CelebratingAmerica8
(The following is part 8 of a series on the American Revolution, which began with the serialization of chapter 7 of my book Defeating Slavery: Hamilton’s American System Showed the Way; that chapter dealt with the Declaration of Independence. Having concluded the serialization in part 4, (Parts 1, 2, and 3 can be found on the blog), I moved on to some of the debate about the Declaration, which will help us appreciate its uniqueness. Three weeks ago we heard from one of its British opponents, two weeks ago from the formerly enslaved Frederick Douglass, and last week from Abraham Lincoln. Today we hear from a modern voice, historian Danielle Allen, who has an important contribution to make.)
By Nancy Spannaus*
Aug. 25, 2024—This week’s post on the Declaration of Independence was inspired by a talk my husband and I heard in Williamsburg, Virginia this last March, during a conference devoted to the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. The speaker, Harvard professor Danielle Allen, authored a book in 2014 entitled Our Declaration, A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. In it, Allen takes on one of most widespread misconceptions of our founding document, i.e., that it champions a libertarian outlook.
The crucial issue revolves around what the Founders meant by the “liberty” (or freedom) we sought in our war of independence against Great Britain. To many today, and a significant number of people at the time as well, that term meant individual rights without consideration for how the exercise of those rights affected the general welfare of the community, or nation, as a whole. Many actually see them as conflicting. Allen begs to differ. She insists that the liberty the Founders proclaimed can only be achieved simultaneously with the provision of equality of rights and opportunities for the entire society.
I do not intend to elaborate on Allen’s full argument. Her book proceeds sentence by sentence through the 1337-word Declaration, supplying historical context and connecting each section to the document as a whole. This is an exercise which she began when teaching adult students in evening classes a number of years before; she found that reading the Declaration aloud brought the document alive to these students – a stark contrast to the cursory familiarity which was the norm among the university youth in her classes. She provides the fruits of that exercise in her book.
Liberty and equality—an unattainable combination? Allen argues that it is not only the goal set forth in the Declaration, but that in the process of framing that document and the development of the United States over time, significant progress has been made toward both ideals. And that it’s long past time that our citizens understood exactly how each goal promotes the other. A close reading of the Declaration is an indispensable first step.
A Fundamental Point
Allen’s first point about the Declaration is surprisingly simple, yet has profound implications. It is a thread throughout the entire book. She noted that all the original renderings of the document treat the opening statement of principles as a single, inter-related thought. To wit:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alert or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
How does this differ from our reading today? Note the punctuation at the end of the first phrase. You should note that I have concluded that phrase with a comma, just as did the original writers and publishers.
But early on, Allen says, some printers began to replace the comma with a period after the word Happiness, thus separating the idea of individual rights from the social objectives which follow. A small change, but a significant one, since it split the individual rights from the creation of government with popular consent, the right to overthrow that government if necessary, and the involvement of the people in determining whether their government is actually promoting their safety and happiness.
A pedantic matter? Not at all, as she points out at some length. At stake is the recognition of how individual rights, including to happiness, are dependent upon the functioning of government and democratic participation in it.
In fact, she notes, broad participation from members of the public was involved in the formulation of the Declaration itself. She recounts the large number of meetings that led step by step to its adoption: the election of delegates to the Continental Congress, the votes needed to establish the relevant committees to draft and then improve the Declaration of Independence, the meetings and elections called to discuss and approve the Congressional decision—it goes on and on. Americans were showing from the very beginning, she asserts, that they had a right to make their voices heard, and they did so in a surprisingly democratic fashion.
Of course, not all groups within America enjoyed those privileges at the beginning, Allen admits. That took a long time. But progress was made, however painfully slow. To be faithful to the Declaration, the happiness of all groups of society has to be taken into account; they should all be able to participate with equal civil rights. And they must all promote the rights and happiness of the entire community.
Types of Equality
The bulk of Allen’s book involves a detailed, and sometimes laborious, analysis of the sentences of the Declaration. More than half of that elaboration concerns the first several sentences, from which she deduces a commitment to three kinds of equality.
The first is what most Americans readily discern and accept: freedom from domination by others. This actually begins, she usefully points out, with an assertion of the “equal station” of the nation: “to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” It then extends to individuals (“the unalienable rights”) both in terms of their civil rights and their political rights, and requires that individuals have equal access to participation in government.
The second kind of equality which Allen finds in the Declaration is each individual’s ability to judge their own happiness. Yet this equality is not as simple as one might think. It requires judgment about the directionality of public affairs, and that the individual take responsibility for pursuing his happiness in relation to that of others in society. It is not the individual against all others, but in cooperation with others.
Allen introduces the third kind of equality under the title of “Prudence.” With specific reference to the Declaration’s statement that “prudence … will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient reasons,” she points to the need for “egalitarian approaches to learning and discovery,” and “to the analysis of how the present connects to the future.” To summarize, “everyone has something to contribute to the shared work of cultivating a collective intelligence that maximizes the community’s knowledge capacities.”
Read the Book
There is much more to Allen’s parsing of our founding document, of course. After analyzing its preamble, she also systematically discusses the grievances against King George, showing how those also represent violations of not just individual rights, but the rights of the society as a whole. She breaks down the specific grievances into different ways King George had sponsored harm to the colonists, specifically through usurpations and injuries; how they represented a pattern that could be defined as “tyranny;” that King George intentionally adopted this behavior; and that the colonists therefore knew they had to act to stop it.
Finally, Allen comes to the conclusion of the document: the assertion that the colonists must act to redress their grievances. This is an action document. They must do so in concert with others, in response to the fact that the King will provide no corrective. This, she says, is the “fourth facet of equality” in the Declaration: an egalitarian principle of reciprocity, which is essential to the capacity of individuals to establish freedom. (Think the “mutual pledge to each other [of] our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”)
In her conclusion, Allen comes back to the unifying principle with which she began. The following paragraph puts it clearly:
The phrase “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is meant to lead us directly, and without interruption, in this single sentence through “consent of the Governed,” and to the phrase “most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness [emphasis added.] This sentence laying out the self-evident truths leads us from the individual to the community – from our separate and equal rights to what we can achieve only together. The Declaration really is ours, not mine.
This is an optimistic book, a counter to both the pessimism and ultra-individualism of our time. For more insights, I strongly urge you to read it yourself.
Next installment: Still thinking about it
*Nancy Spannaus is the author of Hamilton Versus Wall Street: The Core Principles of the American System of Economics, and Defeating Slavery: Hamilton’s American System Showed the Way.
Tags: American Revolution, Danielle Allen, Declaration of Independence, equality, freedom, libertarian, liberty, Nancy Spannaus