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In 1953, contemplating the aftermath of world war, Leo Strauss asked a simple yet profound question: are rights natural and inviolate or are they relative and conventional? Before him, Thomas Hobbes had famously articulated the tradition we call classical liberalism by supposing that civil rights and liberties are wholly conventional and contingent upon the might of the sovereign power. Hobbesian social modeling is thus dualistic: in nature we live a nasty brutish existence characterized by the valueless war of all against all; in civil society the comfortable self-preservation featured by a republic of rights and liberties flourishes. The natural objection to this model is that, a republic being a matter of convention maintained by oversight of the state, civil justice is merely a byproduct of power. Convention being somewhat arbitrary, there would appear to be no necessary ground for objecting to the conventions of an Auschwitz or Manzanar. Nor could the apologists for the American revolution readily identify any rational justification for their blatantly felonious theft of British titular lands during the colonial rebellion of 1775-1783. Indeed, in the US Declaration of Independence we see articulated the struggles of a community united by ideology not heritage. In such a context of course convention sought its naturalized ground. Yet American political thinkers of the 18th century believed they had realized considerable progress by reducing Hobbesian duality to the serial realization of a necessary, not contingent, phenomenon. Their aim was to overcome a more classical dualism, which would have embarrassed the rational presentation of their rebellion to a candid and expectant world, and to replace it with the monism of a natural rights republic. Has the attempt been successful?