Following along the line of rights as cultural artifacts, Steven Shriffin contends that the First Amendment lies at the heart of American political culture and identity and that the central meaning of the First Amendment is a commitment to dissent. Examining flag burning and art censorship, he argues that these issues are cultural conflicts about the role of dissent in our society. In Shriffin's eyes rights and dissent sustain and drive American democratic culture. Martha Minow, in what appears in this article to be a puzzling turn away from her other work challenging us to imagine new meanings of rights, strikes another cautionary note in the book. Her fear is that rights over-emphasize unity.
Rights authorize unity over interests and practices of subcommunities or dissenting individuals.
Her outlook is bleak. Elizabeth Kiss deals with a world where the absence of unities fostered by rights may give her a perspective different from Minow's. Indeed in particular circumstances, human rights and nationalism can together work to construct stable political communities. Her article takes a first step toward such imagining. In the concluding chapter Bruce Ackerman also challenges the political imagination.