But I don’t think that’s so much the issue. Rather, it’s that the overarching conceptual framework of the natural law was lost in liberalism’s project. Even in the case of those scholars who take issue with classical liberalism’s philosophy of rights tout courte (e.g. Rowland), the broader issue remains the either absent or denuded concept of natural law.

Have you been reading and stealing my ideas!?

I’ve been saying pretty much the exact same thing, only I’ve put it down as liberalism, classical republicanism, and Christianity – so as not to weigh down the terms too much. But essentially we agree.

Razib Khan recently had an enlightening post related to this in the context of the American founding:

http://secularright.org/wordpress/culture/you-need-to-know-history-to-talk-about-history

I’ve always thought American colonists could be generalized by three strands: Enlightenment thought, moralistic therapeutic diesm (the South used to be paganistic by comparison to the Protestant orthodox North!), and Roman civic republicanism.

“Authority from above, democracy from below”.

You had the communal governance of open-field villages, chartered boroughs, merchant republics, provincial estates & estates-general and a considerable body of customary law. Within the Church, you had the general chapters of religious orders. Conciliar, deliberative, and elective institutions were not a modern innovation, and the Church co-existed with them for centuries.

The rights of Englishmen that were asserted by the American colonists dated back to the Magna Carta, if not further, before even the Norman Conquest. And Jefferson did not “copy” John Locke in writing the Declaration, as so many seem to think. He may well have been influenced by Catholic political thought!