Our Declaration: a Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality
Empowering Words
"I take never had a feeling politically," Abraham Lincoln alleged in Philadelphia on his style to the White Business firm, "that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." This statement cut to the core of Lincoln's deepest reflections on politics and philosophy. The question is, what precisely are the "sentiments" embedded in the Declaration? This is an outcome with which some of our all-time historical minds — Carl Becker, Garry Wills, Pauline Maier — take grappled.
Now Danielle Allen, a professor of social science at the Constitute for Advanced Study, has added her vocalization to the mix. Allen has written a line-by-line, frequently word-by-give-and-take, commentary on the Declaration, not excluding the placement of commas and semicolons. The book was occasioned by her experience educational activity the Declaration to nighttime school students in Chicago. But how do you lot make Jefferson'due south sonorous prose speak to today'south students, many of whom are property down jobs and managing 24-hour interval care? Allen writes movingly about growing upwards in a mixed-race African-American family whose dinner conversations frequently turned to the Declaration and its claim that "all men" are created equal.
"Our Proclamation" sets forth a bold thesis. American club frequently sees the claims of liberty and equality as pulling in opposite directions; the more than you have of one, the less you have of the other. Furthermore, in the battle betwixt liberty and equality, the claims of individual freedom have more often than not trumped those of equality. Allen says this is a false dilemma. Liberty and equality are not parts of a naught-sum game, but 2 mutually supportive aspects of a common democratic culture. It seems hardly fortuitous that a book arguing for the centrality of equality should appear at but the moment when we take discovered the effects of inequality in our public life.
Equality, Allen argues, consists of two parts. The first is an exclamation about "freedom from domination." The Declaration's opening judgement affirms the colonists' right to a "separate and equal station" among the powers of the earth, suggesting the idea that no nation has the right to interfere with another'southward ability to command its commonage destiny. In a revealing chapter she shows how this phrase was afterwards undermined past Southern segregationists' arguments for "separate but equal" arrangements and accommodations. Separate and equal implies mutual respect and reciprocity; split but equal, bureaucracy and domination. To paraphrase the dandy Dinah Washington, what a difference a word makes!
But equality is about more noninterference; information technology is also virtually the creation of a common democratic civilisation. This goes far across the standard reading of the Proclamation as a defence force of the right non to be interfered with. The Announcement's assertion of "certain unalienable rights," amongst them life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness, suggests that nosotros are each the best approximate of our own interests and consequently as capable of participating in a shared political life. "Happiness" hither does non mean whatever gives us individual pleasure, but contains a social and collective dimension. The cadre of this idea is equal access to the levers of political power. "As judges of our own happiness, we are equals," Allen writes. "This gem of an idea is the prize of our quest."
This book makes three large claims about the Declaration of Independence, one that is profoundly truthful, some other that is debatable, and a 3rd, I would say, that is false. Its principal truth is that when Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal," this genuinely meant to apply to all, blackness likewise as white. There is a moral cosmopolitanism in the Annunciation's linguistic communication. This universality was provocatively confirmed by Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy. In his "Cornerstone Address" of 1861, Stephens alleged that the Annunciation did in fact intend to apply to all races, which is why it was necessary for the Confederacy to break from the Union and create its own republic explicitly based upon the principle of white supremacy. It is ane of the delicious ironies of intellectual history that those today who merits Jefferson could not maybe have included African-Americans in his assertion of human equality are unwittingly repeating the canards of Confederate propaganda.
2nd, Allen devotes considerable attention to the famous "Laws of Nature and of Nature'due south God" clause. How much does the Declaration depend on a theistic orientation? Jefferson and his colleagues speak of rights as being endowed by our Creator. An endowment suggests that these rights are non self-created merely a gift. Yet equally Allen correctly notes, the God invoked by the Declaration is certainly not the God of the Bible, and may not even exist the God of Christianity. And so what piece of work does the reference to the laws of nature perform in the text? Here is where matters get tricky. Allen seems to contend, without exactly saying, that the language of divinity is entirely marginal to the text.
In fact, she says, the Announcement's linguistic communication of "cocky-evident" truths is fatigued not from Scripture simply from logic. A self-evident truth is a truth like those institute in Euclid, based on language and reason alone. But the question is whether rights claims are like the Pythagorean theorem. Do nosotros empathize human equality in the manner we can grasp the backdrop of a triangle? "Can people," Allen asks, "without believing in a god, attain for themselves maximally strong commitments to the right of other people?" Without answering her ain question, she confidently affirms that 1 does not need to be a theist to have the arguments of the Declaration. It is not at all clear that this confidence was shared by the authors of the text.
Allen'southward least plausible assertion is her claim about the "group writing" that went into the limerick of the Declaration. She notes that the Declaration was a memo drafted by a committee and argues that group writing "heads the ranks of man achievement," even higher up works of "individual genius." Really? Group writing, she says, shows how something called the "collective listen" contributes to the product of our shared moral vocabulary. But this claim must be faux fifty-fifty in Allen's own terms. Jefferson'south original draft of the Declaration contained a powerful denunciation of the slave trade as a "war against homo nature." This passage was deleted past the Continental Congress as too inflammatory to be included in the terminal version. Jefferson'south relationship to slavery was, equally Allen observes, "maddeningly complex," but had his words not been compromised by the group, they would have rendered impossible later misrepresentations of the Declaration as expressing the economic cocky-involvement of the slave owners.
Whose Declaration is being described here — Jefferson's, Allen's or, as the title suggests, that of our collectivity every bit a people? Allen'due south passion for each of the Proclamation'due south i,337 words is admirable. Yet when she writes that its equality clause stands at the foundation of an "egalitarian cultivation of collective intelligence" and a "co-ownership of a shared world," her assay veers away from conscientious reading into the domain of wishful thinking. It is one thing to restore the Declaration's equality clause to its pride of place, but quite another to suggest that it advocates the theory of equality practical to the homo mind. Allen's case for a more robustly egalitarian Declaration makes her book timely, merely that doesn't make information technology true.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/books/review/our-declaration-by-danielle-allen.html
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