Radicals In Their Own Time

Later today I'm going to be speaking at Michigan State Law School's Indigenous Law and Policy Center on Michael Anthony Lawrence's Radicals In Their Own Time, which has just appeared from Cambridge University Press.  Lawrence uses five key figures in American history -- Roger Williams, Thomas Paine, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, W.E.B. DuBois, and Vine Deloria -- to trace an alternative, radical history of law and constitutionalism.  Lawrence is interested in two things -- the relationship of radical ideas about law to more traditional ideas and more specifically the relationship of religious thought and practice to law.  Together he uses the ideas of his subjects to show that there are alternative paths -- sometimes taken, often not taken -- in American history.

A couple of things interest me about Lawrence's book -- first, the relocation of the center of ideas from more mainstream people to radicals.  So instead of hearing about John Winthrop (and a generation later Cotton Mather), we hear about Roger Williams; instead of George Washington and James Wilson we hear about Paine; instead of Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, we hear about Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and instead of Booker T. Washington and Woodrow Wilson we hear about DuBois....  The list could go on and on.

Lawrence's mission is to repopulate American history (and particularly American legal history) with people who were outside the mainstream in their time.  Even though I write these days about people at the center of power -- dead, white Christian men (often they were judges or politicians) and slave-owners  -- I am deeply interested in the dissenters, people who advanced another vision of what America could be.

So that leads me to a series of questions.  First, there is the suggestion here that the ideas of the dissenters are actually the ideas that come to triumph.  How how often do the dissenting ideas actually become the mainstream ideas? If the dissenting ideas eventually triumph does that alter our sense of our legal traditions?  Does that make us think differently about originalism or even our common law heritage?  

Second, for those dissenting ideas that triumph, what is the theory of causation?  Phrased another way,  if Thomas Paine had never written Common Sense or The Crisis or Rights of Man how different would our legal history be?  Lawrence's chapter on DuBois invites particular talk of this.  I wonder how much DuBois' constant push for equal treatment in the pages of the NAACP's The Crisis and the ways he highlighted how African Americans were treated differently from white people helped remake law.  DuBois focused on a series of issues, from differential funding of schools, to differential treatment by courts, to the violence of lynching.  These ideas  of equal treatment -- what Ralph Ellison referred to in Invisible Man as the "great constitutional dream book" -- helped set the agenda for the expansion of the equal protection clause from the 1920s through Brown.  

Third -- and very closely related -- Lawrence is what historians affectionately call an idea person.  That is, he's interested in ideas and in how ideas influence our nation's history.  How do we balance the importance of ideas in history with other motives -- economic interest, for one?  Are the ideas discussed here -- such as Paine's and DuBois' -- what led to liberation or were economic and political motives more important in the American Revolution and the Civil Rights Revolution?

Fourth, what do we make of this way of studying legal history?  It raises up some key intellectuals, while leaving many subordinated people without voices.  As we revisit how Paine gave voice to the hopes of our Revolutionary generation, do we ignore other important voices?  By focusing on people whose presence has been ignored, is this the best way of correcting an imbalance in our understanding of legal history?  Should we focus next on litigants -- the people whose suffering often was the impetus to change in law -- or voters?  How do we best capture the rainbow of ideas?

Fifth, there's a sense here that organized religion is in opposition to these thinkers -- and how does religion fit here.  One caveat here, much has been made of late of the role of  Protestant, particularly evangelical, ideas in the shaping of the American Revolution and then later the Civil Rights movement.  And so I wonder how much of this is about divisions within religious thought, instead of a critique of religious institutions.

If you're looking for an enjoyable read on legal history, I think you'll like Radicals in Their Own Time (available here for about $20).  The dust jacket quotes a perceptive commentator on American legal history (wink)

It has been more than half a century since John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage -- now Michael Anthony Lawrence repopulates American legal history with five forgotten (or at least sometimes forgotten) heroes. ... As Lawrence sweeps across four centuries of American history, he causes us to rethink American traditions of legal, religious, and political thought. And he reminds us all that American history is frequently more concerned with toppling hierarchy than supporting it.

Lawrence covers a lot of ground well and quickly and is a very nice introduction to key ideas in American legal history over four hundred years.

Comments

[Landon]

Lawrence is interested in two things -- the relationship of radical ideas about law to more traditional ideas and more specifically the relationship of religious thought and practice to law, my favorite statement in your blog..great post..