Rights and Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution
"Rights and Duties remains the single best volume written on our constitutional heritage and its contemporary ills." --University BookmanThe Constitution's purpose was thoroughly conservative, Russell Kirk emphatically states. Rights and Duties is a collection of lectures and essays that examine conservative constitutional interpretations and concepts.  Kirk views the Constitution through the eyes of Edmund Burke. Kirk firmly believes that the Constitution of the United States is both a written and wholly or partially unwritten document. He believes that the American Constitution has endured because it has not been deliberately altered.  A majority of the first three parts of Rights and Duties concentrates on tracing the roots of the unwritten constitution. The information is in great detail and well documented, but other than history buffs, it can be difficult to maintain interest. For those who can sustain their attention, it is worth the wait.  Rights and Duties is at its best when it creates controversy surrounding moral issues, the natural law and religion. Kirk begins to interject some of his own experiences with his theories to make his conservative arguments. He offers a conservative opinion on the separation of church and state and proceeds to give two cases that provide different interpretations of the establishment and free exercise provisions of the First Amendment. He argues that freedom to speak and publish were never absolute in America.   Perhaps the most debatable inference in the book is that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments created deeply altered the Constitution. Kirk does not adequately explain why he is vehemently opposed to the Fourteenth Amendment. Is it because it has not been used to further conservative agendas? Does he believe that the United States should have continued to use unwritten law rather than courts and an Amendment? How does his natural law theory deal with race?   Rights and Duties is a valuable book that for the most part will keep the readers glued to it. More Americans than conservatives would like to believe probably accept the premise that the constitution is conservative. Nevertheless, Kirk provides excellent political philosophy and arguments on a subject that is important to him. --FromIndependent Publisher