Danielle Allen: Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014.

 

 

The Declaration of Independence tells its readers who is doing the declaring: “We… the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled,” acting “by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies.” In practice, this meant that political independence of those united states from the British Empire was asserted by citizens, mostly white and male, acting however on behalf of the women, children, and indeed the slaves who lived in their households. Notoriously, it was the case that the equal unalienable rights that formed the moral basis of the newly-claimed sovereignty of that people were not reflected in the civil-social institutions and laws the people had enacted. Therefore, Professor Allen argues, “we cannot have freedom” in full “without equality.” Just as a people, in asserting its sovereignty, “assume[s] among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” that same natural equality ought to prevail among individuals living within the same civil society. The civil conditions by which such equality will be secured won’t be the same as the conditions prevailing under the law of nations, inasmuch as no one American, and no group of Americans, enjoys the same degree of sovereignty over himself that an independent people enjoys. Americans live under one regime; the United States lives under no regime, and indeed asserts exactly that in the face of the British monarch.

Both political liberty and civic equality engage not only the natural rights of human beings but their natural capacities or powers, preeminently the distinctively human capacity of speech. The Declaration of Independence amounts to ‘nothing but words.’ The words needed backing by physical force. But the words justified the use of that force. More, they animated the founding of the regime that would replace the British regime, after Americans won the independence they had asserted. Language and force: “The achievement of political equality,” which must be earned, and is seldom simply bestowed, “requires, among other things, the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures.”

This is where the ‘our-ness’ of “our Declaration” comes in. Americans declared their independence on the basis of their equal natural rights a long time ago. Since then, many Americans have denied the existence of those rights. Such defenders of slavery as John C. Calhoun charged that every sentence of the Declaration’s opening paragraphs were falsehoods, based upon a wrong understanding of human nature. To this day, conservatives who prefer not to conserve the Declaration look to tradition, not the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, as the source of moral and political right. On the ‘Left,’ a panoply of thinkers has denied the principles of the Founders as retrograde, perhaps useful for the time but now superseded by historical progress. Marxists regard natural rights as excrescences of the ruling bourgeois class, but the much more numerous (and moderate) ‘Progressives’ of various stripes also regard such rights as obsolete relics of a time gone by.

It is a leading merit of Allen’s study to vindicate the Declaration from its critics but especially from its critics on the ‘Left.’ She wants all Americans to reclaim the Declaration for themselves. To do so, she must convince advocates of economic, social, and political equality that the Declaration speaks for them, too, and that they can and should speak up for it. What “individual citizens” need in order to defend their natural equality is a degree of political equality that enables them to gain “sufficient control over their lives to protect themselves from domination”—to be able to secure their natural rights from those who would violate them. Since no one individual can do this on his own, citizens will need to talk with one another, reaffirm and sometimes reform their political institutions and laws, looking to the Declaration for the unchanging standards against which all such practical efforts should be judged.

How to make the Declaration “ours,” so many years after its original ‘owners’ wrote and enacted it? Read it slowly, Allen recommends. Only after understanding it can one know what its authors, with their command of language, wanted to talk their fellow-citizens into. She sees that the beginning of that understanding, the beginning of wisdom respecting the Declaration, is to see that it is a syllogism, a “logical argument” that you will be rightly talked into, once you’ve seen the rational necessity, and consequent moral necessity, of that argument. She identifies the logictextbook the Signers likely had studied, Isaac Watts’s Logic; or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth with a Variety of rules to Guard against Error in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, which went through twenty editions beginning in 1724.

Logical arguments reach out to the interlocutors of those who make such arguments. Since the Declaration was declared by a few on behalf of many, not by one voice issuing a decree, because it was “written by a group” even though Thomas Jefferson was its principal draftsman, the argument itself was refined in dialogue, as if one of the Socratic inquiries we can now read had not been written by Plato or Xenophon, but had really occurred among acting politicians. Allen calls the Declaration the product of “the collective mind” of the Founders and indeed of Americans, which is how Jefferson himself described it in his old age. Meanwhile, the mind of the British, represented in the mind of their sovereign, George III, had firmly closed itself against rational argument. By late summer of 1775 it was clear that “there would be no reconciliation, no effort to solve differences through negotiation rather than military compulsion.” Force, not reason, would prevail; hence the celebrated phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident….” To minds that are closed, even self-evident truths seem sophistical. Such closed minds incline to impose their opinions with force rather than arguing for them with words, but habits of unreason readily lead to unintended consequences. One means by which the Crown intended to force Americans to obey was to offer freedom to slaves and indentured servants in Virginia, if they “joined the British military” to put down the rebels. “This proclamation instantaneously radicalized Virginia’s slaveholding elite,” proving that the fight for natural equality can benefit from surprising allies. 

This suggests that the British regime was not only close-minded ‘in theory’—refusing to acknowledge equality of natural rights—but rationally deficient ‘in practice,’ imprudent. Not so, the Americans. Far from throwing themselves into a war for independence without considering the consequences if they won, they deliberated on the political means by which they could secure their rights after independence was achieved. John Adams outlined a model for the forms of government the united states might take. This included separation of powers, representation or republicanism, and bicameral legislatures. “Adams’s purpose in providing such a concrete script [was] to allay anticipated fears about the difficulty of setting up new governments in conditions” of what he called “sudden emergency.” “Pulling down tyrannies,” he wrote, requires “erecting Such new Fabricks” as may be “best calculated to promote [the] Happiness” of each former colony, and of their union as a whole. As early as 1776 Adams drafted a preamble that each colony could attach to their new constitutions. 

As for the Declaration itself, Congress edited Jefferson’s draft, reducing it “by about 25 percent.” In deference to the powerful plantation slaveholders whose support they needed, they omitted Jefferson’s vehement denunciation of slavery, while retaining the fundamental argument that puts slavery on trial for its life. They also removed a flowery passage describing the colonists as unrequited lovers of the British, although they more chastely continued to call the British their “brethren.” The added phrases acknowledging God—the “Supreme Judge of the World,” a world ruled by “divine Providence”—much to doubting Thomas Jefferson’s discomfiture. Even the calligraphers got into the act, capitalizing “GOD,” “CREATOR,” and “DIVINE PROVIDENCE” in the final document. “The monumental achievement of Thomas Jefferson is, ultimately, to have produced a first draft—and a general argumentative structure—that, through its philosophical integrity and unquestionable brilliance, could surive such intense committee work and bear this much demand for agreement. But the authorship of the document belongs to all those who participated in the conversations leading up to the decision to declare independence and to all those who wrangled over the consensual statement of justification.” And so “when we sit down to read the Declaration, it is their argument that we read, not Jefferson’s alone.” “The art of democratic writing,” the product of the art of democratic thinking—democratic in the sense of argued over, then consented to—is something that “we must learn to appreciate” if our public discourse is not to degenerate into a verbal war of all against all, vehement assertion against vehement assertion, in which no reason need apply. What is now the Declaration’s most controversial omission, “the language criticizing slavery,” demonstrates that “when groups of people write texts together, some choices are always made on the basis of votes, not truth. There will be compromises.” Without such compromises, the war for independence will never be won, and if somehow won, cannot secure the rights it was fought to secure, or frame the governments needed to perpetuate their security.

The Declaration is “an ordinary memo,” Allen writes, a document announcing a change and giving reasons for it. In so saying, she intends to make the Declaration seem ‘approachable’ to contemporary readers, but of course the Declaration isn’t a memo. It is what it says it is: a formal and indeed legal document appealing to the law of nations, similar to a declaration of war. In her attempt to ‘democratize’ the Declaration, she even goes so far as to claim that “we are all equal in having the capacity to judge relations among facts, principles, and courses of action,” equal in “being political creatures.” On the contrary, we are not equal in the capacity to judge (except in the sense that any sane person has such a capacity, even if not to the same degree); we are by nature political creatures, although again not all to the same degree, and some scarcely at all, content with being told what to do).

Allen returns to firmer ground in observing that the Declaration proceeds in four steps: “declaring reasons, presenting facts to witnesses”—the “candid world,” unbiased—then “declaring independence, and making pledges.” As a “unanimous” Declaration of the American Congress, it gives voice to many representatives but with one soul—as she cogently remarks, unus or ‘one’ and anima or ‘soul.’ Soul implies not only mind but life; “this comes through in the link between the words anima and ‘animal.'” Through their representatives, through the nucleus of their future republican regime, Americans have formed a group “committ[ing] its energies fully to a common goal.” Another way to say this is to recall that the Declaration says that governments derive their “just powers” from “the consent of the governed.” “This country was born in talk,” and not just any kind of talk but rational talk, a syllogism; consent means rational assent, not mere ‘going along.’ Consent is needed because human beings are equally human, that is, born with the capacity to reason, if not to the same degree and obviously not with the same willingness to exercise that capacity on a regular basis.

In its rational character, “the Declaration is nothing less than a very short introduction to political philosophy,” raising questions of what it is to live well along with the practical question of whether we are in fact living well. And it begins to answer these questions by raising the question of what it means to be “created equal.” Allen rightly denies that in invoking equality the Signers mean ‘sameness.’ She identifies five “facets” of their idea of equality: a condition in which no party dominates another; “equal access to the tools of government”; “egalitarian approaches to the development of collective intelligence,” by which she means moral and civic education; “egalitarian practices of reciprocity” or the ruling-and-being ruled relations Aristotle identifies as the characteristic of a sound marriage; and finally “shar[ed] ownership of public life and in co-creating our common world”—that is, the intention to exercise the tools of government to which every citizen has access. All of these facets of civic equality derive from the natural equality human beings have, equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The link between human nature and civil society is moral necessity—in this case, the necessity of dissolving the political bands that have connected Americans to the English. That moral necessity in turn derives from the logical contradiction between the equality of Americans and Englishmen by nature and the British regime’s refusal to secure the natural rights which both peoples equally share. Moral necessity impels them to turn to national “self-government” in lieu of the failed imperial government, to equal status as a sovereign people, not yet equal to the great British Empire in power (as Allen puts it) but “equal as a power,” as a sovereign people among a world of other equally sovereign peoples.

Allen pauses to remark that the phrase, “separate and equal station among the Powers of the earth,” which the Signers declare, was later distorted and misused by the majority opinion of the United States Supreme Court in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896. In that ruling, the Court declared racial segregation constitutional if accommodations on railroad lines, restaurants, and so on were “separate but equal.” “Whereas the colonists sought an external separation, the segregationists—a cross-class alliance of white-power advocates—sought separation internally.” Of course, such separation never really mean equality but rather the opposite: racial domination, “to keep many people subjected and dependent.” Given this correct analysis, it is not quite right to say that “the Declaration provided tools for liberating some and dominating others”; it is more accurate to say that later Americans used the materials of which the Declaration’s “tools”—its words—could be reshaped and repurposed for evil.

As Creator, God endows all human beings with certain unalienable rights. The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God also entitle a people to a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth, if (given their circumstances) moral necessity commands them to assert that station. As a law of nature and of nature’s God, moral necessity is as necessary as the law of gravity, although not quite in the same way. It is indeed felt in “the natural instinct to survive,” as Allen says, but a mere instinct implies no right; to claim that it does would be to run afoul of David Hume’s famous distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ Rather, “the source of rights” is the nature of human beings ‘in full.’ Whether created by God or not, a good human being must fulfill its nature as such, just as a good horse or a good cornstalk is one that fulfills its nature. There are, of course, those who do not want human beings to fulfill their nature but rather to bend their fellows to serve those who dominate them, to turn those so dominated into beings less than what they are by nature. They want most human beings to be bad examples of human nature. In so desiring, they make themselves into bad examples of human nature, inasmuch as it is ‘self-evident,’ a matter of definition, that any being which is less than what it is by nature is a bad human being, and to desire the bad for others must therefore be a bad desire.

As Allen puts it, “Successful self-government is a success for nature, because it expands the flourishing of one set of natural creatures, human beings. Because all human beings desire to survive and flourish, they all struggle to interpret the events of their social worlds in order to ascertain whether things are going well or ill for them and their communities and to ascertain whether they need to change course.” Each person has “the potential to be a reasonable judge” (emphasis added)—a “moral sense,” as Jefferson would say, following the doctrine of the philosopher Francis Hutcheson. To realize this potential, each citizen must “grasp the importance of self-knowledge” and strive to achieve it. This is the Socratic lesson at the heart of the Declaration.

If so, then the human capacity of judgment entails the use of government to secure natural rights, inasmuch as one people might be considerably less willing to secure those rights for another people, as the British regime has demonstrated. The capacity so to use government requires a capacity readily to acknowledge certain truths about human beings. Hence the language, “self-evident.” Allen lists the truths the Signers consider to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that those rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that governments have been instituted among men, based on the consent of the governed to secure those rights; that when governments fail to secure those rights, the people have the right to change their government and instituted a 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.” This is more than a list of truths, Allen observes; it is a syllogism. It is a syllogism that George III preferred not to acknowledge. Even Jefferson himself did not fully act on it, inasmuch as he failed to emancipate all of his slaves. But failure to acknowledge, or in acknowledging but failing to act upon, a logical argument does not invalidate the argument. No ad hominem argument refutes a syllogism unless the syllogism is about the nature or the behavior of a person. The major premises of the Declaration syllogism concern human beings as a species, not any one person. As Allen restates it, the syllogism is: (1) All people have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; (2) Properly constituted government is necessary to their securing these rights; (3) all people have a right to whatever is necessary to secure what they have a right to; (4) all people have a right to a properly constituted government. This provides a standard by which persons and their action may be judged; it assumes nothing about the person or persons making the argument. Mao Zedong could say as much (although he did not); to counter-argue that Mao was a mass-murdering tyrant would be to say something true but irrelevant to the question of whether the argument is sound.

If equal unalienable rights are endowed by our Creator, who or what created human beings? This also raises Hume’s ‘is-ought’ question. “Why is it… that we possess our powers of mind, body, and spirit, which enable us to live, be free, and pursue happiness by means of politics, as a matter of right?” The Declaration leaves room for its readers to define the term ‘Creator’; Jefferson and Franklin evidently defined it differently than did that eminent Presbyterian co-signer, John Witherspoon. The fact that we must judge good and bad, the fact that no one can be ‘non-judgmental’ in any strong sense of the term, self-evidently or logically requires some ultimate source of right, whether that source is nature, or God, or some combination of the two. This puts the axe to Humean conventionalism, the claim that the real source of right can be custom or prevailing opinion, inasmuch as existing customs and opinions may be demonstrated to be bad for the human beings who practice and hold them. It does not put the axe to the later philosophic doctrine of historicism, which defines ‘God’ as Hegel does, as an ‘Absolute Spirit’ that unfolds dialectically through the course of human events. It does provide the beginning of an answer to historicism, but that is another matter.

So much for the theory of the Declaration. The Signers were not philosophers following their argument in all its implications but politicians with a practical intent. There is theoretical reasoning; there is also practical or prudential reasoning, equally obedient to the principle of non-contradiction. “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” What Allen calls the Signers’ “spirit of prudence” points them to “the third facet of equality,” the “need to build a collective intelligence” through moral and civic education, an intelligence that enables a people to analyze “how the present connects to the future”—that is, how to counteract the tyrannical designs of a George III with plans for effective self-government. 

The Declaration’s invocation of prudence leads immediately to the minor premises of the syllogism, the list of charges against the monarch and the English Parliament. One highly useful step in educating oneself in political prudence is to learn how to recognize tyrannical designs. Given our ignorance of others’ thoughts, we can only identify a tyrannical design by a set of actions that fits a pattern. When the Declaration describes “the history of the present King of Great Britain” as “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,” it means just such a pattern, a story or narrative of events. The prudence of the Signers comes out, as Allen remarks, not only in their recognition of this telltale pattern but in the timing of their counter-actions. They didn’t wait until the would-be tyrant had got his rule cinched in—a rule that contradicted both the natural rights of all human beings and the constitutional rights of Englishmen. 

The list of eighteen grievances itself has a pattern, moving from bad to worse to worst. “King George has begun to make war on the colonists,” and in a way that violates the rules of just war as set down in the law of nations. “He is an aggressor,” violating the laws of jus bellum, and his means of war, which the Signers compare to the tactics among the Indian nations and tribes that are savage, violate the laws of jus in bello. Oddly, Allen cites the “multitude of New Offices” the king has imposed on the colonies, but she misses its significance. An example of these offices, as she points out, was the American Board of Customs Commissioners, “whose members were to live in the colonies and regulate everything that had to do with trade and tax.” These and other such measures were part of his attempt, in collaboration with Parliament, to consolidate British rule before, during and especially after the war is over (a war he obviously expected to win). A multitude of new offices bespeaks the institutional structure of the centralized modern state; George III and Parliament intended to extend the central state’s tentacles into the American colonies. Anticipating Tocqueville and many others, the Signers see such statism as the prime instrument of tyranny in the modern world. Limiting immigration is another such tactic. As Allen remarks, the Americans disliked this because it stunted their economic growth (“societies under the thumb of tyrants do not grow prosperous”); it is also true that tyrants don’t want large populations of restless colonists who might reach the ‘critical mass’ that would make their revolution successful.

As a syllogism, the Declaration teaches those who follow it. “The Declaration teaches people how to do the very thing that it argues that everyone has the capacity to do, namely, make political judgments.” Political judgments, recall, are judgments made in common, reflecting the reciprocal ruling-and-being-ruled fellow citizens exercise. In this sense the Declaration leads its readers “to a very deep understanding of human equality.” “When we read the Declaration, we watch political judgment in action,” as the Signers first lay down the standards of right human conduct, then measure the conduct of the British regime against those standards, find it contradictory to it, and announce a timely action in response to it. Allen suggests that the Declaration “tests its own hypothesis” with respect to the capacity of Americans at least, and maybe all people as well. “If all people can read or listen to it and understand how political judgment works in the Declaration beyond the Declaration itself—which is to say, regardless of whether they have gone to school, or how much history they have learned—then the Declaration is right about human equality.” If so, so. This may be carrying the principles of natural right rather too far into optimism about their likelihood of practice. But Allen is undoubtedly right to think that those who carry those principles to the people can and did find a wider audience of persons who did indeed understand those principles, and did indeed have the capacity to apply them in practice, than tyrants, oligarchs, and demagogues have typically thought possible or desirable. And this capacity can be strengthened by educators.

She also sees clearly that the portrait of a tyrant provides a sort of photographic negative of what good government looks like. Good governments take actions exactly the opposite of those undertaken by the British. Good governments will respect the rule of law, the orderly transaction of legislative business, and the actions of an independent judiciary; it will govern by popular consent, not by bureaucracy and armies; it will not wage unjust war against its own citizens or foment violent factional strife among them but instead strive to keep a civil peace. 

This being so, “what are we to make of the fact that the signers, who formally declared a commitment to equality, also protected slavery and ruthlessly sought to deracinate, if not exterminate, Native Americans?” To this, Allen replies that many of the Founders did indeed work to end slavery, putting it on the road to extinction in many of the states. It isn’t as easy to do things like that as it may seem, from a distance of two centuries. “In order to germinate and come alive in the world, ideas have to function as rules for action.” They must move from the head to the heart, from thought to habit. That requires step-by-step planning and consistent implementation of the progression of steps—setting out the future course of events, then taking each step along that course. “By the time the colonists affirmed the Declaration of Independence, they had already for over a century been scripting for themselves the set of actions that could bring the ideal of equality to life among themselves.” They had “built specific new habits for interacting with each other at the same time that they were developing general ideas about political equality,” but had not done so with respect to “interacting with slaves or Native Americans.” To be sure, some did: Quakers and their ‘secularist’ ally, Benjamin Franklin worked for the education of free black children in Pennsylvania; the Washington administration sought to change the regimes of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ in the deep South. But such projects proved too limited and desultory; in the case of Washington’s policy, the people of Georgia moved to push the Indians out, anyway, and succeeded. “Ideas don’t change actions on their own. Our desires matter too. This, finally, is why a shadow of tragedy trails our Declaration,” a trail of tears that became a river, and then a flood less than a century later. The troubled waters have yet to recede, entirely, to this day—another reason to read the Declaration of Independence, slowly.

Allen turns to the Americans’ attempts to persuade the king. “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms,” only “to be answered by repeated injury” by him, a man therefore “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” The capitalization of “We” was added by the printer but was not removed by the Signers when they reviewed his work. Allen makes much of this, saying that “it’s as if the Declaration is telling a story about how ‘We, the people’ was born.” Given the Declaration’s clear indication that Americans were already a people before their separation from the political bands that connected them to the English, it is more as if they are saying that We, the people have come to political maturity, that we are ready for self-government and indeed insist on it. We are reasonable, in theory and in practice; the British regime is not. We have developed “habits of reciprocity,” as Allen nicely puts it. The king, habituated to rule with no back-talk, has not. The colonists understand “the kind of equality that needs to be in play in relations between people in order for freedom to obtain,” relations that are political in Aristotle’s sense. The connection between genuinely political relations and reason is that both presuppose dialogue and dialectic, reciprocity, not one-way commands. There will come a time, after such deliberation, when commands are issued; otherwise, there is no rule, no government. Allen identifies the two times the phrase “We hold” occurs in the Declaration. First, “We hold these truths to be self-evident”; we, as a people who have engaged in political conference, in rational dialogue, have made our decision and we will stick to it. Second, we hold our “British brethren,” along with “the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends”; again, we have decided, together. Against any extra-logical, ad hominem questions about “the rectitude of our intentions,” they simply refer the matter to the Supreme Judge of the World, who alone can discern rectitude or the lack of it. They are willing to be judged by their fellow men in the same way they have judged their fellow men, by their actions directed at building “a political order that puts [the] recognition of human equality front and center.” And so they have been judged, although judgments have varied, ever since. 

“All adults should read the Declaration closely; all students should have read the Declaration from start to finish before they leave high school.” To do so “would prepare us all for citizenship” by “learn[ing] the democratic arts.”