion, I know, but for me it’s clarifying. What conservatives do and try to do through the Constitution and the law is disgusting. They use the law to humiliate people, to torture people, and to murder people, and tell you they’re just “following orders” from the Constitution. They frustrate legislation meant to help people, free people, or cure people, and they tell you it’s because of “doctrinal interpretative framework.” They use the very same legal arguments that have been used to justify slavery, segregation, and oppression for four hundred years on this continent and tell you it’s the only “objective” way of interpreting the law. Most legal stories

Unfortunately, the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government have become increasingly concerned with their image and their political parties, have drifted away from strict interpretations of the Constitution, and have substituted their own ideologies for the original vision. As a result, our government produces massively complicated taxation schemes, impossibly intricate and uninterpretable health care laws, and other intrusive measures instead of being a watchful guardian of our rights. Instead of providing an environment that allows diligent people to thrive on the basis of their own hard work and entrepreneurship, our government has taken on the role of trying to care for everyone’s needs and redistributing the fruits of everyone’s labors in a way consistent with its own ideology.

Both Jefferson and Madison remained convinced to the end of their lives that all parts of America’s government had equal authority to interpret the fundamental law of the Constitution—all departments had what Madison called “a concurrent right to expound the constitution.

As fine a document as the Constitution is, the Antifederalists, who were not frivolous men, raised some prescient criticisms. Patrick Henry was concerned that the “general welfare” clause would someday be interpreted to authorize practically any federal power that might be imagined.

the U.S. Supreme Court decides an issue—for example, interpreting the Constitution to determine a woman had the right in consultation with her doctor to terminate a pregnancy—that decision cannot be overturned or modified by any state or federal law, only by the U.S. Supreme Court itself.8

Then you don't think the artist works from his intelligence?" "No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him what constitutes material. But after all every writer writes because it's his mode of living.

Those who have studied the working of the American Constitution know that the Supreme Court is part of the forces engaged in the protection of the plutocracy. But of the men who know this, some are on the side of the plutocracy, and therefore do nothing to weaken the traditional reverence for the Supreme Court, while others are discredited in the eyes of ordinary quiet citizens by being said to be subversive and Bolshevik. A considerable further career of obvious partisanship will be necessary before a Luther will be able to attack successfully the authority of the official interpreters of the Constitution.

By judicial conservative, I mean a judge who does not advance any political or policy preferences, but whose approach to constitutional and statutory interpretation involves fidelity to the text of the Constitution and adherence to the original understanding of that document or to the intent of its drafters.

This problem arises from the imperfection of human nature, apparent in rulers as well as in ruled, and if the principle which attempts to solve it be admitted as a principle of importance in the formation of the best constitution, then the starting-point of politics will be man's actual imperfection, not his ideal nature. Instead, then, of beginning with a state which would express man's ideal nature, and adapting it as well as may be to man's actual shortcomings from that ideal, we must recognise that the state and all political machinery are as much the expression of man's weakness as of his ideal possibilities.

Progressives did not like the antiquated thinking that saw the Constitution as a barrier to government expansion. The "living Constitution" was born. That benign-sounding phrase (coined later) was conjured up to justify changing the Constitution, without formal amendment, from a limit on power to a blank check. What was impermissible to the federal government by an earlier interpretation became permissible once the Constitution was construed as a evolving document. But by that philosophy, the Constitution is no limit on government power at all. A constitutional government that defines its own powers is a contradiction in terms.

Now, early in 1865, the war is over. The North does not especially want free Negroes, it wants trade and wealth. The South does not want a particular interpretation of the Constitution. It wants cheap Negro labor and the political and social power based on it. Had there been no Negroes, there would have been no war. Had no Negroes survived the war, peace would have been difficult because of hatred, loss and bitter fried. But its logical path would have been straight. The South would have returned to its place in congress with less than its former representation because of the growing North and West. These areas of growing manufacture and agriculture, railroad building and corporations, would have held the political power over the South until the South united with the new insurgency of the West or the Eastern democratic ideals. Industrialization might even have brought a third party representing labor and raised the proletariat to dominance.

Nor was he less blamable for the manner in which he constituted the ephori; for these magistrates take cognisance of things of the last importance, and yet they are chosen out of the people in general; so that it often happens that a very poor person is elected to that office, who, from that circumstance, is easily bought.

Attempting to resolve questions of interpretation by deferring to the intentions of the Framers of the Constitution leads to several practical and philosophical difficulties. First, the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, was not written by one person but was arrived at through a process of debate, politicking, and compromise. It may be that the various participants in that process had different intentions about what the amendment should mean and how it should be implemented; those intentions may even have been contradictory. Moreover, some would argue that even if the Constitution had one author with one coherent intention as to its meaning and future implementation, that intention could never be completely accessible to judges, or even historians, two centuries later. Finally, assuming for the sake of argument that the Constitutions; Framers did have a unitary, discoverable intention as to how it should be implemented in a particular case, it is not clear that that intention should necessarily govern constitutional interpretation in the late twentieth century, a profoundly different time and society from that of the Framers. The Constitution endures because it is a vehicle for the most central values of American society; but those values necessarily evolve as society changes.

For millions of Arabs and Muslims, this universe of abstract systems, this world of Western freedom and individualism, constitutes the soullessness of modernity. The attack on the World Trade Center, in this interpretation, was not so much an attack on the United States, but on modernity—secular, non-tribal modernity—itself.

Another view of the Constitution was put forward early in the twentieth century by the historian Charles Beard (arousing anger and indignation, including a denunciatory editorial in the New York Times). He wrote in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution: Inasmuch as the primary object of a government, beyond the mere repression of physical violence, is the making of the rules which determine the property relations of members of society, the dominant classes whose rights are thus to be determined must perforce obtain from the government such rules as are consonant with the larger interests necessary to the continuance of their economic processes, or they must themselves control the organs of government. In short, Beard said, the rich must, in their own interest, either control the government directly or control the laws by which government operates. Beard applied this general idea to the Constitution, by studying the economic backgrounds and political ideas of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draw up the Constitution. He found that a majority of them were lawyers by profession, that most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping, that half of them had money loaned out at interest, and that forty of the fifty-five held government bonds, according to the records of the Treasury Department. Thus, Beard found that most of the makers of the Constitution had some direct economic interest in establishing a strong federal government: the manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the moneylenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded Indian lands; slaveowners needed federal security against slave revolts and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide taxation, to pay off those bonds. Four groups, Beard noted, were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interests of those groups. He wanted to make it clear that he did not think the Constitution was written merely to benefit the Founding Fathers personally, although one could not ignore the $150,000 fortune of Benjamin Franklin, the connections of Alexander Hamilton to wealthy interests through his father-in-law and brother-in-law, the great slave plantations of James Madison, the enormous landholdings of George Washington. Rather, it was to benefit the groups the Founders represented, the “economic interests they understood and felt in concrete, definite form through their own personal experience.

At an NRA annual meeting in Cincinnati in 1977, Second Amendment “absolutists” took control of the NRA from previous leaders who thought the organization was really there to protect marksmen. Gun nuts call this event the Revolt at Cincinnati. Our modern epidemic of mass shootings can, more or less, be traced to these yahoos winning control of that organization. The ammosexuals reformed the NRA from the generally benign conglomeration of Bambi killers to the grotesque weapon of mass destruction we know it to be today. It was this new NRA that invented the radical rationalization of the Second Amendment as a right to armed self-defense. It was this new NRA that gained political supremacy in the Republican party. It was this new NRA that got Ronald Reagan, who once signed one of the most sweeping gun restrictions in the nation, to sign the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, an act that rolled back many of the restrictions from the Gun Control Act. The NRA’s wholesale reimagining of the Second Amendment hasn’t just lured Republican politicians, it’s become part of the gospel of Republican judges. The Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, the two outside interest groups most responsible for telling Republican judges how to rule, have fully adopted an absolutist, blood-soaked interpretation of the Second Amendment. These groups of alleged “textualists” read “well regulated militia” clear out of the text of the Amendment. Instead, they substitute self-defense as the “original purpose” of the language. There was an original purpose to the Second Amendment, but it wasn’t to keep people safe. It was to preserve white supremacy and slavery.

For to constitute Happiness, there must be, as we have said, complete virtue and a complete life: for many changes and chances of all kinds arise during a life, and he who is most prosperous may become involved in great misfortunes in his old age, as in the heroic poems the tale is told of Priam: but the man who has experienced such fortune and died in wretchedness, no man calls happy. Are we then to call no man happy while he lives, and, as Solon would have us, look to the end? And again, if we are to maintain this position, is a man then happy when he is dead? or is not this a complete absurdity, specially in us who say Happiness is a working of a certain kind?

Absolutely nothing in the Constitution nor in the Bill of Rights states or even implies any such power leading to this interpretation. “Sovereign government” is nowhere to be found in either document. Only a limited and critically defined sovereignty was allowed the federal government; all other issues of sovereignty were reserved for the states or the people.

Let's press ahead a little further by sketching out a few variations among short shorts: ONE THRUST OF INCIDENT. (Examples: Paz, Mishima, Shalamov, Babel, W. C. Williams.) In these short shorts the time span is extremely brief, a few hours, maybe even a few minutes: Life is grasped in symbolic compression. One might say that these short shorts constitute epiphanies (climactic moments of high grace or realization) that have been tom out of their contexts. You have to supply the contexts yourself, since if the contexts were there, they'd no longer be short shorts. LIFE ROLLED UP. (Examples: Tolstoy's 'Alyosha the Pot,' Verga's 'The Wolf,' D. H. Lawrence's 'A Sick Collier.') In these you get the illusion of sustained narrative, since they deal with lives over an extended period of time; but actually these lives are so compressed into typicality and paradigm, the result seems very much like a single incident. Verga's 'Wolf' cannot but repeat her passions, Tolstoy's Alyosha his passivity. Themes of obsession work especially well in this kind of short short. SNAP-SHOT OR SINGLE FRAME. (Examples: Garda Marquez, Boll, Katherine Anne Porter.) In these we have no depicted event or incident, only an interior monologue or flow of memory. A voice speaks, as it were, into the air. A mind is revealed in cross-section - and the cut is rapid. One would guess that this is the hardest kind of short short to write: There are many pitfalls such as tiresome repetition, being locked into a single voice, etc. LIKE A FABLE. (Examples: Kafka, Keller, von Kleist, Tolstoy's 'Three Hermits.') Through its very concision, this kind of short short moves past realism. We are prodded into the fabulous, the strange, the spooky. To write this kind of fable-like short short, the writer needs a supreme self-confidence: The net of illusion can be cast only once. When we read such fable-like miniatures, we are prompted to speculate about significance, teased into shadowy parallels or semi allegories. There are also, however, some fables so beautifully complete (for instance Kafka's 'First Sorrow') that we find ourselves entirely content with the portrayed surface and may even take a certain pleasure in refusing interpretation. ("Introduction")

The three terms of Federalist rule had been full of dazzling accomplishments that Republicans, with their extreme apprehension of federal power, could never have achieved. Under the tutelage of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, the Federalists had bequeathed to American history a sound federal government with a central bank, a funded debt, a high credit rating, a tax system, a customs service, a coast guard, a navy, and many other institutions that would guarantee the strength to preserve liberty. They activated critical constitutional doctrines that gave the American charter flexibility, forged the bonds of nationhood, and lent an energetic tone to the executive branch in foreign and domestic policy. Hamilton, in particular, bound the nation through his fiscal programs in a way that no Republican could have matched. He helped to establish the rule of law and the culture of capitalism at a time when a revolutionary utopianism and a flirtation with the French Revolution still prevailed among too many Jeffersonians. With their reverence for states’ rights, abhorrence of central authority, and cramped interpretation of the Constitution, Republicans would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to achieve these historic feats. Hamilton

There is also another defect in his laws worthy of censure, which Plato has given in his book of Laws; that the whole constitution was calculated only for the business of war: it is indeed excellent to make them conquerors; for which reason the preservation of the state depended thereon. The destruction of it commenced with their victories: for they knew not how to be idle, or engage in any other employment than war.

originalist” philosophy that advocates interpreting the Constitution by what the words meant when written “stems from two features of the constitution: (1) that one of its principal purposes is to constrain those who make and enforce laws so as to protect the rights retained by the people, and for this reason, (2) it is put in writing,” meaning all law is constrained by the document itself to protect individual rights.

The double standard exposed the left’s agenda of purging Judeo-Christian values and history from the public schools. If those on the left were genuinely concerned about the integrity of the First Amendment (as they interpret it), the same alleged “wall” that separates church and state would also separate mosque and state. Instead, the left celebrates not just teaching about Islam but actively proselytizing for Islam in the public schools. Why? It’s because Christian doctrines were foundational to the American Republic, which the left despises. Fundamentalist Islam has declared war on “infidel” cultures like America’s, with its Judeo-Christian respect for individual liberty and constitutional restraints on the power of government. On their hatred of Christianity and contempt for the Constitution, both the left and political Islam agree.19

Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and administered, to which you have to go.

States can provide more protection of rights under their constitutions than exists under the U.S. Constitution. To take a simple example, the Supreme Court has held that citizens have no First Amendment right to use privately owned shopping centers for speech purposes.57 But the California Supreme Court interpreted the state constitution to create a right in the state to use shopping centers for expression. The Supreme Court upheld this interpretation as permissible.

Civilized existence is one which respects the law, both wise and good laws as well as bad laws, whose constitutional basis is the will of the people. When one does not like a particular law, the remedy resides in modifying it or revoking it by the procedures established for that very purpose. That methodology is the sole means of guaranteeing that popular will cannot be seized and held captive by zealots, with their own extreme interpretations. -- Torcuato Fernández-Miranda

Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks. That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself.

We see, then, that even from the zoological point of view, which is the least interesting and—note this—not decisive, a being in such condition can never achieve a genuine equilibrium; we also see something that differs from the idea of challenge-response in Toynbee and, in my judgement, effectively constitutes human life: namely, that no surroundings or change of surroundings can in itself be described as an obstacle, a difficulty, and a challenge for man, but that the difficulty is always relative to the projects which man creates in his imagination, to what he customarily calls his ideals; in short, relative to what man wants to be. This affords us an idea of challenge-and-response which is much deeper and more decisive than the merely anecdotal, adventitious, and accidental idea which Toynbee proposes. In its light, all of human life appears to us as what it is permanently: a dramatic confrontation and struggle of man with the world and not a mere occasional maladjustment which is produced at certain moments.

Critics have focused on three Supreme Court opinions decided between 2002 and 2005. All three moved the law in a progressive direction, with the majority opinions citing the views of foreign courts or lawmakers. These foreign sources were clearly not invoked as determinative of the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, nor could they have been. But mere mention of the foreign materials provoked anger by framing the question of how to interpret the Constitution in a global context of evolving views on human dignity.

The Constitution guarantees the right of the People to have any person they choose assist them in court. This was the first Constitutional right the lawyers’ cartel had to scrap. To this end, the Bar Association, through its member judges, interpreted the word “counsel” in the Sixth Amendment to mean “attorney-at-law” (which is, by definition, a member of their cartel). The word counsel can be found in any dictionary, and its primary meaning is not “attorney-at-law.” In fact, it means any person who gives advice.

Two centuries ago, the United States settled into a permanent political order, after fourteen years of violence and heated debate. Two centuries ago, France fell into ruinous disorder that ran its course for twenty-four years. In both countries there resounded much ardent talk of rights--rights natural, rights prescriptive. . . . [F]anatic ideology had begun to rage within France, so that not one of the liberties guaranteed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man could be enjoyed by France's citizens. One thinks of the words of Dostoievski: "To begin with unlimited liberty is to end with unlimited despotism." . . . In striking contrast, the twenty-two senators and fifty-nine representatives who during the summer of 1789 debated the proposed seventeen amendments to the Constitution were men of much experience in representative government, experience acquired within the governments of their several states or, before 1776, in colonial assembles and in the practice of the law. Many had served in the army during the Revolution. They decidedly were political realists, aware of how difficult it is to govern men's passions and self-interest. . . . Among most of them, the term democracy was suspect. The War of Independence had sufficed them by way of revolution. . . . The purpose of law, they knew, is to keep the peace. To that end, compromises must be made among interests and among states. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists ranked historical experience higher than novel theory. They suffered from no itch to alter American society radically; they went for sound security. The amendments constituting what is called the Bill of Rights were not innovations, but rather restatements of principles at law long observed in Britain and in the thirteen colonies. . . . The Americans who approved the first ten amendments to their Constitution were no ideologues. Neither Voltaire nor Rousseau had any substantial following among them. Their political ideas, with few exceptions, were those of English Whigs. The typical textbook in American history used to inform us that Americans of the colonial years and the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras were ardent disciples of John Locke. This notion was the work of Charles A. Beard and Vernon L. Parrington, chiefly. It fitted well enough their liberal convictions, but . . . it has the disadvantage of being erroneous. . . . They had no set of philosophes inflicted upon them. Their morals they took, most of them, from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Their Bill of Rights made no reference whatever to political abstractions; the Constitution itself is perfectly innocent of speculative or theoretical political arguments, so far as its text is concerned. John Dickinson, James Madison, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, and other thoughtful delegates to the Convention in 1787 knew something of political theory, but they did not put political abstractions into the text of the Constitution. . . . Probably most members of the First Congress, being Christian communicants of one persuasion or another, would have been dubious about the doctrine that every man should freely indulge himself in whatever is not specifically prohibited by positive law and that the state should restrain only those actions patently "hurtful to society." Nor did Congress then find it necessary or desirable to justify civil liberties by an appeal to a rather vague concept of natural law . . . . Two centuries later, the provisions of the Bill of Rights endure--if sometimes strangely interpreted. Americans have known liberty under law, ordered liberty, for more than two centuries, while states that have embraced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, with its pompous abstractions, have paid the penalty in blood.

Reading the hymn of Philippians in a baptismal key and, reciprocally, understanding baptism as participation in the descending movement of Jesus Christ (kenosis) turn out to have extremely important consequences: if such interpretations have validity, then the church is by essence and by definition constituted as a kenotic body. The socio-political implications of this affirmation are only too evident in a society structured according to the totally opposed movements of dominion, power, oppression, social ascent, meritocracy, violence, and injustice.

The First Congress of the United States passed the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—to put fences around the federal government, saying it could not establish any specific religion, silence the press, police speech, stop the people from assembling peacefully, take away the right of the people to bear arms, deny trials by jury, arbitrarily seize property, and so on. These rights were not rights given to individuals, as the modern Supreme Court has interpreted them, but rather were designed to hold back the government if it began to overreach.

My conclusions, on this point, are as follows: when the Law Commission says committal of judgment debtors is an anomaly that cannot be justified and should be abolished; when it is common cause that there is a general international move away from imprisonment for civil debt, of which the present committal proceedings are an adapted relic; when such imprisonment has been abolished in South Africa, save for its contested form as contempt of court in the magistrate's court; when the clauses concerned have already been interpreted by the Courts as restrictively as possible, without their constitutionally offensive core being eviscerated; when other tried and tested methods exist for recovery of debt from those in a position to pay; when the violation of the fundamental right to personal freedom is manifest, and the procedures used must inevitably possess a summary character if they are to be economically worthwhile to the creditor, then the very institution of civil imprisonment, however it may be described and however well directed its procedures might be, in itself must be regarded as highly questionable and not a compelling claimant for survival.

Justices in the United States believe that their duty is to uphold the Constitution, but if they do not understand that the authority of the Constitution itself rests upon the inalienable natural rights of all human beings, then they not only undermine the Constitution, which they are sworn to uphold but also turn themselves into wielders of arbitrary power. Regrettably, this misuse of power occurred in both the Dred Scott decision and in the Roe v. Wade decision (and its subsequent interpretation in cases such as Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Robert P. Casey).

As one leading Supreme Court scholar, Sanford Levinson, has noted, Supreme Court cases necessarily deal only with the “litigated Constitution,” those provisions that are open to interpretation and become fodder for lawyers and judges. At the same time, the “hard-wired Constitution,” structural elements of great significance like the over-representation of small states in the United States Senate, remain beyond the reach of any court. “The fixation on the litigated Constitution,” Levinson writes, leads people to “overestimate the importance of courts and judges, for good and for ill.

Eliot's understanding of poetic epistemology is a version of Bradley's theory, outlined in our second chapter, that knowing involves immediate, relational, and transcendent stages or levels. The poetic mind, like the ordinary mind, has at least two types of experience: The first consists largely of feeling (falling in love, smelling the cooking, hearing the noise of the typewriter), the second largely of thought (reading Spinoza). The first type of experience is sensuous, and it is also to a great extent monistic or immediate, for it does not require mediation through the mind; it exists before intellectual analysis, before the falling apart of experience into experiencer and experienced. The second type of experience, in contrast, is intellectual (to be known at all, it must be mediated through the mind) and sharply dualistic, in that it involves a breaking down of experience into subject and object. In the mind of the ordinary person, these two types of experience are and remain disparate. In the mind of the poet, these disparate experiences are somehow transcended and amalgamated into a new whole, a whole beyond and yet including subject and object, mind and matter. Eliot illustrates his explanation of poetic epistemology by saying that John Donne did not simply feel his feelings and think his thoughts; he felt his thoughts and thought his feelings. He was able to "feel his thought as immediately as the odour of a rose." Immediately" in this famous simile is a technical term in philosophy, used with precision; it means unmediated through mind, unshattered into subject and object. Falling in love and reading Spinoza typify Eliot's own experiences in the years in which he was writing The Waste Land. These were the exciting and exhausting years in which he met Vivien Haigh-Wood and consummated a disastrous marriage, the years in which he was deeply involved in reading F. H. Bradley, the years in which he was torn between the professions of philosophy and poetry and in which he was in close and frequent contact with such brilliant and stimulating figures as Bertrand Russell and Ezra Pound, the years of the break from his family and homeland, the years in which in every area of his life he seemed to be between broken worlds. The experiences of these years constitute the material of The Waste Land. The relevant biographical details need not be reviewed here, for they are presented in the introduction to The Waste Land Facsimile. For our purposes, it is only necessary to acknowledge what Eliot himself acknowledged: the material of art is always actual life. At the same time, it should also be noted that material in itself is not art. As Eliot argued in his review of Ulysses, "in creation you are responsible for what you can do with material which you must simply accept." For Eliot, the given material included relations with and observations of women, in particular, of his bright but seemingly incurably ill wife Vivien(ne).

Who is the arbiter of the Constitution? "Now, the President may be right in how he reads the Constitution," Jaworski said. "But he may also be wrong. And if he is wrong, who is there to tell him so? And if there is no one, The President, of course, is free to pursue his course of erroneous interpretation. What then becomes of our constitutional form of government? ... That nation's constitutional form of government is in serious jeopardy if the President, any President, is to say that the Constitution means what he says it does and that there is no one, not even the Supremer Court, to tell him otherwise.

… The cloak of racism surrounding the actions of the Brotherhood in refusing membership to Negroes and in entering into and enforcing agreements discriminating against them, all under the guise of Congressional authority, still remains. No statutory interpretation can erase this ugly example of economic cruelty against colored citizens of the United States.… A sound democracy cannot allow such discrimination to go unchallenged. Racism is far too virulent today to permit the slightest refusal, in the light of a Constitution that abhors it, to expose and condemn it wherever it appears in the course of a statutory interpretation.

These waves, then, on which I sit, coming out of nothing, travelling through a non-medium in multi-dimensional non-space, are the ultimate answer modern physics has to offer to man's question after the nature of reality. The waves that seem to constitute matter are interpreted by some physicists as completely immaterial 'waves of probability' marking out 'disturbed areas' where an electron is likely to 'occur'. They are as immaterial as the waves of depression, loyalty, suicide, and so on, that sweep over a country ' From here there is only one step to calling them abstract, mental, or brain waves in the Universal Mind - without irony.

To narrow natural rights to such neat slogans as "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "life, liberty, property," . . . was to ignore the complexity of public affairs and to leave out of consideration most moral relationships. . . . Burke appealed back beyond Locke to an idea of community far warmer and richer than Locke's or Hobbes's aggregation of individuals. The true compact of society, Burke told his countrymen, is eternal: it joins the dead, the living, and the unborn. We all participate in this spiritual and social partnership, because it is ordained of God. In defense of social harmony, Burke appealed to what Locke had ignored: the love of neighbor and the sense of duty. By the time of the French Revolution, Locke's argument in the Second Treatise already had become insufficient to sustain a social order. . . . The Constitution is not a theoretical document at all, and the influence of Locke upon it is negligible, although Locke's phrases, at least, crept into the Declaration of Independence, despite Jefferson's awkwardness about confessing the source of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If we turn to the books read and quoted by American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century, we discover that Locke was but one philosopher and political advocate among the many writers whose influence they acknowledged. . . . Even Jefferson, though he had read Locke, cites in his Commonplace Book such juridical authorities as Coke and Kames much more frequently. As Gilbert Chinard puts it, "The Jeffersonian philosophy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason"--that is, Jefferson was more strongly influenced by his understanding of British history, the Anglo-Saxon age particularly, than by the eighteenth-century rationalism of which Locke was a principal forerunner. . . . Adams treats Locke merely as one of several commendable English friends to liberty. . . . At bottom, the thinking Americans of the last quarter of the eighteenth century found their principles of order in no single political philosopher, but rather in their religion. When schooled Americans of that era approved a writer, commonly it was because his books confirmed their American experience and justified convictions they held already. So far as Locke served their needs, they employed Locke. But other men of ideas served them more immediately. At the Constitutional Convention, no man was quoted more frequently than Montesquieu. Montesquieu rejects Hobbes's compact formed out of fear; but also, if less explicitly, he rejects Locke's version of the social contract. . . . It is Montesquieu's conviction that . . . laws grow slowly out of people's experiences with one another, out of social customs and habits. "When a people have pure and regular manners, their laws become simple and natural," Montesquieu says. It was from Montesquieu, rather than from Locke, that the Framers obtained a theory of checks and balances and of the division of powers. . . . What Madison and other Americans found convincing in Hume was his freedom from mystification, vulgar error, and fanatic conviction: Hume's powerful practical intellect, which settled for politics as the art of the possible. . . . [I]n the Federalist, there occurs no mention of the name of John Locke. In Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention there is to be found but one reference to Locke, and that incidental. Do not these omissions seem significant to zealots for a "Lockean interpretation" of the Constitution? . . . John Locke did not make the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or foreordain the Constitution of the United States. . . . And the Constitution of the United States would have been framed by the same sort of men with the same sort of result, and defended by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, had Locke in 1689 lost the manuscripts of his Two Treatises of Civil Government while crossing the narrow seas with the Princess Mary.

Just how difficult this task turned out to be is demonstrated in a number of problems which have arisen in our own day. The failure to use the checks and balances effectively has allowed the judiciary to create new laws (called judicial legislation) by pretending to be merely interpreting old ones. Failure to use the checks and balances has also allowed the President to make thousands of new laws, instead of Congress, by issuing executive orders. It has allowed the federal government to invade the reserved rights of the states on a massive scale. It has allowed the legislature to impose taxes on the people never contemplated by the Founders or the Constitution. The whole spectrum of checks and balances needs to be more thoroughly studied and more vigorously enforced.

Much of the so-called environmental movement today has transmuted into an aggressively nefarious and primitive faction. In the last fifteen years, many of the tenets of utopian statism have coalesced around something called the “degrowth” movement. Originating in Europe but now taking a firm hold in the United States, the “degrowthers,” as I shall characterize them, include in their ranks none other than President Barack Obama. On January 17, 2008, Obama made clear his hostility toward, of all things, electricity generated from coal and coal-powered plants. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal . . . under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. . . .”3 Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”4 Degrowthers define their agenda as follows: “Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.”5 It “is an essential economic strategy to pursue in overdeveloped countries like the United States—for the well-being of the planet, of underdeveloped populations, and yes, even of the sick, stressed, and overweight ‘consumer’ populations of overdeveloped countries.”6 For its proponents and adherents, degrowth has quickly developed into a pseudo-religion and public-policy obsession. In fact, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy. Some of its leading advocates argue that “Degrowth is not just an economic concept. We shall show that it is a frame constituted by a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”7 Degrowth is “an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action.”8 The degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace the notions of “less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.”9 Degrowthers want to engage in polices that will set “a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders (“no-border”) to reduce means to keep inequality between rich and poor countries.”10 And they demand reparations by supporting a “concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation in the Global South.”11

Now I realize, of course, that not everyone accepts the Thomistic (or any other traditional) ontology, and that moreover a reductio to quantity constitutes in fact the definitive tendency of the modern age. One fact, however, is incontrovertible: as I have shown in The Quantum Enigma, it is possible to interpret all of physics—by virtue of its definitive modus operandi—in traditional (and thus non-Cartesian) terms, based precisely on a categorical distinction between the 'corporeal' (i.e., perceptible) and the 'physical' universe: the universe, namely, as conceived by the physicist. Everyone, of course, is free to disagree with the non-Cartesian interpretation of physics: what is NOT possible (by virtue of the above-said finding) is to do so on SCIENTIFIC ground. ("Taking Stock of a New Philosophy of Physics: The KKE Theory")

Every religion offers an interpretation of the world, a worldview, a counterpart to the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption. Translated into worldview terms, creation refers to a theory of origins: Where did we come from? What is ultimate reality? Fall refers to the problem of evil: What’s wrong with the world, the source of evil and suffering? Redemption asks, How can the problem be fixed? What must I do to become part of the solution? These are the three fundamental questions that every religion, worldview, or philosophy seeks to answer.16 The answers offered by Romanticism were adapted from neo-Platonism.17 In neo-Platonism, the counterpart to creation, or the ultimate source of all things, is a primordial spiritual essence or unity referred to as the One, the Absolute, the Infinite. Even thinking cannot be attributed to the One because thought implies a distinction between subject and object—between the thinker and the object of his thought. In fact, for the Romantics, thinking itself constituted the fall, the cause of all that is wrong with the world. Why? Because it introduced division into the original unity. More precisely, the fault lay in a particular kind of thinking—the Enlightenment reductionism that had produced the upper/lower story dichotomy in the first place. Coleridge wrote that “the rational instinct” posed “the original temptation, through which man fell.” The poet Friedrich Schiller blamed the “all-dividing Intellect” for modern society’s fragmentation, conflict, isolation, and alienation. And what would redeem us from this fall? The creative imagination. Art would restore the spiritual meaning and purpose that Enlightenment science had stripped from the world.

The “United States” does not exist as a nation, because the ruling class of the U.S./Europe exploits the world without regard to borders and nationality.  For instance, multinational or global corporations rule the world.  They make their own laws by buying politicians– Democrats and Republicans, and white politicians in England and in the rest of Europe.  We are ruled by a European power which disregards even the hypocritical U.S. Constitution.  If it doesn’t like the laws of the U.S., as they are created, interpreted and enforced, the European power simply moves its base of management and labor to some other part of the world.   Today the European power most often rules through neocolonial regimes in the so-called “Third World.”  Through political leaders who are loyal only to the European power, not to their people and the interests of their nation, the European power sets up shop in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  By further exploiting the people and stealing the resources of these nations on every continent outside Europe, the European power enhances its domination.  Every institution and organization within the European power has the purpose of adding to its global domination: NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the military, and the police.   The European power lies to the people within each “nation” about national pride or patriotism.  We foolishly stand with our hands over our hearts during the “National Anthem” at football games while the somber servicemen in their uniforms hold the red, white and blue flag, then a military jet flies over and we cheer.  This show obscures the real purpose of the military, which is to increase European power through intimidation and the ongoing invasion of the globe.  We are cheering for imperialist forces.  We are standing on Native land celebrating the symbols of de-humanizing terrorism.  Why would we do this unless we were being lied to?   The European imperialist power lies to us about its imperialism.  It’s safe to say, most “Americans” do not recognize that we are part of an empire.  When we think of an empire we think of ancient Rome or the British Empire.  Yet the ongoing attack against the Native peoples of “North America” is imperialism.  When we made the “Louisiana Purchase” (somehow the French thought Native land was theirs to sell, and the U.S. thought it was ours to buy) this was imperialism.  When we stole the land from Mexico, this was imperialism (the Mexican people having been previously invaded by the European imperialist power).  Imperialism is everywhere.  Only the lies of capitalism could so effectively lead us to believe that we are not part of an empire.

Why, for almost forty years now, have Aboriginal peoples won virtually every time they go to the Supreme Court? Because our history and the law, if fairly interpreted, cannot help but re-establish our long-standing – long betrayed – agreements. If I look for the leading constitutional voice of historical accuracy and ethical understanding in Canada over the last few decades, the sound is clear. It comes from the indigenous community and the Supreme Court’s rulings on Aboriginal issues. Some people protest that this is judicial interference in the political sphere. They are missing the point. It is happening because the political class and the civil service are not only not doing their job, they are acting badly. The indigenous community, on the other hand, is paying attention to our history and to our legal history. The Supreme Court is responding intelligently to this reality.

It is critical to recognize that we live in an increasingly complex world - biologically, socially, politically, technologically, you name it - that holds many inherent contradictions. In the middle of this complex world are we humans, who have a natural tendency to seek coherence in what we see, feel, think, and do. When we experience conflict, this tendency intensifies. Conflict is essentially a contradiction, an incompatibility, oppositely directed forces, and a difference that triggers tension. When we encounter conflict, within the field of forces that constitute it, the natural human tendency is to reduce that tension by seeking coherence through simplification. Research shows that this tendency toward simplification becomes even more intensified when we are under stress, threat, time constraints, fatigue, and various other conditions all absolutely typical of conflict. So what is the big idea? It is NOT that coherence is bad and complexity is good. Coherence seeking is simply a necessary and functional process that helps us interpret and respond to our world efficiently and (hopefully) effectively. And complexity in extremes is a nightmare - think of Mogadishu, Somalia, in the 1990s or the financial crisis of 2009 or Times Square during rush hour on a Friday afternoon. On the other hand, too much coherence can be just as pathological: for example, the collapse of the nuances and contradictions inherent in any conflict situation into simple 'us versus them' terms, or a deep commitment to a rigid understanding of conflicts based on past sentiments and obsolete information. Either extreme - overwhelming complexity or oversimplified coherence - is problematic. But in difficult, long-term conflicts, the tide pulls fiercely toward simplification of complex realities. This is what we must content with.

As I said earlier, to admit and verbally declare that we love is to admit that we lack. But this goes further still, for Lacan suggests that we in fact admit that we are lacking in some way whenever we open our mouths to say something. As infants we opened our mouths to convey that we were lacking in food, nourishment, warmth, or attention, and we learned to speak to express our wants in such a way that they would be less at the mercy of the interpretations of those who cared for us, for our caregivers could not always figure out what it was we wanted and their ministrations often left a great deal to be desired. All speech is a request or demand for something we are missing, or at least to be heard and recognized as missing something, as lacking in some respect. Ultimately, as Lacan puts it, all speech constitutes a demand for love. Whenever we speak, we are unconditionally asking to be heard (Lacan, 2015, p. 356), we are asking for our request to be recognized, we are asking to be responded to, we are asking to be loved. This is one of the reasons why psychoanalysts must not speak too much during sessions, and should even avoid presenting themselves as the authors of the little they do say when possible, preferring to reiterate and punctuate the analysand’s speech. They must not reveal much about themselves, for when they do they are essentially asking or even begging (Lacan, 2015, p. 370) to be loved, which puts the shoe on the wrong foot, as it were; this is one of the many reasons why self-disclosure is such a bad idea. As we shall see, it is not so much in order to refuse to admit to be lacking that analysts must not speak so much, for analysis structurally puts analysts in the position of loving the analysand, and that loving itself reveals their lack. Analysts must not speak much in their own names or talk about themselves so as not to demand to be loved in return by their analysands.

Members who listen to the voice of the Church need not be on guard against being misled. They have no such assurance for what they hear from alternate voices. Local Church leaders also have a responsibility to review the content of what is taught in classes or presented in worship services, as well as the spiritual qualifications of those they use as teachers or speakers. Leaders must do all they can to avoid expressed or implied Church endorsement for teachings that are not orthodox or for teachers who will use their Church position or prominence to promote something other than gospel truth. . . . In any case, volunteers do not speak for the Church. As long as Church leaders feel they should not participate in an event where the Church or its doctrines are discussed, the overall presentation will be incomplete and unbalanced. In such circumstances, no one should think that the Church’s silence constitutes an admission of facts asserted in that setting. . . . I have seen some persons attempt to understand or undertake to criticize the gospel or the Church by the method of reason alone, unaccompanied by the use or recognition of revelation. When reason is adopted as the only—or even the principal—method of judging the gospel, the outcome is predetermined. One cannot find God or understand his doctrines and ordinances by closing the door on the means He has prescribed for receiving the truths of his gospel. That is why gospel truths have been corrupted and gospel ordinances have been lost when left to the interpretation and sponsorship of scholars who lack the authority and reject the revelations of God. . . . In our day we are experiencing an explosion of knowledge about the world and its people. But the people of the world are not experiencing a comparable expansion of knowledge about God and his plan for his children. On that subject, what the world needs is not more scholarship and technology but more righteousness and revelation.

In the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet there is an attempt at a more or less Copernican change in the relation between the paradigm and the text. In Camus the counter-pointing is less doctrinaire; in Dostoevsky there is no evidence of any theoretical stand at all, simply rich originality within or without, as it chances, normal expectations. All these are novels which most of us would agree (and it is by a consensus of this kind only that these matters, quite rightly, are determined) to be at least very good. They represent in varying degrees that falsification of simple expectations as to the structure of a future which constitutes peripeteia. We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. But unless we are extremely naive, as some apocalyptic sects still are, we do not ask that they progress towards that end precisely as we have been given to believe. In fact we should expect only the most trivial work to conform to pre-existent types. It is essential to the drift of all these talks that what I call the scepticism of the clerisy operates in the person of the reader as a demand for constantly changing, constantly more subtle, relationships between a fiction and the paradigms, and that this expectation enables a writer much inventive scope as he works to meet and transcend it. The presence of such paradigms in fictions may be necessary-that is a point I shall be discussing later--but if the fictions satisfy the clerisy, the paradigms will be to a varying but always great extent attenuated or obscured. The pressure of reality on us is always varying, as Stevens might have said: the fictions must change, or if they are fixed, the interpretations must change. Since we continue to 'prescribe laws to nature'--Kant's phrase, and we do--we shall continue to have a relation with the paradigms, but we shall change them to make them go on working. If we cannot break free of them, we must make sense of them.

Within the evangelical community, Dobson emerged as Obama’s fiercest critic. In June 2008 he lashed out at Obama on his radio program, accusing him of distorting the Bible to fit his worldview, of having a “fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution,” and of appealing to the “lowest common denominator of morality.” Dobson especially took issue with a speech Obama had given in 2006 in which he had defended the right of people of faith to bring their religious beliefs into the public square, while also pointing out that Christians disagreed among themselves on how best to do so. Whose Christianity would win out? “Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharp-ton’s?” Obama had asked. “Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy?” Should Old Testament passages dictate that slavery was acceptable but eating shellfish was not? “Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount—a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application?” Dobson was not amused. 5

Excellence itself, aretē as the Greeks, virtus as the Romans would have called it, has always been assigned to the public realm where one could excel, could distinguish oneself from all others. Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required, and this presence needs the formality of the public, constituted by one’s peers, it cannot be the casual, familiar presence of one’s equals or inferiors.40 Not even the social realm—though it made excellence anonymous, emphasized the progress of mankind rather than the achievements of men, and changed the content of the public realm beyond recognition—has been able altogether to annihilate the connection between public performance and excellence. While we have become excellent in the laboring we perform in public, our capacity for action and speech has lost much of its former quality since the rise of the social realm banished these into the sphere of the intimate and the private. This curious discrepancy has not escaped public notice, where it is usually blamed upon an assumed time lag between our technical capacities and our general humanistic development or between the physical sciences, which change and control nature, and the social sciences, which do not yet know how to change and control society. Quite apart from other fallacies of the argument which have been pointed out so frequently that we need not repeat them, this criticism concerns only a possible change in the psychology of human beings—their so-called behavior patterns—not a change of the world they move in. And this psychological interpretation, for which the absence or presence of a public realm is as irrelevant as any tangible, worldly reality, seems rather doubtful in view of the fact that no activity can become excellent if the world does not provide a proper space for its exercise. Neither education nor ingenuity nor talent can replace the constituent elements of the public realm, which make it the proper place for human excellence. 7

Regarding all aesthetic values I now avail myself of this main distinction: I ask in every instance, "is it hunger or superabundance that has here become creative?" At first glance, another distinction may seem preferable—it is far more obvious—namely the question whether the desire to fix, to immortalize, the desire for being prompted creation, or the desire for destruction, for change, for future, for becoming. But both of these kinds of desire are seen to be ambiguous when one considers them more closely; they can be interpreted in accordance with the first scheme that is, as it seems to me, preferable. The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with future (my term for this is, as is known, "Dionysian"); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underpriviledged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them. To understand this feeling, consider our anarchists closely.

Man has failed to build only from himself autonomously and to find a solid basis in nature for law, and we are left today with Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “experience” and Frederick Moore Vinson’s statement that nothing is more certain in modern society than that there are no absolutes. Law has only a variable content. Much modern law is not even based on precedent; that is, it does not necessarily hold fast to a continuity with the legal decisions of the past. Thus, within a wide range, the Constitution of the United States can be made to say what the courts of the present want it to say—based on a court’s decision as to what the court feels is sociologically helpful at the moment. At times this brings forth happy results, at least temporarily; but once the door is opened, anything can become law and the arbitrary judgments of men are king. Law is now freewheeling, and the courts not only interpret the laws which legislators have made, but make law. Lex Rex has become Rex Lex. Arbitrary judgment concerning current sociological good is king.

In other words, the canon is inspired; the community is illumined to understand, embrace, interpret, and obey it. Jesus taught that there is a qualitative distinction between the prophets and the tradition of the elders who were Israel’s teachers after the Old Testament canon was closed (Mt 15:2, 6). Similarly, Paul distinguishes between the foundation-laying era of the apostles and the building-erecting era of the ordinary ministers who follow after them (1Co 3:11 – 12). Although Paul could appeal to no human authority higher than his own office, he encouraged Timothy to recall the gift he received at his ordination, “when the council of elders [presbyteriou] laid their hands on you” (1Ti 4:14). None of us, today, is a Moses. None is a Paul or a Peter. We are all “Timothys,” no longer adding to the apostolic deposit, but guarding and proclaiming it (1Ti 6:20). The apostolic era has now come to an end; the office was a unique one, for a unique stage of redemptive history, a period of time used by God for the drafting of the new covenant constitution.

The learned. Learning and prayer have little in common. It was so then and it is still so today. Learning is besotted and bemused by the brilliance of its own ideas and has an overweeningly high opinion of its own interpretation of the world’s affairs. And whenever the world takes a course not laid down in the books it is immediately suspect. Western thought is inordinately proud of having “grown up” in the last century. It considers itself completely adult and self-possessed. Meanwhile in obedience to its own law it is no longer spreading its wings like an eagle, no longer adventuring to the horizon. It has become a mere appendage to earthbound utility blind and blunted to certain aspects of the truth. But human nature is so constituted that even in its most debased and blinded state it still needs to ape God and set itself on a pedestal as if it were divine. Unconsciously it is reaching out towards a state it might be capable of achieving if it were not so in love with itself and forever leading itself and its world into the icy mire of materialism.

A government has the duty to preserve the order as well as the truth which it represents; when a Gnostic leader appears and proclaims that God or progress, race or dialectic, has ordained him to become the existential ruler, a government is not supposed to betray its trust and to abdicate. And this rule suffers no exception for governments which operate under a democratic constitution and a bill of rights. Justice Jackson in his dissent in the Terminiello case formulated the point: the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact. A democratic government is not supposed to become an accomplice in its own overthrow by letting Gnostic movements grow prodigiously in the shelter of a muddy interpretation of civil rights; and if through inadvertence such a movement has grown to the danger point of capturing existential representation by the famous “legality” of popular elections, a democratic government is not supposed to bow to the “will of the people” but to put down the danger by force and, if necessary, to break the letter of the constitution in order to save its spirit.

Hegel comprehended quite correctly the abstract character of revolutionary self-consciousness of-Fichte's 'Ego = Ego' and French 'egalite'. However, the transition from the abstract to the concrete he interpreted not as a continuous revolutionary process in which the citizens become differ­entiated and class interests concretized, but on the contrary, as an advance from the turbulence of the cosmic spirit in its 'years of discipleship' to bold reconciliation with reality. Hegel's cosmic spirit goes through all the successive stages of the post-revolutionary 'transitory period' of bourgeois society — from Thermidor to constitutional monarchy. True enough, he subjects bourgeois society to sharp criticism; but not in its historically determined form — rather as the material aspect of a society par excellence. This negation is next declared to be abstract and in its transition from the abstract to the concrete is declared to be a return to material, sensuous existence, i.e. to bourgeois society­ with this difference, however, that the prosaic and sordid character of bourgeois relations here acquires a deep mys­tical significance as the embodiment of the active essence of the spirit. Such, briefly, is the meaning of the 'speculat­tive methods' of German idealist philosophy.

Several recent studies (Bliss, 1980; Boon & Draijer, 1993a; Coons & Milstein, 1986; Coons, Bowman, & Milstein, 1988; Putnam et al., 1986; Ross et al., 1989b) are largely consistent in terms of the general trends that they demonstrate. At the time of diagnosis (prior to exploration) approximately two to four personalities are in evidence. In the course of treatment an average of 13 to 15 are encountered, but this figure is deceptive. The mode in virtually all series is three, and median number of alters is eight to ten. Complex cases, with 26 or more alters (described in Kluft, 1988), constitute 15-25% of such series and unduly inflate the mean. Series currently being studied in tertiary referral centers appear to be more complex still (Kluft, Fink, Brenner, & Fine, unpublished data). This is subject to a number of interpretations. It is likely that the complexity of the more difficult and demanding cases treated in such settings may be one aspect of what makes them require such specialized care. It is also possible that the staff of such centers is differentially sensitive to the need to probe for previously undiscovered complexity in their efforts to treat patients who have failed to improve elsewhere. However, it is also possible that patients unduly interested in their disorders and who generate factitious complexity enter such series differently, or that some factor in these units or in those who refer to them encourages such complexity or at least the subjective report thereof.

The nature of God understood in Islam is not the same as the conceptions of God understood in the various religious traditions of the world; nor is it the same as the conceptions of God understood in Greek and Hellenistic philosophical tradition; nor as the conceptions of God understood in Western philosophical or scientific tradition; nor in that of Occidental and Oriental mystical traditions. The apparent similarities that may be found between their various conceptions of God with the nature of God understood in Islam cannot be interpreted as evidence of identity of the One Universal God in their various conceptions of the nature of God; for each and everyone of them serves and belongs to a different conceptual system, which necessarily renders the conception as a whole or the super system to be dissimilar with one another.... Nor is there a 'transcendent unity of religions', if by 'unity' is meant 'oneness' or 'sameness'; and if by 'unity' is not meant 'oneness' or 'sameness', then there is plurality or dissimilarity of religions even at the level of transcendence. If it is conceded that there is plurality or dissimilarity at that level, and that by 'unity' is meant 'interconnectedness of parts that constitute a whole', so that the 'unity' is the interconnection of the plurality or dissimilarity of religions as of parts constituting a whole, then it follows that at the level of ordinary existence, in which mankind is subject to the limitations of humanity and the material universe, any one religion is incomplete in itself, is in itself inadequate to realize its purpose, and can only realize its purpose, which is true submission to the One Universal God without associating with him any partner, rival, or like, at the level of transcendence. But religion is meant to realize its purpose precisely at the level of existence in which mankind is subject to the limitations of humanity and the material universe and not when mankind is not subject to these limitations as the term 'transcendent' conveys. If 'transcendent' is meant to refer to an ontological condition not included under any of the ten categories, God is, strictly speaking, not the God of religion (i.e. ilah) in the sense that there could be such a thing as a 'unity' of religions at that level. At that level God is recognized as rabb, not as ilah; and recognizing Him as rabb does not necessarily imply oneness or sameness in the proper acknowledgement of the truth that is recognized, since Iblis also recognized God as rabb and yet did not properly acknowledge Him. Indeed, all of Adam's progeny have already recognized Him as rabb at that level. But mankind's recognition of Him as such is not true unless followed by proper acknowledgement at that level in which He is known as ilah. And proper acknowledgement at the level in which He is known as ilah consists in not associating Him with any partner, rival, or like, and in submitting to Him in the manner and form approved by Him and shown by His sent Prophets.

Men cooperate with one another. The totality of interhuman relations engendered by such cooperation is called society. Society is not an entity in itself. It is an aspect of human action. It does not exist or live outside of the conduct of people. It is an orientation of human action. Society neither thinks nor acts. Individuais in thinking and acting constitute a complex of relations and facts that are called social relations and facts. The issue has been confused by an arithmetical metaphor. Is society, people asked, merely a sum of individuals or is it more than this and thereby an entity endowed with independent reality? The question is nonsensical. Society is neither the sum of individuais nor more nor less. Arithmetical concepts cannot be applied to the matter. Another confusion arises from the no less empty question whether society is—in logic and in time—anterior to individuais or not. The evolution of society and that of civilization were not two distinct processes but one and the same process. The biological passing of a species of primates beyond the levei of a mere animal existence and their transformation into primitive men implied already the development of the first rudiments of social cooperation. Homo sapiens appeared on the stage of earthly events neither as a solitary foodseeker nor as a member of a gregarious flock, but as a being consciously cooperating with other beings of his own kind. Only in cooperation with his fellows could he develop language, the indispensable tool of thinking. We cannot even imagine a reasonable being living in perfect isolation and not cooperating at least with members of his family, clan, or tribe. Man as man is necessarily a social animal. Some sort of cooperation is an essential characteristic of his nature. But awareness of this fact does not justify dealing with social relations as if they were something else than relations or with society as if it were an independent entity outside or above the actions of individual men. Finally there are the misconstructions caused by the organismic metaphor. We may compare society to a biological organism. The tertium comparationis is the fact that division of labor and cooperation exist among the various parts of a biological body as among the various members of society. But the biological evolution that resulted in the emergence of the structurefunction systems of plant and animal bodies was a purely physiological process in which no trace of a conscious activity on the part of the cells can be discovered. On the other hand, human society is an intellectual and spiritual phenomenon. In cooperating with their fellows, individuais do not divest themselves of their individuality. They retain the power to act antisocially, and often make use of it. Its place in the structure of the body is invariably assigned to each cell. But individuais spontaneously choose the way in which they integrate themselves into social cooperation. Men have ideas and seek chosen ends, while the cells and organs of the body lack such autonomy.

MSB: The triumph of Christ marks the culmination of your work from a thematic point of view. But in the world itself, it also marks the culmination of the long journey of human violence. RG: I think that Saint Paul's letters, particularly Romans and Corinthians, have the form of a mimetic spiral. Everything we've been talking about constitutes a sort of exegesis of what Paul had to say about the centrality of the Cross. The Cross is not only knowledge of God, but first and foremost an understanding of mankind. Paul was perfectly aware of this. It seems to me essential that the notion of the crucified Christ as “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23) be examined more closely. I had thought that Jacob Taubes, in his book on Paul's political theology, would develop this idea, but he never really gets around to it.6 MSB: Your acquaintance with Paul seems to have deepened over the years. RG: I hope it has. In a way it is rather recent. I have come to better understand Paul through reading and talking with Protestants. Most Catholics speak mainly of the Gospels. Protestants, on the other hand, speak mainly of Saint Paul; they consider Saint Paul's letters to be the primary Christian documents. I would find nothing more interesting than to write on the relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism. True ecumenicism would be exactly this, understanding what the Gospels and Saint Paul fundamentally have in common. The anthropological interpretation of Satan offers an opportunity for going further in this direction, it seems to me. MSB

Charles I’s attempt to collect ship-money without the consent of Parliament was declared by his opponents to be “unjust and unlawful,” and by him to be just and lawful. Only the military issue of the Civil War proved that his interpretation of the Constitution was the wrong one. The same thing happened in the American Civil War. Had States the right to secede? No one knew, and only the victory of the North decided the legal question. The belief— which one finds in Locke and in most writers of his time—that any honest man can know what is just and lawful, is one that does not allow for the strength of party bias on both sides, or for the difficulty of establishing a tribunal, whether outwardly or in men’s consciences, that shall be capable of pronouncing authoritatively on vexed questions. In practice, such questions, if sufficiently important, are decided simply by power, not by justice and law. To some degree, though in veiled language, Locke recognizes this fact. In a dispute between legislative and executive, he says, there is, in certain cases, no judge under Heaven. Since Heaven does not make explicit pronouncements, this means, in effect, that a decision can only be reached by fighting, since it is assumed that Heaven will give the victory to the better cause. Some such view is essential to any doctrine that divides governmental power. Where such a doctrine is embodied in the Constitution, the only way to avoid occasional civil war is to practise compromise and common sense. But compromise and common sense are habits of mind, and cannot be embodied in a written constitution.

Hegel’s account avoids falling into a careless historicism by virtue of its appeal to the infinite ends at work in subjectivity, but it maintains its strong historicist commitment by virtue of the way in which Hegel takes himself to have shown that the universal has to particularize itself— a thesis we could formulate rather abstractly as the notion that for speculative (philosophical) concepts, meaning is determined by use but not exhausted by use, such that within a certain historical development, such concepts can be developed into better actualizations. Hegel’s type of philosophical history is not an a priori theory about how those historical particulars were necessitated to line up with each other, nor is it some happy talk Whig account of progress, nor is it a self-congratulatory tale of progressive enlightenment and error-correction, nor is it the explication of any laws of history or any claims about how various regimes inevitably converge at some final point or inevitably lead to a certain result. It is rather an examination of the metaphysical contours of subjectivity and how the self interpreting, self-developing collective human enterprise has moved from one such shape to another in terms of deeper logic of sense-making and how that meant that subjectivity itself had reshaped itself over the course of history. It is not a thesis about what constitutes true causality in history, nor is it even a thesis that unintelligibility causes such breakdowns. Hegel’s philosophy of history is concerned with what various things mean to subjects, individually and collectively, in the historical configurations into which they are thrown.

What is the motive for this ‘fugitive’ way of saying “I”? It is motivated by Dasein’s falling; for as falling, it *flees* in the face of itself into the “they.” When the “I” talks in the ‘natural’ manner, this is performed by the they-self. What expresses itself in the ‘I’ is that Self which, proximally and for the most part, I am *not* authentically. When one is absorbed in the everyday multiplicity and the rapid succession [*Sich-jagen] of that with which one is concerned, the Self of the self-forgetful “I am concerned” shows itself as something simple which is constantly selfsame but indefinite and empty. Yet one *is* that with which one concerns oneself. In the ‘natural’ ontical way in which the “I” talks, the phenomenal content of the Dasein which one has in view in the "I" gets overlooked; but this gives *no justification for our joining in this overlooking of it*, or for forcing upon the problematic of the Self an inappropriate ‘categorial’ horizon when we Interpret the “I” ontologically. Of course by thus refusing to follow the everyday way in which the “I” talks, our ontological Interpretation of the ‘I’ has by no means *solved* the problem; but it has indeed *prescribed the direction* for any further inquiries. In the “I,” we have in view that entity which one is in ‘being-in-the-world’. Being-already-in-a-world, however, as Being-alongside-the-ready-to-hand-within-the-world, means equiprimordially that one is ahead of oneself. With the ‘I’, what we have in view is that entity for which the *issue* is the Being of the entity that it is. With the ‘I’, care expresses itself, though proximally and for the most part in the ‘fugitive’ way in which the “I” talks when it concerns itself with something. The they-self keeps on saying “I” most loudly and most frequently because at bottom it *is not authentically* itself, and evades its authentic potentiality-for-Being. If the ontological constitution of the Self is not to be traced back either to an “I”-substance or to a ‘subject’, but if, on the contrary, the everyday fugitive way in which we keep on saying “I” must be understood in terms of our *authentic* potentiality-for-Being, then the proposition that the Self is the basis of care and constantly present-at-hand, is one that still does not follow. Selfhood is to be discerned existentially only in one’s authentic potentiality-for-Being-one’s-Self—that is to say, in the authenticity of Dasein’s Being *as care*. In terms of care the *constancy of the Self*, as the supposed persistence of the *subjectum*, gets clarified. But the phenomenon of this authentic potentiality-for-Being also opens our eyes for the *constancy of the Self*, in the double sense of steadiness and steadfastness, is the *authentic* counter-possibility to the non-Self-constancy which is characteristic of irresolute falling. Existentially, “*Self-constancy*” signifies nothing other than anticipatory resoluteness. The ontological structure of such resoluteness reveals the existentiality of the Self’s Selfhood." ―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, pp. 368-369

ONE of the evil results of the political subjection of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nation unnecessarily and excessively conscious of its past. Its achievements in the old great days of freedom are remembered, counted over and exaggerated by a generation of slaves, anxious to convince the world and themselves that they are as good as their masters. Slaves cannot talk of their present greatness, because it does not exist; and prophetic visions of the future are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. There remains the past. Out of the scattered and isolated facts of history it is possible to build up Utopias and Cloud Cuckoo Lands as variously fantastic as the New Jerusalems of prophecy. It is to the past — the gorgeous imaginary past of those whose present is inglorious, sordid, and humiliating — it is to the delightful founded-on-fact romances of history that subject peoples invariably turn. Thus, the savage and hairy chieftains of Ireland became in due course “the Great Kings of Leinster,” “the mighty Emperors of Meath.” Through centuries of slavery the Serbs remembered and idealised the heroes of Kossovo. And for the oppressed Poles, the mediaeval Polish empire was much more powerful, splendid, and polite than the Roman. The English have never been an oppressed nationality; they are in consequence most healthily unaware of their history. They live wholly in the much more interesting worlds of the present — in the worlds of politics and science, of business and industry. So fully, indeed, do they live in the present, that they have compelled the Indians, like the Irish at the other end of the world, to turn to the past. In the course of the last thirty or forty years a huge pseudo-historical literature has sprung up in India, the melancholy product of a subject people’s inferiority complex. Industrious and intelligent men have wasted their time and their abilities in trying to prove that the ancient Hindus were superior to every other people in every activity of life. Thus, each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it. A sentence of a dozen words, obscure even to the most accomplished Sanskrit scholars, is triumphantly quoted to prove that the ancient Hindus were familiar with the chemical constitution of water. Another, no less brief, is held up as the proof that they anticipated Pasteur in the discovery of the microbic origin of disease. A passage from the mythological poem of the Mahabharata proves that they had invented the Zeppelin. Remarkable people, these old Hindus. They knew everything that we know or, indeed, are likely to discover, at any rate until India is a free country; but they were unfortunately too modest to state the fact baldly and in so many words. A little more clarity on their part, a little less reticence, and India would now be centuries ahead of her Western rivals. But they preferred to be oracular and telegraphically brief. It is only after the upstart West has repeated their discoveries that the modern Indian commentator upon their works can interpret their dark sayings as anticipations. On contemporary Indian scholars the pastime of discovering and creating these anticipations never seems to pall. Such are the melancholy and futile occupations of intelligent men who have the misfortune to belong to a subject race. Free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit upon such vanities. From those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have.

A specific statutory provision that contravenes a general constitutional injunction or prohibition is invalid.

Some advocates of “limited government” have attempted to get around this problem by stipulating that the government must be limited to a very strict constitution to keep it confined to its “proper” functions and prevent it from passing immoral and destructive laws. But this is to ignore the fact that those who write the constitution and those who enforce it must be elected by majority vote (or else appointed by those who are elected). A constitution is only as good as the men who write and enforce it, and if majority opinion can’t create truth in matters of legislation, it can’t create truth in matters of constitutional formulation and interpretation, either. If it is wrong to employ the mass opinion-mongering method of voting to determine the policies of a government, it is even more wrong to use it to determine the form and structure of that government.

In other words, we are not writing a treatise on legislation or on the law of contracts or, for that matter, on the Constitution. Our subject is solely interpretation: how a legal message is to be received by those who must apply its directives.

In 449 Honoria appealed to none other than Attila the Hun to come and rescue her from Ravenna, sending Hyacinthus, one of her eunuch servants, to him with her request. Because Attila was the most aggressively determined enemy of the Roman empire at that time, her invitation constituted a stupendously treasonable act. And the seriousness of her message was marked by the gift of a ring, which Attila interpreted as a proposal of marriage. If he could marry the imperial princess, sister of the western emperor, she might bring at least half the western provinces as her dowry! The dangers were clear enough to both Theodosius II and Valentinian, who reacted quickly. The eastern emperor recommended that Honoria be dispatched to the Huns straight away, which might have reduced the threat of invasion, but Valentinian had reservations about allowing his sister to marry the ‘scourge of God’, who was known to be polygamous. Instead, he punished his sister by exiling her from the court and executing her eunuch servant and other accomplices. Only Galla Placidia’s interventions and insistence upon the planned marriage to the senator Herculanus, secured Honoria’s restoration. In 452 Herculanus was named consul in Rome, a mark of the emperor’s gratitude for saving Honoria from total disgrace.

But what this nostalgia tells me is not that Americans forget too easily. "We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing," Gore Vidal famously said, but this is only partially true. He neglected that the delusion is intentional. The preamble to our Constitution starts, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..." and it has been interpreted as an excuse for America's shortcomings. We are not perfect, but seek to be "more perfect." Our faults are not American, only the progress--ending slavery is American, the institution itself was not. Extending the vote to white women via constitutional amendment is American, denying them the vote for more than a century of the nation's existence was not. For the myth to hold, we can only ever view America as the sum of its best parts.

It is constitutive of equanimity that I feel impartially about the well-being of others. If I am in the state of equanimity, interpreted as upekkha, I am in a state that involves, as an essential component, equal care and concern for all sentient beings. We might translate upekkha as ‘‘equanimity in community’’ if it helps us avoid confusion with our understanding of equanimity as a purely self-regarding state of mind.

Congress and the presidency have gradually taken more power for themselves, and the Supreme Court has allowed them to get away with it, aggrandizing itself in the process. As the Court has let both the legislative and executive branches swell beyond their constitutionally authorized powers, so have the laws and regulations that it now interprets.

I learned . . . to read and interpret the country: the ground underfoot, the coming and going of creatures, the arrival and departure of birds, the seasonal flowering and fading of plant life. These things — the physical evidence of them — constitute a language, a grammar , and a syntax; they represent in some way the original perception we may have acquired of a fundamental order in things, in their relationships and significant connections. Ad by this I mean (among other things) story, narrative, the thread of sequence and consequence [John Haines, "The Creative Spirit in Art and Literature", The Norton Book of Nature Writing, Robert Finch, editor].

Ginsburg believes that the Constitution should be interpreted to root out unconscious biases that subordinate women. But as she recognized decades ago, true equality requires that men and women work together to root out unconscious bias in families and in the workplace.

If the [Supreme] Court's job is to interpret the Constitution, then by definition, it must be open to interpretation.

Getting somebody confirmed to the Supreme Court has never been a slam dunk, in part because the Court’s role in American government has always been controversial. After all, the idea of giving nine unelected, tenured-for-life lawyers in black robes the power to strike down laws passed by a majority of the people’s representatives doesn’t sound very democratic. But since Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 Supreme Court case that gave the Court final say on the meaning of the U.S. Constitution and established the principle of judicial review over the actions of the Congress and the president, that’s how our system of checks and balances has worked. In theory, Supreme Court justices don’t “make law” when exercising these powers; instead, they’re supposed to merely “interpret” the Constitution, helping to bridge how its provisions were understood by the framers and how they apply to the world we live in today. For the bulk of constitutional cases coming before the Court, the theory holds up pretty well. Justices have for the most part felt bound by the text of the Constitution and precedents set by earlier courts, even when doing so results in an outcome they don’t personally agree with. Throughout American history, though, the most important cases have involved deciphering the meaning of phrases like “due process,” “privileges and immunities,” “equal protection,” or “establishment of religion”—terms so vague that it’s doubtful any two Founding Fathers agreed on exactly what they meant. This ambiguity gives individual justices all kinds of room to “interpret” in ways that reflect their moral judgments, political preferences, biases, and fears. That’s why in the 1930s a mostly conservative Court could rule that FDR’s New Deal policies violated the Constitution, while forty years later a mostly liberal Court could rule that the Constitution grants Congress almost unlimited power to regulate the economy.

Peter Berger notes that the events that constitute our lives are subject to many interpretations, not just by outsiders, but by ourselves.7 When an unexpected event occurs, we need to explain it not only to others, but to ourselves.

Women are infantilized, demeaned, deprived of dignity, denied their rights, and all in the name of the rule of law. The elite approach followed within the courtrooms often asserts supremacy while excluding the poor, women, children, Dalits, tribals, and other subaltern groups. In itself, a court cannot change the law, yet, the court has the power to interpret and implement the given law in a sensitive manner while upholding the constitutional spirit and values, and that is what a litigant expects and society hopes for. However, this is not happening.

he law is a blunt tool and though it makes tall claims of being objective and neutral, in itself, the law is fragile and will not smash patriarchy. Rather, The courts have always favored the power structure and shielded those who are resourceful. The courtrooms, themselves as a symbol of authority, defend the values of supremacy and protect the oppressive and regressive system. However, those on the margins with their conviction and belief in the values of democracy, justice, and the rule of law, need to shake the system. With individual or through collective action the marginalized are challenging the power structure and are compelling the state and the society to make social and political transformation at a larger level. Angela Davis said that “in a racist society it is not enough to be a non-racist. We must be anti-racist”. Similarly, here it may be derived that `in a patriarchal society, it is not enough to be a non-patriarchal. We must be anti-patriarchy’. The women with their sheer will and conviction are marching ahead to smash patriarchy using law as an instrument of change. However, what is required is the radical interpretation of constitutional values by the courts and this should be strengthened by assuring the equal representation of women within the judiciary at all levels to open up the possibility of nondiscrimination within the patriarchal hostile settings.

I tell my first-year law students that they will be learning how to read. "Huh? We've known how to read since we were six!" Sure, that's true, in the sense that students come to law school knowing cognitively how to translate black-and-white marks on a page into words. But what I mean by read is different. It requires you to isolate phrases, then individual words, and then figure out as many interpretations of those words as possible. Once you have the various options on the table, you can start to prioritize the options and choose which is best---or at least how to argue for one over the other on behalf of a client. This is a skill, and one that is becoming increasingly rare in a world of information overload, texts, tweets, and sound bites.

Unfortunately, we do not always understand the Bill of Rights as well as we might. Many people seem to think that it guarantees us the right to do almost anything we want. That is not the case; there are limits. For example, the right to free speech does not give us the right to say slanderous things about others, to cry fire in a crowded theater as a joke, or to discuss military secrets with our friends. The right to peaceable assembly does not permit us to gather a crowd of demonstrators in the middle of a busy street. As interpreted by the Supreme Court, the rights of the individuals must be balanced against the needs of the society as a whole.

Two men are travelling together along a road. One of them believes that it leads to a Celestial City, the other that it leads nowhere; but since this is the only road there is, both must travel it. Neither has been this way before, and therefore neither is able to say what they will find around each next comer. During their journey they meet both with moments of refreshment and delight, and with moments of hardship and danger. All the time one of them thinks of his journey as a pilgrimage to the Celestial City and interprets the pleasant parts as encouragements and the obstacles as trials of his purpose and lessons in endurance, prepared by the king of that city and designed to make of him a worthy citizen of the place when at last he arrives there. The other, however, believes none of this and sees their journey as an unavoidable and aimless ramble. Since he has no choice in the matter, he enjoys the good and endures the bad. But for him there is no Celestial City to be reached, no all-encompassing purpose ordaining their journey; only the road itself and the luck of the road in good weather and in bad. During the course of the journey the issue between them is not an experimental one. They do not entertain different expectations about the corning details of the road, but only about its ultimate destination. And yet when they do turn the last corner of it will be apparent that one of them has been right all the time and the other wrong. Thus although the issue between them has not been experimental, it has nevertheless from the start been a real issue. They have not merely felt differently about the road; for one was feeling appropriately and the other inappropriately in relation to the actual state of affairs. Their opposed interpretations of the road constituted genuinely rival assertions, though assertions whose assertion-status has the peculiar characteristic of being guaranteed retrospectively by a future crux.

Dobkin de Rios and Smith13 suggest that spiritual techniques for altering consciousness are typically repressed in state-level societies because they constitute a potential threat to the religious interpretations of those who hold social and religious power.

the sectional crisis was rooted not only in a peculiarly American problem—Constitutional interpretation—but in an issue that was global in scope: change, and the resistance to it.

In Federalist Paper # 10, James Madison argued that representative government was needed to maintain peace in a society ridden by factional disputes. These disputes came from “the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” The problem, he said, was how to control the factional struggles that came from inequalities in wealth. Minority factions could be controlled, he said, by the principle that decisions would be by vote of the majority. So the real problem, according to Madison, was a majority faction, and here the solution was offered by the Constitution, to have “an extensive republic,” that is, a large nation ranging over thirteen states, for then “it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. . . . The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.” Madison’s argument can be seen as a sensible argument for having a government which can maintain peace and avoid continuous disorder. But is it the aim of government simply to maintain order, as a referee, between two equally matched fighters? Or is it that government has some special interest in maintaining a certain kind of order, a certain distribution of power and wealth, a distribution in which government officials are not neutral referees but participants? In that case, the disorder they might worry about is the disorder of popular rebellion against those monopolizing the society’s wealth. This interpretation makes sense when one looks at the economic interests, the social backgrounds, of the makers of the Constitution.

how do we explain the appearance of the remarkable group of leaders who carried the American colonies from resistance to revolution, held their own against the premier imperial power of the day, and then capped their visionary experiment by framing a Constitution whose origins and interpretation still preoccupy us over two centuries later?

Without a constitution to maintain some semblance of order, religious law becomes the highest authority. And when everyone is free to interpret and enforce the law as he sees fit, chaos ensues.

as a futurist in my college days, the pretense of consistent literalism was challenged by Revelation’s wild imagery. In any given verse, we might pivot from literal to figurative interpretations and back again. Using the Church in Revelation again as our example, it was easy to discern that the collective billions who constitute the Bride of Christ are not one literal female colossus in a humongous wedding dress waiting to consummate union with Jesus in actual lovemaking. We knew this was symbolic. Yet in the very same verse, we stumbled over our literalism into the New Jerusalem. Some of the popular futurist commentaries of the day quibbled over the Holy City’s dimensions—whether it will be a pyramid or a cube and what the rooms, streets, and transportation will be like.4 I tried to picture a city that was fifteen hundred miles tall and wondered what that would do to the earth’s rotation. I also wondered what kind of oysters could produce pearls large enough to become the city’s twelve gates (Rev 21:21).

Whenever I attempt to understand the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence and the civilian Intelligence Bureau, whose purpose is to collect crucial information on the security of the state, I am left with biting questions about their true roles in internal and external matters. It is a fact that such countries as India and Pakistan have always suffered from a lack of limits on the role of their intelligence agencies and respect for international law and human rights, including the privacy of individuals within the concept and context of global peace and fundamental freedoms. The ISI, driven by the Pakistan Armed Forces, ignores the supreme constitutional role and rule of a democratic head of state, under which even the Armed Forces themselves fall. This is not only a violation of the constitution but also a rejection of the civilian leadership. This can be interpreted as Pakistan is a country where the servant rules its leader and patron. It is this bitter reality that leads toward the collapse of all systems of society, which the Pakistani nation has faced since the first introduction of martial law by General Ayub Khan in 1958, and such conduct has continued to exist ever since, whether visibly or invisibly. One cannot ignore, avoid, or deny that Pakistan has maintained its physical independence for more than 7 decades. However, its real freedom as conceptualized upon the nation’s creation has been only a dream and abused by its so-called defenders and its power-mongers. Unfortunately, such figures control the ISI and lead it in the wrong direction, beyond the constitutional limits of its power. Consequently, the ISI plays the role of a gang that disrupts the stability of the main political parties and promotes tiny, unpopular parties to gain power for itself. There is thus no doubt that the ISI has failed in its responsibility to support constitutional rule and to secure and defend the state and its people. The failure of the democratic system in the country, directly or indirectly, reflects the harassment practiced by both intelligence agencies without proof or legal process, even interfering with other institutions. The consequences are the collapse of the justice system and the imposition of foreign policies that damage international relationships. The result is a lack of trust in these agencies and their isolation. In a civilized century, it is a tragedy that one dares not express one’s feelings that may abuse God, prophets, or sacred figures. But more than that, one cannot speak a word against the wrongdoing of a handful of army generals or ISI officials. In Pakistan, veteran journalists, top judges, and other key figures draw breath under the spying eyes of the ISI; even higher and minister-level personalities are the victims of such conduct. One has to live in such surroundings. Pakistan needs a major cleanup and reorganization of the present awkward role of the ISI for the sake of international relations, standards, and peace, including the privacy of individuals and respect for the notable figures of society, according to the law.

What is most important in this interpretation of the morphology of time? The idea that time precedes the object, and that in the construction of time we should seek an inner depth of consciousness, rather than a consciousness rooted in outer phenomena constituted by the subjective process of traumatic self-awareness. The world around us becomes what it is by the fundamental action of presencing accomplished by the mind. When the mind sleeps, reality lacks the sense of present existence. It is fully immersed in a continuous dream. The world is created by time, and time, in its turn, is the manifestation of self-aware subjectivity, an intrasubjectivity.

The amendments proposed are in respect of Article 14 guaranteeing equality before the law, Article 15 prohibiting discrimination on grounds of religion, Article 19 guaranteeing certain personal rights of the citizen such as freedom of speech, Article 31 relating to compulsory acquisition of private property and Article 32 regarding the right to move the Supreme Court for the enforcement of fundamental rights. Amendments to the Constitution became necessary as judicial interpretations of fundamental rights created difficulties in the execution of the policy of the Government

Too many dictatorships have been reared in the sacred name of public order,’ warned the commentator, ‘and to leave the interpretation of this term to the tender mercies of officialdom is to barter away a precious privilege.

Instead of accepting the decision of this then august tribunal—the ultimate authority in the interpretation of constitutional questions—as conclusive of a controversy that had so long disturbed the peace and was threatening the perpetuity of the Union, it was flouted, denounced, and utterly disregarded by the Northern agitators, and served only to stimulate the intensity of their sectional hostility.

Congress has the power to make laws, but the president can veto them, and vetoes can be overridden only by congressional supermajorities. The president and his executive branch enforce the laws, but there is congressional and judicial oversight. The judiciary interprets the Constitution and the laws, but judges are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Firestone accepts that culture and history have played important roles in shaping the way we conceive of men, women, (and children) and their differing roles but that underlying all these interpretations are some basic anatomical continuities — unchangeable until now. It is not therefore economic class that underlies oppression but biological and physical characteristics. As she puts it: “Nature produced the fundamental inequality.” This claim about the reality of sex difference and its natural consequences —there are women and there are men and women suffer precisely because of their womanness — puts her at odds with the majority of feminism, past and present. She is interested neither in more subtle analyses of the cultural meaning of sex and gender, nor in reclaiming a positive essence of female physicality (celebrating birth, for example, or the specificities of female sexual experience). As Stella Sandford puts it: “On the main points that constitute her distinctive contribution to feminist theory she finds herself in opposition to the mainstream of US radical feminism.

A physicist decides to demonstrate the inaccuracy of a proposition; in order to deduce from this proposition the prediction of a phenomenon and institute the experiment which is to show whether this phenomenon is or is not produced, in order to interpret the results of this experiment and establish that the predicted phenomenon is not produced, he does not confine himself to making use of the proposition in question; he makes use also of a whole group of theories accepted by him as beyond dispute. The prediction of the phenomenon, whose nonproduction is to cut off debate, does not derive from the proposition challenged if taken by itself, but from the proposition at issue joined to that whole group of theories; if the predicted phenomenon is not produced, the only thing the experiment teaches us is that among the propositions used to predict the phenomenon and to establish whether it would be produced, there is at least one error; but where this error lies is just what it does not tell us... In sum, the physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses; when the experiment is in disagreement with his predictions, what he learns is that at least one of the hypotheses constituting this group is unacceptable and ought to be modified; but the experiment does not designate which one should be changed.

For, read properly, the ninth amendment creates no rights at all. There are no “ninth amendment rights” in the sense in which there are, for example, first amendment rights or fourth amendment rights. That there are individual rights fully derivable from no single provision but implicit in several, or in the structure of the Bill of Rights as a whole, is a proposition implicit in the ninth amendment. But that amendment is not itself the fount of any such rights, and it in no way obviates the need to argue that the Constitution does indeed impose upon government the particular limitation for which the advocate contends.52 Thus the Ninth Amendment itself does not protect a right, but tells us not to not find a right in the Constitution just because it is not specifically enumerated. The right to privacy still needs some kind of constitutional hook, although that hook might be the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, even though the clause does not mention “privacy.” In interpreting that clause, and other clauses, we should be mindful of their more expansive interpretations.

The judges who breach, violate, and break the concept of the constitution and law are not fair to society, even to themselves; they just put the mask on their faces as the judge. However, history is their judge that does not ignore the reality. A verdict is neither a vote nor a consensus nor a customary decision; it is the interpretation and conclusion of the constitution and law, and judges set it accordingly in the context of that and ensure its implementation. The constitution is like a rose; foreign policy is its fragrance that flies freely everywhere, and everyone feels equally beyond restrictions. Sure, such context carries beauty, dignity, self-determination, freedom, and success; otherwise, the sting of thorns becomes a painful risk. In a civilized century, it is a tragedy that one dares not express one’s feelings that may abuse God, prophets, or sacred figures. But more than that, one cannot speak a word against the wrongdoing of a handful of army generals or ISI officials. In Pakistan, veteran journalists, top judges, and other key figures draw breath under the spying eyes of the ISI; even higher and minister-level personalities are the victims of such conduct. One has to live in such surroundings. Tit for Tat is neither a constitution nor a law; it is just an act of revenge. If it continues, be sure everything collapses wherever it happens. The cheap army, undemocratic state, and corrupt nation neither fulfill their oath nor comply with their constitution.

Contrary to DM1 which interprets antagonism as opposition, as the eternal struggle of opposites, DM2 conceives antagonism as the constitutive contradiction of an entity with itself: things come to be out of their own impossibility, the external opposite that poses a threat to their stability is always the externalization of their immanent self-blockage and inconsistency.

In the judiciary, judges do not adhere to the Constitution; they adhere to their interpretation; thus, the judiciary remains in a state of disaster.

A people can never choose between different types of government. It can choose the outer trappings of government, but not the essential thing, the spirit of government—even though public opinion constantly confuses the two. What gets written into a constitution is never essential.The important thing is how the instinct of the people interprets it.

A people can never choose between different types of government. It can choose the outer trappings of government, but not the essential thing, the spirit of government—even though public opinion constantly confuses the two. What gets written into a constitution is never essential.The important thing is how the instinct of the people interprets it.

Attacks on the principles of the Declaration began at an early point in American history. In the four decades before the Civil War, defenders of slavery explicitly rejected it, even calling it, as Senator John Pettit did in 1854, “a self-evident lie.”63 Horrified by this, antislavery politicians rallied to the Declaration. They developed a constitutional interpretation that emphasized liberty and equality, and they denounced slavery as incompatible with the

Therefore, the Burmese felt no particular urge to understand their colonial rulers. This indifference was also encouraged by British attitudes. While the Englishman tended to see the Hindus as ‘serious’, ‘mysterious’, ‘deep’, ‘introverted’, and so on, he usually saw the Burmese as ‘gay’, ‘open’, ‘careless’, ‘childlike’, not a people who needed deep philosophical interpretation. The Burmese returned the compliment by assuming that there was not much that they needed to know about the Englishman beyond the necessities of unavoidable intercourse between the ruler and the ruled. How different it was from India, with the earnest, almost obsessive desire for comprehension at the intellectual level that was producing a string of scholars and philosophers in the western mould! It was true that such Indians constituted only a tiny section of the population, but their impact was strong on the upper classes; and they set the tone for those who would be leaders in the independence movements that were to gather momentum in the twentieth century. II

The first duty of liberality (dana) which demands that a ruler should contribute generously towards the welfare of the people makes the tacit assumption that a government should have the competence to provide adequately for its citizens. In the context of modern politics, one of the prime duties of a responsible administration would be to ensure the economic security of the state. Morality (sila) in traditional Buddhist terms is based on the observance of the five precepts, which entails refraining from destruction of life, theft, adultery, falsehood and indulgence in intoxicants. The ruler must bear a high moral character to win the respect and trust of the people, to ensure their happiness and prosperity and to provide a proper example. When the king does not observe the dhamma, state functionaries become corrupt, and when state functionaries are corrupt the people are caused much suffering. It is further believed that an unrighteous king brings down calamity on the land. The root of a nation’s misfortunes has to be sought in the moral failings of the government. The third duty, paricagga, is sometimes translated as generosity and sometimes as self-sacrifice. The former would constitute a duplication of the first duty, dana, so self-sacrifice as the ultimate generosity which gives up all for the sake of the people would appear the more satisfactory interpretation. The concept of selfless public service is sometimes illustrated by the story of the hermit Sumedha who took the vow of Buddhahood. In so doing he who could have realized the supreme liberation of nirvana in a single lifetime committed himself to countless incarnations that he might help other beings free themselves from suffering.

The other component was to build cadres through political education. Republicans sought out wealthy donors to set up foundations and think tanks as safe spaces outside the university for elaborating the Republican catechism, a document that grew from a cocktail napkin to a vast library of popular books and academic policy studies. They set up summer camps where college students could read Aristotle and Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich von Hayek, and learn to connect them. They set up reading groups for professors, who got paid to attend. They funded graduate students and apprenticed them under movement-approved professors. They also funded campus newspapers and national organizations like the Federalist Society, which introduces students to the "originalist" interpretation of constitutional law and acts as an an employment agency for young lawyers looking for clerkships and teaching positions. This one organization has revolutionized the way law is taught and interpreted in this country, and therefore how we are governed. It is the fruit of the conservatives' pedagogical strategy. The movement's fathers and godfathers, some of whom had once been Trotskyites, understood intuitively that to make lasting change the movement would have to build and sustain cadres, and send them out with full backpacks on the long march through the institutions. Marching with the aim of dismantling government by first seizing control of it, thus achieving anti-political ends by political means.

Interpretations varied as time passed. Early Hebrews contended that the universe was a hierarchy, with God at the top and other entities radiating downward from him. They believed that angels constitute the “court of heaven.” In writings they referred to “the angels of God” and bene Elohim, “God’s sons.

The judiciary, by its interpretation of the Constitution, plays a significant role in changing the destiny of the nation and which it has done remarkably, as

For Bryson, the centric ray, the line running from viewpoint to vanishing point, constitutes the return of the gaze upon itself.

The Founding and the Constitution WHAT GOVERNMENT DOES AND WHY IT MATTERS The framers of the U.S. Constitution knew why government mattered. In the Constitution’s preamble, the framers tell us that the purposes of government are to promote justice, to maintain peace at home, to defend the nation from foreign foes, to provide for the welfare of the citizenry, and, above all, to secure the “blessings of liberty” for Americans. The remainder of the Constitution spells out a plan for achieving these objectives. This plan includes provisions for the exercise of legislative, executive, and judicial powers and a recipe for the division of powers among the federal government’s branches and between the national and state governments. The framers’ conception of why government matters and how it is to achieve its goals, while often a matter of interpretation and subject to revision, has been America’s political blueprint for more than two centuries. Often, Americans become impatient with aspects of the constitutional system such as the separation of powers, which often seems to be a recipe for inaction and “gridlock” when America’s major institutions of government are controlled by opposing political forces. This has led to bitter fights that sometimes prevent government from delivering important services. In 2011 and again in 2013, the House and Senate could not reach agreement on a budget for the federal government or a formula for funding the public debt. For 16 days in October 2013, the federal government partially shut down; permit offices across the country no longer took in fees, contractors stopped receiving checks, research projects stalled, and some 800,000 federal employees were sent home on unpaid leave—at a cost to the economy of $2–6 billion.1 39

But together they will represent the range of positions and the diversity of viewpoints that constitute the heterogeneity of the modern city and account for the variations in the ways that the heat wave was managed and interpreted.

Dasein *is authentically itself* in the primordial individualization of the reticent resoluteness which exacts anxiety of itself. *As something that keeps *silent*, authentic *Being*-one’s-Self is just the sort of thing that does not keep on saying ‘I’; but in its reticence it ‘*is*’ that thrown entity as which it can authentically be. The Self which the reticence of resolute existence unveils is the primordial phenomenal basis for the question as to the Being of the ‘I’. Only if we are oriented phenomenally by the meaning of the Being of the authentic potentiality-for-Being-one’s-Self are we put in a position to discuss what ontological justification there is for treating substantiality, simplicity, and personality as characteristics of Selfhood. In the prevalent way of saying “I,” it is constantly suggested that what we have in advance is a Self-Thing, persistently present-at-hand; the ontological question of the Being of the Self must turn away from any such suggestion. *Care does not need to be founded in a Self. But existentiality, as constitutive for care, provides the ontological constitution of Dasein’s Self-constancy, to which there belongs, in accordance with the full structural content of care, its Being-fallen factically into non-Self-constancy*. When fully conceived, the care-structure includes the phenomenon of Selfhood. This phenomenon is clarified by Interpreting the meaning of care; and it is as care that Dasein’s totality of Being has been defined.” ―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, pp. 369-370

The *second task* consists in distinguishing the mode of knowing operative in ontology as science of Being, and this requires us to *work out the methodological structure of ontological-transcendental differentiation*. In early antiquity it was already seen that Being and its attributes in a certain way underlie beings and precede them and so are *a proteron*, an earlier. The term denoting this character by which Being precedes beings is the expression *a priori*, *apriority*, being earlier or prior. As *a priori*, Being is earlier than beings. The meaning of this *a priori*, the sense of the earlier and its possibility, has never been cleared up. The question has not even once been raised as to why the determinations of Being and Being itself must have this character of priority and how such priority is possible. To be earlier is a determination of time, but it does not pertain to the temporal order of the time that we measure by the clock; rather, it is an earlier that belongs to the "inverted world." Therefore, this earlier which characterises Being is taken by the popular understanding to be the later. Only the interpretation of Being by way of temporality can make clear why and how this feature of being earlier, apriority, goes together with Being. The *a priori* character of Being and of all the structures of Being accordingly calls for a specific kind of approach and way of apprehending Being―*a priori cognition*. The basic components of *a priori* cognition constitute what we call *phenomenology*. Phenomenology is the name for the method of ontology, that is, of scientific philosophy. Rightly conceived, phenomenology is the concept of a method. It is therefore precluded from the start that phenomenology should pronounce any theses about Being which have specific content, thus adopting a so-called standpoint." ―Martin Heidegger, from_The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_

When the Romans looked a little baffled, he said, "Let us suppose that certain crimes in the Constitution you are now planning carry the capital penalty. And let us then suppose that future generations of politicians shall say, 'That is not exactly what our fathers intended in that particular table of law.' or, 'They really intended such and such.' Who can then refute the politicians? Who among you would be alive to insist that indeed the old meaning was intended? In hsort, different ages would have different interpretations for their own purposes.

Jackson read the Indian treaties in much the same way that Democrats and progressives today read the U.S. Constitution. They care little about what it says; they interpret it to mean what they want it to mean. Jackson

Pericles’ speech is not only a programme. It is also a defence, and perhaps even an attack. It reads, as I have already hinted, like a direct attack on Plato. I do not doubt that it was directed, not only against the arrested tribalism of Sparta, but also against the totalitarian ring or ‘link’ at home; against the movement for the paternal state, the Athenian ‘Society of the Friends of Laconia’ (as Th. Gomperz called them in 190232). The speech is the earliest33 and at the same time perhaps the strongest statement ever made in opposition to this kind of movement. Its importance was felt by Plato, who caricatured Pericles’ oration half a century later in the passages of the Republic34 in which he attacks democracy, as well as in that undisguised parody, the dialogue called Menexenus or the Funeral Oration35. But the Friends of Laconia whom Pericles attacked retaliated long before Plato. Only five or six years after Pericles’ oration, a pamphlet on the Constitution of Athens36 was published by an unknown author (possibly Critias), now usually called the ‘Old Oligarch’. This ingenious pamphlet, the oldest extant treatise on political theory, is, at the same time, perhaps the oldest monument of the desertion of mankind by its intellectual leaders. It is a ruthless attack upon Athens, written no doubt by one of her best brains. Its central idea, an idea which became an article of faith with Thucydides and Plato, is the close connection between naval imperialism and democracy. And it tries to show that there can be no compromise in a conflict between two worlds37, the worlds of democracy and of oligarchy; that only the use of ruthless violence, of total measures, including the intervention of allies from outside (the Spartans), can put an end to the unholy rule of freedom. This remarkable pamphlet was to become the first of a practically infinite sequence of works on political philosophy which were to repeat more or less, openly or covertly, the same theme down to our own day. Unwilling and unable to help mankind along their difficult path into an unknown future which they have to create for themselves, some of the ‘educated’ tried to make them turn back into the past. Incapable of leading a new way, they could only make themselves leaders of the perennial revolt against freedom. It became the more necessary for them to assert their superiority by fighting against equality as they were (using Socratic language) misanthropists and misologists—incapable of that simple and ordinary generosity which inspires faith in men, and faith in human reason and freedom. Harsh as this judgement may sound, it is just, I fear, if it is applied to those intellectual leaders of the revolt against freedom who came after the Great Generation, and especially after Socrates. We can now try to see them against the background of our historical interpretation.

A Hard Left For High-School History The College Board version of our national story BY STANLEY KURTZ | 1215 words AT the height of the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, conservatives were alive to the dangers of a leftist takeover of American higher education. Today, with the coup all but complete, conservatives take the loss of the academy for granted and largely ignore it. Meanwhile, America’s college-educated Millennial generation drifts ever farther leftward. Now, however, an ambitious attempt to force a leftist tilt onto high-school U.S.-history courses has the potential to shake conservatives out of their lethargy, pulling them back into the education wars, perhaps to retake some lost ground. The College Board, the private company that develops the SAT and Advanced Placement (AP) exams, recently ignited a firestorm by releasing, with little public notice, a lengthy, highly directive, and radically revisionist “framework” for teaching AP U.S. history. The new framework replaces brief guidelines that once allowed states, school districts, and teachers to present U.S. history as they saw fit. The College Board has promised to generate detailed guidelines for the entire range of AP courses (including government and politics, world history, and European history), and in doing so it has effectively set itself up as a national school board. Dictating curricula for its AP courses allows the College Board to circumvent state standards, virtually nationalizing America’s high schools, in violation of cherished principles of local control. Unchecked, this will result in a high-school curriculum every bit as biased and politicized as the curriculum now dominant in America’s colleges. Not coincidentally, David Coleman, the new head of the College Board, is also the architect of the Common Core, another effort to effectively nationalize American K–12 education, focusing on English and math skills. As president of the College Board, Coleman has found a way to take control of history, social studies, and civics as well, pushing them far to the left without exposing himself to direct public accountability. Although the College Board has steadfastly denied that its new AP U.S. history (APUSH) guidelines are politically biased, the intellectual background of the effort indicates otherwise. The early stages of the APUSH redesign overlapped with a collaborative venture between the College Board and the Organization of American Historians to rework U.S.-history survey courses along “internationalist” lines. The goal was to undercut anything that smacked of American exceptionalism, the notion that, as a nation uniquely constituted around principles of liberty and equality, America stands as a model of self-government for the world. Accordingly, the College Board’s new framework for AP U.S. history eliminates the traditional emphasis on Puritan leader John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” sermon and its echoes in American history. The Founding itself is demoted and dissolved within a broader focus on transcontinental developments, chiefly the birth of an exploitative international capitalism grounded in the slave trade. The Founders’ commitment to republican principles is dismissed as evidence of a benighted belief in European cultural superiority. Thomas Bender, the NYU historian who leads the Organization of American Historians’ effort to globalize and denationalize American history, collaborated with the high-school and college teachers who eventually came to lead the College Board’s APUSH redesign effort. Bender frames his movement as a counterpoint to the exceptionalist perspective that dominated American foreign policy during the George W. Bush ad ministration. Bender also openly hopes that students exposed to his approach will sympathize with Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s willingness to use foreign law to interpret the U.S. Constitution rather than with Justice Antonin Scalia�

Todd Billings has articulated the dynamics of theological interpretation in a way that resonates with my account of Derrida’s emphasis on context and communal criteria for what constitutes a “good” interpretation. As Billings winsomely puts it, the ecclesial and theological interpretation of Scripture invites us into “the spacious and yet specified place of wrestling with, chewing on, and performing Scripture.”[422] The generous boundaries (spacious yet specified) of ecclesial interpretation constitute a context for interpreting well, and for knowing what counts as “good” interpretation. Billings captures this dynamic well: Christian readers occupy a spacious territory when they come to know the inexhaustible power of the Spirit’s word through Scripture, a word that is both strangely close to us and yet always meeting us anew as a stranger. Our imaginations need rejuvenation so that we can perceive the wide, expansive drama of salvation into which God incorporates us as readers of Scripture. Yet, as Christians, we also interpret Scripture from a specified location. We are not simply modern individuals looking at an ancient text, or members of a social club looking to an instruction manual on how to make the church run more effectively. We are people who interpret Scripture “in Christ,” as those united to the living Christ by the Holy Spirit’s mediation and power.[423] Such a stipulation of the church (and the canon) as the context for “good” scriptural interpretation is completely consistent with Derrida’s account of iterability and decontextualization.

I would argue that out of these particularities of interpretive horizons (plural) of each social subject comes the potential for critical reflection. Out of our inconsistencies, or out of the crooked timber of socialization, comes acquaintance with multiple ways of making sense of the world that can be critically reflected against each other. There is no rock of certainty for the contemporary subject but out of overlapping inconsistencies there emerges the awareness that there is no single way of describing the world, no ultimate discourse of truth, no final vocabulary, with which we should attempt to totalize our experience or that of others. In this uncertainty the possibility of utopia appears as a mirage shimmering at the edge of a horizon that is shaped by the summer heat of the illusion of a singular interpretative horizon. In its place there is the multiple vision of a colder less secure social subject. If that subject can create a modest mode of life for themselves that includes this sense of insecurity, they will be less easily attracted to perfectionist totalizing visions, thus this subject is constituted as more dialogically open. If that subject tries to overcome their ontological insecurity, they may be attracted to a singular interpretative horizon that provides all the answers, wherein lies the root of totalitarianism.

Videogames require critical interpretation to mediate our experience of the simulation, to ground it in a set of coherent and expressive values, responses, or understandings that constitute effects of the work. In this process, the unit operations of a simulation embody themselves in a player's understanding. This is the place where rules can be grasped, where instantiated code enters the material world via human players' faculty of reason. In my mind, it is the most important moment in the study of a videogame.

This breadth of constitutional law in barring extralegal legislation is revealing about more than the past. The reader will have to wait patiently until chapter 7 for details of the current regime of extralegal lawmaking, but the significance of the history can already be anticipated. In an era of administrative legislation, it often is assumed that when the U.S. Constitution grants legislative power to Congress, it does not bar the executive from issuing binding rules, making interpretations, or setting taxes—as long as the executive has legislative authorization or at least acquiescence. The history of constitutional law, however, reveals that constitutions developed to bar all extralegal lawmaking—the point being to confine government to ruling through the law. Thus, administrative legislation—whether by proclamation, rulemaking, interpretation, or taxation—is not a novel form of lawmaking, and it cannot, on account of its alleged novelty, escape constitutional restrictions. On the contrary, it is a return to the extralegal legislation that constitutions were established to prohibit.

Deists, not religious authoritarians, codified the clear separation of church from state in addition to the division of powers within the state. Deists, not the Continental philosophers, established our democratic republic upon uniquely radical interpretations of constitutional and procedural stability, representation, accountability, and transparency. Deists, not autocrats, formed a more perfect Union that preserved equally for each individual the universal civil liberties inscribed in the Bill of Rights. It was Deists who stood up for Everyman by instituting true equality and freedom for all.

The class-dominance approach to political activity is acutely related to our own in an unfortunate terminological sense. By historical accident, the class-dominance conception, in its Marxian variant, has come to be known as the “economic” conception or interpretation of State activity. The Marxian dialectic, with its emphasis on economic position as the fundamental source of class conflict, has caused the perfectly good word “economic” to be used in a wholly misleading manner. So much has this word been misused and abused here, that we have found it expedient to modify the original subtitle of this book from “An Economic Theory of Political Constitutions” to that currently used.

In sum, part I has shown that administrative law revives prerogative legislation, together with the prerogative of suspending and dispensing with law—thus restoring an extralegal regime of making and unmaking law. And lest it be thought that this is improbable, it should be recalled that some leading advocates of administrative law candidly admitted that their project was to return to prerogative power. John Dickinson, for example, observed that “the question of whether or not the king can issue ordinances parallels our modern question as to whether or not an executive body or officer can establish regulations; and the arguments used pro and con have followed much the same lines.”25 Put more theoretically, administrative lawmaking is not a power exercised through law, but a power outside it. Indeed, as will become more fully apparent in part III, it is a power above the law. But even when considered simply as a power outside the law, this extralegal regime revives what once was considered absolute power. Administrative law thus returns to the very sort of power that constitutions developed in order to prohibit. The prerogative to issue law-like commands was the primary point of contention in the English constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century. In response, the English developed a constitution and Americans enacted a constitution that placed all legislative power in the legislature. It therefore is mistaken to assume that American administrative law is a novel mode of governance, which could not have been anticipated or barred by the U.S. Constitution. On the contrary, administrative power revives extralegal rulemaking, interpretation, dispensing, and suspending, and thus almost the entire regime of extralegal lawmaking once associated with absolute prerogative power. It thereby restores what constitutions barred when they located legislative power in their legislatures.

It is a fundamental principle of American democracy that laws should not be public only when it is convenient for government officials to make them public. They should be public all the time, open to review by adversarial courts, and subject to change by an accountable legislature guided by an informed public. If Americans are not able to learn how their government is interpreting and executing the law then we have effectively eliminated the most important bulwark of our democracy. That’s why, even at the height of the Cold War, when the argument for absolute secrecy was at its zenith, Congress chose to make US surveillance laws public. Without public laws, and public court rulings interpreting those laws, it is impossible to have informed public debate. And when the American people are in the dark, they can’t make fully informed decisions about who should represent them, or protest policies that they disagree with. These are fundamentals. It’s Civics 101. And secret law violates those basic principles. It has no place in America.

Interpreters, when challenged on their manipulations, tell us the Constitution was written for a different and simpler time. Actually, the genius of the Constitution is that it was not. It was not written for a time and place but for a species of being. It is not a political document but a psychological one. It will remain relevant so long as humans remain human, so long as people are driven by the desire for power.

The new Constitution will promote the “general” welfare, not welfare varying by condition or by place of residence. It will secure our liberties—against whom? There’s an ambiguity here; liberty could be secured against foreign enemies and domestic subversives, or against the new government itself. The latter interpretation is soothing to American ears; but in this context, it seems far-fetched. The clause appears in a list of things government is to do, not things it is not to do; a list of powers, not of prohibitions. The new government, it would appear, is not the enemy of liberty but its chief agent and protector. The purpose then, in its most plausible reading, is to create a strong, active, national government, one whose benefits will flow directly to the people who create it.

If science is defined or understood as a mode of seeking knowledge, a means of interpreting nature in a way that can be demonstrated to others, then the plant-medicine traditions of the Amazon as they have been practiced constitute an authentic scientific discipline.

On behalf of the deference under the Administrative Procedure Act, it is said that Congress is not constitutionally barred from authorizing deference—as if Congress can detract from the office of the judges. The office of the judges, however, was an element of the Constitution’s grant of judicial power, and it required the judges to exercise independent judgment in accord with the law of the land. Put another way, when the Constitution authorized judicial power, it took for granted that judges, by their nature, had such a duty.19 This judicial duty was recognized very early, because it was the foundation of what nowadays is called “judicial review.” When writing about the judicial power of North Carolina in 1786, James Iredell explained: “The duty of the power I conceive, in all cases, is to decide according to the laws of the state,” and as “the constitution is a law of the state,” a statute “inconsistent with the constitution is void.” Or as put by John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, where “both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case” the court “must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case,” this being “of the very essence of judicial duty.”20 Judicial review, in other words, is entailed by judicial duty—a duty that accompanies judicial power and that requires judges to exercise their own independent judgment in following the law. And another result of this duty is that a mere statute cannot justify the judges in abandoning their independent judgment or in following extralegal rules or interpretations. As if this were not enough, the U.S. Constitution adds that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” If this means anything, it surely requires a judge not to defer to one of the parties, let alone to defer systematically to the government. Nonetheless, on the basis of a mere statute, the judges generally defer. The next step is to examine the varieties

It may be thought that administrative legislation at least comes with virtual representation. Although the administrative lawmakers themselves are unelected, they are appointed by presidential authority, and they act under congressional authorization or acquiescence. It therefore could be imagined that they are virtually, even if not actually, acting as representatives of the people. In fact, however, most administrators are not even chosen directly by the president. Although heads of agencies and a few others at the top of each agency are political appointees, selected by the president or his staff, almost all other administrators are hired by existing administrators. Thus, almost all of those who make law through administrative interpretations were never even picked by elected politicians. Far from being elected by the people, let alone elected politicians, they are appointed by other administrators. Their authority thus is not even virtually representative, but is merely that of a self-perpetuating bureaucratic class. Accordingly, the suggestion that their lawmaking comes with virtual representation is illusory. Virtual representation, moreover, is not a very convincing theory, for it traditionally was an excuse for denying representation to colonists and then to women. For example, although women could not elect representatives and senators, they were said to be virtually represented through their husbands or fathers.10 Nowadays, the same sort of theory (whether put in terms of “virtual,” “delegated,” or “derivative” representation) remains an excuse for refusing representation—this time for refusing it to the entire nation. Nor is this a coincidence. As will soon be seen, it was when Americans acquired equal voting rights that much legislation was shifted outside the elected legislature. The virtual representation excuse therefore should be understood in the same way in the past, as a brazen justification for denying representation. Administrative agencies or officers thus are not representative lawmaking bodies, let alone the Constitution’s representative lawmaking body. Perhaps it will be suggested that it is sufficient for administrative power to be mere state coercion. But no one, neither an individual nor a government, has any natural superiority or power over anyone else. Therefore, if a law is not to be mere coercion, it must be made by the people or at least by their representative legislature, and obviously administrative law is not made by either.

Perceiving that she had constituted herself interpreter, M. Plançon opened negotiations with an impassioned plea to be preserved from these mad Englishmen who expected honest Frenchmen to understand their own barbarous language – and this in France, voyez-vous!

On the level of signified object, iconic hybridity constitutes a subcategory of English, whereas symbolic hybridity constitutes a separate category.

am arguing, therefore, for the replacement of interpretation as it is generally practiced with exegesis. Exegesis is a method of discovering relations among language and referents, and is an essential part of translation. “Exegesis … does not constitute the interpretation of the symbol, but one of its extensions,” Dan Sperber maintains, and so it delineates truth as a set of relations rather than an ultimate determinant of meaning.28 A “meaning” is only another sign in the system from which the symbol being interpreted comes. As long as we find the meaning within other parts of the system, we are merely rotating signs in a way similar to that done by those using the system. To

The crisis at Nootka thus sparked the first cabinet-level foreign policy debate in the United States under the new Constitution of 1787.

Further, the OIC seeks to impose this unfounded interpretation on general human rights law and international law. The truth is that there is no basis in human rights law for the implementation of blasphemy statutes or their equivalent. The restriction of freedom of speech considered “blasphemous” is anti-Constitutional[86] and antithetical to international standards of genuine human rights.[87]

The Torah, like other ancient law codes, assigns the death penalty to many proscribed behaviors besides murder—including adultery, rape of a betrothed woman, giving insult or injury to one’s parents, witchcraft, male homosexuality, and public profanation of the Sabbath. By the second century C.E., however, the Talmudic rabbis, whose debates and rulings constitute the main body of Halakha, had virtually nullified the death penalty. The Mishnah (the codification of law that forms the core text of the Talmud) states, “A Sanhedrin [governing council] that puts a man to death once in seven years is called destructive. Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah says: even once in seventy years. Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon say: had we been in the Sanhedrin none would ever have been put to death” (Makkot 7A). Even in murder cases, the Torah’s requirement of two eyewitnesses for a sentence of death was interpreted by the Talmudic rabbis to make capital punishment highly unlikely: the murderer’s own confession could not be accepted as evidence, and the two eyewitnesses were required also to have warned the criminal beforehand that he would be executed! Justice tempered by mercy thus became the Jewish ideal.

Nicholas Turgenev in his Russia and the Russians in 1847 eloquently restated the classical enlightened arguments for constitutional monarchy; but this was the voice of an old man writing in Paris.

The ruling regime in Iran has many faults, but it is more representative than most in the Middle East outside Israel (though the trend is not encouraging—the Majles elections of 2004 and the presidential elections of 2005 were more interfered with and less free than previous elections). Despite repressive measures by the state, Iran is not a totalitarian country like the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It is a complex polity, with different power centers and shades of opinion among those in power. There is space for dissent—within certain boundaries. Iran still has the potential for self-generated change, as has been recognized by observers from Paul Wolfowitz to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah. Important independent Iranian figures like Shirin Ebadi and dissidents like Akbar Ganji have urged that Iran be left alone to develop its own political solutions. One theory of Iranian history, advanced by Homa Katouzian and others,5 is that Iran lurches from chaos to arbitrary autocracy and back again. There is certainly some evidence of that in the record. Perhaps increased political freedom would merely unleash chaos, and no doubt there are pragmatists within the current Iranian regime who make just that argument for keeping things as they are. One could interpret the crisis of the reform movement in 2000, followed by the press crackdown, as another episode in the Katouzian cycle. There are signs of disillusionment and nihilism among many young Iranians after the failure of the Khatami experiment.6 But I don’t believe in that kind of determinism. There is real social and political change afoot in Iran, in which the natural dynamic toward greater awareness, greater education, and greater freedom is prominent. Other Europeans in the seventeenth century used to say that England was a hopelessly chaotic place, full of incorrigibly violent and fanatical people who clamored to cut off their king’s head. A century later England was the model to others for freedom under the law and constitutional government.

The use of the commodity is the name and image of the commodity itself. Use-value is irrelevant to the form of consumption – and fantasy, wish, or interpretation – that seals the relation of image to consciousness. In the ‘real abstraction’ that constitutes the fully realized industrial commodity,

difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans, we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.213 Jefferson stressed that liberty—in particular, the people’s liberty to criticize their government—helped to make the government of the United States “the strongest on earth.” He also insisted that “we are all republicans, we are all federalists,” by which he meant that all Americans rejected monarchy and embraced republican government, and that all Americans agreed that the powers of government were well divided between the federal government and the states. Finally, he reaffirmed his commitment to “a wise and frugal government” that would have friendly relations with all nations but “entangling alliances with none.” With these statements, he declared his purpose to interpret the Constitution narrowly and strictly, to rein in the powers of the general government, and to avoid the dangers of being pulled into European wars.214

After Gary’s graduation with the Bachelor’s degree, Professor Nixon advised Gary about what he would do next as a graduate student. Gary would be a student teacher and would be teaching Constitutional Law. Nixon asked, “Do you know anything about the United States Constitution, Gary?” “No, does it matter?” “Honestly, it depends on who’s teaching it. There are some, who say it’s a living document, and can be interpreted to suit the times, without the need for amendments. While others say it isn’t, and has to be followed exactly how the Founders wrote it. The people who follow the Constitution, word for word, are like those Christians who think the Bible should be interpreted in a complete, literal sense. Actually, I think both literalists are one in the same, but I don’t know for sure. Anyway, I think you should teach it as a living, breathing document, which is open to interpretation.

When the Court has interpreted the Constitution, it has acted within the province of the Judicial Branch, which embraces the duty to say what the law is,

On November 29, 1860, Thanksgiving, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, one of the most influential Southern preachers, gave one of the most polemic proslavery secession sermons ever, which became one a Confederate propaganda tool: “Some 50,000 copies of that sermon were printed in pamphlet form and circulated throughout the South. That pamphlet became a most powerful part of Southern propaganda.” Palmer thundered against abolitionists, particularly Northern ministers, equating them to atheists and French Revolution radicals: Last of all, in this great struggle, we defend the cause of God and religion. The abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic. The demon which erected its throne upon the guillotine in the days of Robespierre and Marat, which abolished the Sabbath and worshipped reason in the person of a harlot, yet survives to work other horrors, of which those of the French Revolution are but the type. Among a people so generally religious as the American, a disguise must be worn; but it is the same old threadbare disguise of the advocacy of human rights. . . . These self- constituted reformers must quicken the activity of Jehovah or compel his abdication. . . . This spirit of atheism, which knows no God who tolerates evil, no Bible which sanctions law, and no conscience that can be bound by oaths and covenants, has selected us for its victims, and slavery for its issue. Its banner- cry rings out already upon the air— “liberty, equality, fraternity,” which simply interpreted mean bondage, confiscation and massacre. . . . To the South the high position is assigned of defending, before all nations, the cause of all religion and of all truth.

Serbian Nationalism and the Origins of the Yugoslav Crisis, Peaceworks No. 8, United States Institute of Peace, 1996 by Vesna Pesic The sheer complexity of the former Yugoslavia's current crisis has supported numerous interpretations of its origins. One explanation that has acquired a certain currency is "nationalism as a power game," which views the main cause of the Yugoslav crisis as an ideology (in the sense of "false consciousness") of "aggressive nationalism," perpetuated by members of the old nomenklatura who seek to preserve their threatened positions of power in the face of democratic change. … The problem with this approach is that it treats the "national question" as an epiphenomenon of the struggle to preserve power and privilege. In doing so, it forgets that political battles in Yugoslavia have almost always developed around the "national question." Such an understanding of nationalism as "false consciousness" discounts the power of national sentiment among the region's ethnic groups. … By its very nature, Yugoslavia has never had a staatsvolk ("state-people") that could "naturally" dominate by its numbers and serve as the foundation on which a modern nation-state could be built. (As members of the most populous national group, Serbs constituted only 40 percent of the total Yugoslav population.) … An aggressive Serbian nationalism broke the thin thread holding together Yugoslavia's nations in a compromise arrangement, pushing toward an extreme solution of its national question through threats and warmongering: Either Yugoslavia's various nations would accept Serbia's vision of a "normal," unified state that served Serbian interests, or Serbs from all the republics would "join together" and achieve their national unity by force.

On November 29, 1860, Thanksgiving, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, one of the most influential Southern preachers, gave one of the most polemic proslavery secession sermons ever, which became one a Confederate propaganda tools: “Some 50,000 copies of that sermon were printed in pamphlet form and circulated throughout the South. That pamphlet became a most powerful part of Southern propaganda.”5 Palmer thundered against abolitionists, particularly Northern ministers, equating them to atheists and French Revolution radicals: Last of all, in this great struggle, we defend the cause of God and religion. The abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic. The demon which erected its throne upon the guillotine in the days of Robespierre and Marat, which abolished the Sabbath and worshipped reason in the person of a harlot, yet survives to work other horrors, of which those of the French Revolution are but the type. Among a people so generally religious as the American, a disguise must be worn; but it is the same old threadbare disguise of the advocacy of human rights. . . . These self- constituted reformers must quicken the activity of Jehovah or compel his abdication. . . . This spirit of atheism, which knows no God who tolerates evil, no Bible which sanctions law, and no conscience that can be bound by oaths and covenants, has selected us for its victims, and slavery for its issue. Its banner- cry rings out already upon the air— “liberty, equality, fraternity,” which simply interpreted mean bondage, confiscation and massacre. . . . To the South the high position is assigned of defending, before all nations, the cause of all religion and of all truth.

A significant proportion of Americans have never accepted the separation of Church and State and believe that the Constitution is inspired by the Christian God, in much the same way as the Bible, and should be interpreted in the same terms, as always lending support to Christianity. In fact, the Constitution is not a quasi-religious document. It is not something frozen in the past like the Bible. It is a set of directions, appropriate for their day, but in constant need of being amended to reflect the America of today rather than the America of the past. If, for example, the Second Amendment was to be taken absolutely literally, and therefore considered precisely in terms of the weapons available at the exact time when it was enacted (which were the weapons those who formulated it had in mind), then every advocate of the Second Amendment should own nothing except a Brown Bess musket! Why should the interpretation of the Constitution be frozen in time, while the weaponry of the day is constantly updated? A Constitution that does not move with the times is a hindrance. It’s unfit for purpose, just as 18th century weapons are unfit for purpose in the 20th century. No conservative would be seen dead with a Brown Bess. So why do they worship an ancient Constitution? It has ceased to be relevant.

We study the past as a dead object, as a ruin, not as an authority and as an experiment. One reason why history was less interesting to former ages was that they were less conscious of separation from the past. The perspective of time was less clear because the synthesis of experience was more complete. The mind does not easily discriminate the successive phases of an action in which it is still engaged; it does not arrange in a temporal series the elements of a single perception, but posits them all together as constituting a permanent and real object. Human nature and the life of the world were real and stable objects to the apprehension of our forefathers; the actors changed, but not the characters or the play. Men were then less studious of derivations because they were more conscious of identities.

[F]ascism,” according to one prominent scholar of the subject, “is the product of democracies gone wrong, that had working constitutional systems which they gave up voluntarily.”14 To expand that interpretation: Hitler and Mussolini did not instantly “overthrow” parliamentary systems but, while cultivating a mass following, exploited popular elections to gain office and, once in power, proceeded to eviscerate the system of parliamentary governance, party competition, and the rule of law.15

The claim for an unconstrained popular will is plausible for populists when they are in opposition; after all, they aim to pit an authentic expression of the populus as uninstitutionalized, nonproceduralized corpus mysticum against the actual results of an existing political system. In such circumstances, it is also plausible for them to say that the vox populi is one—and that checks and balances, divisions of power, and so on, cannot allow the singular, homogeneous will of the singular, homogeneous people to emerge clearly. Yet when in power, populists tend to be much less skeptical about constitutionalism as a means of creating constraints on what they interpret to be the popular will—except that the popular will (never given empirically, but always construed morally) has first to be ascertained by populists, and then appropriately constitutionalized. Or, picking up a distinction developed by Martin Loughlin, positive, or constructive, constitutionalism is followed by negative, or restraining, constitutionalism.20 Populists will seek to perpetuate what they regard as the proper image of the morally pure people (the proper constitutional identity, if you will) and then constitutionalize policies that supposedly conform to their image of the people. Hence populist constitutionalism will not necessarily privilege popular participation, nor will populists always try somehow to “constitutionalize the charisma” of a popular leader in the way that Bruce Ackerman has suggested.

It is almost a cliché to point out that many constitutions have evolved because of struggles for inclusion and because ordinary “citizen interpreters” of the constitution have sought to redeem previously unrealized moral claims contained in a founding document.36 The not-so-trivial point is that those fighting for inclusion have rarely claimed “We and only we are the people.” On the contrary, they have usually claimed “We are also the people” (with attendant claims of “we also represent the people” by various leaders). Constitutions with democratic principles allow for an open-ended contestation of what those principles might mean in any given period; they allow new publics to come into being on the basis of a novel claim to representation. Citizens who never thought of themselves as having much in common can respond to an unsuspected appeal to being represented and all of a sudden see themselves as a collective actor—as individuals capable of acting in concert

The central concept of a human psychology is meaning and the processes and transactions involved in the construction of meanings. To understand man you must understand how his experiences and his acts are shaped by his intentional states; the form of these intentional states is realized only through participation in the symbolic systems of the culture. Indeed, the very shape of our lives - the rough and perpetually changing draft of our autobiography that we carry in our minds - is understandable to ourselves and to others only by virtue of those cultural systems of interpretation. But culture is also constitutive of mind.

The preponderance of an altruistic way of valuing is the result of a consciousness of the fact that one is botched and bungled. Upon examination, this point of view turns out to be: "I am not worth much," simply a psychological valuation; more plainly still: it is the feeling of impotence, of the lack of the great self-asserting impulses of power (in muscles, nerves, and ganglia). This valuation gets translated, according to the particular culture of these classes, into a moral or religious principle (the pre-eminence of religious or moral precepts is always a sign of low culture): it tries to justify itself in spheres whence, as far as it is concerned, the notion "value" hails. The interpretation by means of which the Christian sinner tries to understand himself, is an attempt at justifying his lack of power and of self-confidence: he prefers to feel himself a sinner rather than feel bad for nothing: it is in itself a symptom of decay when interpretations of this sort are used at all. In some cases the bungled and the botched do not look for the reason of their unfortunate condition in their own guilt (as the Christian does), but in society: when, however, the Socialist, the Anarchist, and the Nihilist are conscious that their existence is something for which some one must be guilty, they are very closely related to the Christian, who also believes that he can more easily endure his ill ease and his wretched constitution when he has found some one whom he can hold responsible for it. The instinct of revenge and resentment appears in both cases here as a means of enduring life, as a self-preservative measure, as is also the favour shown to altruistic theory and practice. The hatred of egoism, whether it be one's own (as in the case of the Christian), or another's (as in the case of the Socialists), thus appears as a valuation reached under the predominance of revenge; and also as an act of prudence on the part of the preservative instinct of the suffering, in the form of an increase in their feelings of co-operation and unity. ... At bottom, as I have already suggested, the discharge of resentment which takes place in the act of judging, rejecting, and punishing egoism (one's own or that of others) is still a self-preservative measure on the part of the bungled and the botched. In short: the cult of altruism is merely a particular form of egoism, which regularly appears under certain definite physiological circumstances. When the Socialist, with righteous indignation, cries for "justice," "rights," "equal rights," it only shows that he is oppressed by his inadequate culture, and is unable to understand why he suffers: he also finds pleasure in crying; if he were more at ease he would take jolly good care not to cry in that way: in that case he would seek his pleasure elsewhere. The same holds good of the Christian: he curses, condemns, and slanders the "world" and does not even except himself. But that is no reason for taking him seriously. In both cases we are in the presence of invalids who feel better for crying, and who find relief in slander.