Communitarians — who emphasize the importance of social connectedness —
have in their own way shared the modern insistence that the individual is primary.
They affirm the great rights to life, liberty, property, and the pia-smt of happiness;

these rights fit squarely within the traditional American view that rights belong to
individuals, not to communities, families, or races. But communitarians also affirm
our ability to emphasize and express our cultural and ethnic heritage, and to achieve
the fulfillment possible only through deep connections with other people.

The United States Constitution says, in hs Preamble, that the document is the
work of "We the People." In many ways the Constitution is not only a recipe for
government, but also an exrggssion of moral goals and ideals. The U.S. Constitution
set a young nation on a course of unknown duration and undefined direction. It has
become a living document as each generation has struggled with the Constitution's
tension between majority rule and the rights of individuals.   What's more, each
generation of Americans has struggled to articulate — and to realize — its vision of the
kind of society the Constitution calls us to be.

Abraham Lincoln envisioned a government that respects human rights, both by
constraining its own power and by uniting its people behind the ideal of democratic
equality. Speaking on the eve of the Civil War, Lincoln expressed the hope that the

Right, Human Rights and Civil Rights
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