Law and People in Colonial Americ by Peter Charles Hoffer, and: A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and Law, 1791 and 1991 ed. by Michael J. Lacey, Knud Haakonssen (review)

BookReviews 243 be).In making his dislike of the tradition into a result of a philosophically objective analysis,Santayana found personal justification for returning to Europe in 1911,the same year as his lecture; after that, he felt able to "realize" his individuality in Fascism, homosexual adventures, and the trappings of medieval Catholicism (despite his avowed Greek agnosticism). This is a thoughtful, scholarly book. Dawidoff goes beyond the current simplisticdebunking of the terms "democracy'' and "culture," perhaps mindful from his ownanalysis that such debunkers implicitly posture themselves as "objective" obseIVers who are superior to the life in which they participate. It is also a very sensible book about what Dawidoff terms the need to be "smart" in a democracy such as America's. Dawidoff returns to the term "democracy'' because he is a Jeffersonian, seeing power arising from the daily life of the people. Indeed, his articulation of such power is exhilarating in the concluding section, where he notes how Americans have learned to move between polarities of individualism and commonality. The example he presents-riding a car that betokens a certain "class" on a highway of aggressive drivers-is a powerful depiction of how images of self-identity arise and actual decisions are made. Jefferson would be delighted and yet amazed that his democracy of the people could be simultaneously so absurd and yet so sensible. John Stephen Martin Universityof Calgary •••••• Peter Charles Hoffer. Law and People in Colonial America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Pp. 156. Michael J. Lacey and Knud Haakonssen, eds.A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights inPhilosophy, Politics, and Law, 1791 and 1991. Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. 474. Peter Charles Hoffer's Law and People in Colonial America and Michael J. Lacey and Knud Haakonssen's edited collection A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and Law, 1791 and 1991 are linked, in a number a ways, through basic assumptions about the relationship between American society and conceptions of law and rights. Hoffer's slim volume focuses on the uses and perception of law by colonial Americans, and how law assumed a central role in colonial times and, by extension, in twentieth-century America. He writes that 244 Canadian Review of American Studies "throughout their colonial and revolutionary experience, Americans developed a passion for the law, a legalism that pervaded social, economic, and political relationships. They laid their disputes with one another before the courts of lawto an extent exceeding all other peoples. The colonists believed in the possibilities of a lawful world, and their demands for legal redress grew from and sustained this faith" (x). Lacey and Haakonssen's collection of essays expands this view with a premise that the American institutional structure "strongly encourages the persistence of ideas of rights, both popular and professional, and virtually requires the foundational questions regarding rights be asked from time to time by anyone seriously concerned about the relationship between social theory and practice" (3). Thus, not only was law an integral force in ordering the daily lives of average Americans, it also shaped their view of the world. However, while sharing assumptions about law, rights, and American society, theses books chart strikingly different tacks. Hoffer's attention is focused on how average colonial Americans employed the law in search of stability and security. For example, when writing of increasing litigiousnessamongst colonials in the 1720sand 1730s, Hoffer asserts that the explanation rests in a community-based fear that traditional social values were being threatened. Specifically, "lawsuits multiplied when more potential plaintiffs sensed that they had not only been wronged, but that their community needed them to bring that wrong to court" (55). As time passed, and the perceived threats to traditional values soon included unpopular actions by the crown and its representatives, law and its practitioners assumed even greater importance in American society.The culmination of this process was revealed in the merging of law and politics in the events leading to 1776.(96-97). Thus, in Hoffer's eyes, the colonials elevated the practical application of law in defense of tradition, to a point whereby that law was to...