Michael Platt: The Deliberation That Founded America. Volume I: The Mighty Intelligent Design of the Declaration. Cleveland: Privately published, 2026.
The 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence has attracted some attention. Publishers have issued the predictable spate of exegeses and polemics. Michael Platt stands to one side of the roil, answering the declared result of the Founders’ deliberations with a profound meditation on their work.
This is the first of a two-volume sequence on those deliberations, the second being a consideration of the United States Constitution. Platt therefore begins by stating the intention that animates both books, which is to show how “deliberation discovers design.” This cheerful alliteration refers not only to the design of the two documents considered, not only to the design of the political founding they announced, justified, and began to shape, but to the design the Declaration calls “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Design is conceived, announced, justified, and explained by speech. “Although the American Founding included war…it was achieved through speech” and through the thinking that generates (and is generated by) speech. The Founding saw two kinds of deliberation: formal deliberation in Congress and informal deliberation—the expression of popular opinion during the ratification debate, in state assemblies, in pamphlets and in newspapers. “These deliberations were substantially one deliberation,” conducted from what we now call Independence Hall in Philadelphia to local taverns and street corners.
In those deliberations, the Declaration of Independence holds the primary place, since it set down the self-evident truths that underlay them—the foundation of the Founding. Although those truths have existed since human beings were created, they had never been so clearly “addressed to the whole world,” by saying to it, “Here’s how our deliberation has led us to do what we are doing,” namely, separating ourselves from our Mother Country (our “unnatural mother,” as one indignant American described her). As for the Constitution, it is “our Parthenon,” “spare and smooth as marble,” providing the institutional framework that enables Americans to live by the Declaration’s truths, if they choose to do so. This “sagacious” document is linked to the Declaration, “a marriage almost made in heaven.” The Declaration “inform[s] the Constitution with guards against all tyrants, singular, factional, and multitudinous,” i.e., “kings, bloc, and people.”
Will they choose to do so? “This book began in study and it invites you to join in study. Freedom is always but a couple of unstudious generations away from expiring.” We can no longer deliberate about the Declaration and the Constitution, but we can study them and either accept or reject them as guides for our own deliberations in our own circumstances in an occasionally candid world under the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. We even describe immigrants who become citizens as “‘naturalized’—what a choice word!” Choice, because it “means to recognize Nature and Nature’s God, and abide by them, as you passing through nature to eternity, pursue happiness.”
By the Declarers’ design, the Declaration consists of seven parts, Platt observes: one devoted to separation; one to revolution; one to prudence; one (“much the longest”) to the charges against George III, “convicting him of tyranny”; one addressing “our disappointing Brittish brethren”; one the literal declaration, the announcement, of independence from Britain; the final one “the signatures of the representatives of the United States in Congress assembled.” Each part issues logically in the next one. That is, the Declaration is in substance and structure a logical syllogism, a point first noted among recent scholars by Carl Becker, as Platt eventually notes, although I would have preferred if he had mentioned him earlier and given it more emphasis throughout. As Platt does insist, the Declarers’ foundation of their declaration upon “truths that will never change” was very much a reasonable thing to do. Mere assertion is endemic to public speech, indeed in speech generally, but it is not really political in Aristotle’s strict sense of ruling and being ruled in turn: assertion bespeaks the desire to rule or perhaps (rarely) to be ruled, but it never exemplifies reciprocity, dialectical interplay, free exchange of thoughts. The Declarers give reasons while they display their reasoning to their fellow citizens, to their erstwhile tyrant, to the world, and to God, whose natural laws they cite as justification for their policy. And Americans themselves want reasons for commands and proposals; they are thoughtful, inclined to the reasonable assent that is consent and to the reasonable dissent that might go so far as revolution. “Such a people,” a thinking people, “is surely able to govern itself,” the Declarers imply to those they address. “The Declarers truly think reason is a human power belonging, with admitted degrees to all members of the species,” beings “endowed by the Creator with reason and the rights that go with it.” It is the rational nature of human beings that enables them to speak and act with civility, politically in the true sense of the word. And there is a Biblical echo: “Treat others as you find that you are already treating yourself would seem to be the governing maxim here.” This bespeaks not only the prudence the Declarers explicitly esteem but “a species of charity as well.” Their much-remarked insistence on the consent of the governed and their “decent respect for the Opinions of Mankind,” most of which the Americans do not govern, comport with both the laws of Nature and the laws set down by the God who created Nature.
“Apparently,” then, the Declarers harmonize reason and Biblical revelation. Who or what is “Nature’s God”? And what, Platt asks, does that apostrophe indicate? The God who created and ‘owns’ nature? Or a god generated by nature? The God “who is known to pious readers of Genesis and deep students of theology as the Creator? Or is this the God that belongs to Nature, that issues from Nature, or personifies Nature, or even the God that really is Nature, as a pantheist such as Spinoza might say? It is hard to know.” But perhaps any of these definitions might be supplied by the reader. “Is it not inclusive,” a “stroke of Statesmanship”? Like all political men, the Founders sought to build alliances, form a coalition.
The Declaration begins, “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them to another….” [1] Evidently, the Americans and the British had at some point ceased to be one people, before independence; independence meant the dissolution of the political bands that had linked them, up until now. Platt counts ten references to “people” in the document and asks what the Declarers meant by that word. The straightforward answer would be the Lockean one: a people is a group of human beings who have established a ‘social contract’ among them. This would imply some sort of deliberation or at least consent, as would be consistent with the other elements of the syllogism. In the course of previous events, this separation had already been effected in their departure from the British Isles—most famously, by the Puritans, who undertook not only a physical but a civil-social separation from their Mother Country, a separation solemnized in the Mayflower Compact. Platt is not satisfied with that explanation, instead focusing on the word “bands” or bonds, which he describes as “stronger and more natural than contracts.” If so, and if they cannot be, simply, political bands, the kind that had linked Americans to Britons, “bands” might mean ties of affection, duty, “solemnized union,” all perhaps “ordained by divine command,” all aimed at “stand[ing] in mutual aid and charity to each other, with no limit in time”—something “more fundamental than will, or choice, or reflection.” They cannot simply be bloodlines, since most Americans were Britons, originally, and some were not, yet all were the American people. Accordingly, the Declarers do not call America a nation, implying a shared natio or nativity. Whatever a people may be, exactly, the Americans consider themselves to be one; their representatives also say that a people is entitled to self-government, a “separate and equal station among the powers of the earth,” ordained by the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. The bands that hold a people together are political in that sense; a people is entitled to rule itself as a body. “It is as if we readers should already know what the laws of Nature entitle a people to do,” which is “a characteristic of something natural,” evidence of which “is already there and available to all.”
Be all of that as it may, the Declarers move to more clearly defined, indeed “self-evident” ground when they move from political separation to the truths justifying the political revolution the separation must entail, the change in their “form of government.” Is this “Separation for the sake of Revolution, or Revolution for the sake of Separation?” To be sure, “in the circumstances, it would be hard to separate them.” Separate yourself from the British monarchy and you will at very least form a monarchy with a different monarch, a different ruler—one dimension of what a ‘regime’ is. [2] And if the people are making this revolution, perhaps they will insist on continuing to rule themselves, without any monarch at all. Even more impressively, “if you are making a change in principles, affirming self-evident truths about human nature itself, that is fundamentally revolutionary.” That is changing not only the rulers, not only the form of government or institutional framework by which the rulers rule, but the telos of the regime, to “secure a regime more conducive to safety and happiness” than the one you have had until now. What would justify such a revolution?
“Whereas in the first section we heard of the relation of a people and the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” the themes of separation, “in the second section we hear of the relations among a person, a government, and God”—themes of revolution, regime change. The equal station a people is entitled to, among the powers of the earth, gives way to a consideration of “a more fundamental equality, the equality of all persons.” The “enigma of a people” gives way to “the reality of a human being,” knowledge of which reality “is clearer and firmer more nearly certain” than knowledge of a people.” [3] Knowledge of human being is “self-evident,” at least to those not blinded by passion or self-interest. Again logically, the six truths enumerated follow from one another in the right order. “All follow from the first,” the equality of human beings, who are all equally endowed with the right to life, then to liberty, then to the pursuit of happiness, since one cannot pursue happiness without liberty and one cannot be at liberty without being alive. These are not, Platt rightly observes, the rights of Englishmen as Englishmen, as subjects of the British Empire; for example, in Sir Thomas More, that play Shakespeare had a hand in, the aggrieved Londoners demand their rights as free Englishmen, not as human beings as such. And although they claimed their entitlement to self-government as a people, Americans did not make that claim as human beings simply. But natural rights, rights inherent in all human beings as such, are “founded in the laws of nature,” specifically, the law of equality in humanness, in ‘species equality.’ “What we have by nature we cannot give away” (they are “unalienable”), nor can it be taken away,” although such rights can be violated, and have been violated by the British regime. (It must be, then, that the existence of Americans as a people, prior to declaring their independence, must rest upon a natural right civilly to associate with one another.)
As Platt also remarks, the Declarers alter Locke’s formulation of natural rights—life, liberty, property—preferring to say life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “Obviously, the Declarers did not think happiness was a right and thus something a government could ever guarantee,” although government could, indeed must, attempt to secure it for a people, along with their safety. (“To say that a government does not protect an unalienable right is to take away all, or almost all, of the authority it rules by, while to say that a government has not achieved one of its ends may not delegitimize it at all.” Circumstances alter cases.) Happiness will include the right to property but is not the same as the right to property. It is broader than that. In addition to rulers, ruling offices or institutions, and ends, a regime consists of a way of life. The American way of life will indeed consist in part of comfortable self-preservation, “Mr. Locke’s comfortable minimum,” but it also gives scope to “the practice of a trade, the improvement of an art, the accumulation of wealth, the endeavor of research, and the getting of knowledge”—none of these being trivial satisfactions. Americans will not be ‘Lockean liberals’ in the usual sense of the term—that is, “fundamentally needy, not very brave, and rather calculating individuals” associating for mere convenience. At least some of them will pursue lives animated by “sacred honor”—of spiritedness, not appetite. And their fellow citizens, admittedly less spirited, will esteem them for the virtues thereby exhibited.
In this discussion of revolution, Platt gently and rightly chides those American conservatives who claim that the Americans did not undertake a revolution at all, that they did not make a radical appeal, a rational appeal to the nature of human beings but a traditionalist appeal to English constitutionalism, or to Western civilization. English constitutionalism and Western civilization are not self-evident truths; they are complex realities (at least as complex as the definition of a people). The Declarers declare self-evident truths, using them as the major premises of a logical syllogism. They are rationalists, if not Cartesian or even Lockean rationalists, and surely not the kind of rationalists who imagine that political life can be lived from theory alone, as a set of simple deductions from ‘first principles.’ But a set of simple or at least straightforward, logical deductions from first principles can justify a revolution in “the minds and hearts of the people,” as Thomas Jefferson put it, even if they cannot bring one about in practice, which is the work of prudential reasoning, not theoretical reasoning. That is why “the Declaration that founded America is indeed a Revolutionary document,” even as it is also “prudent and even moderate.” The theoretical principles justify but also limit revolutionary action, as do the revolution’s practical ends.
And then there were the circumstances that further limited what the revolution might achieve in practice. George III had already declared war against the colonies, and he ruled “a mighty sea power,” making the spring of 1776 “a time to deliberate carefully.” As with all revolutions and with all movements toward independence, very much including the revolution of Christianity, “to declare independence would force every citizen of the colonies to choose sides; it would sever families and split neighbors,” bringing not peace but a sword. Prudence (a virtue commended by Jesus as well as Aristotle) must lead one to expect “a war to the finish.” War ends in deaths, and it might have ended in the deaths of the Declarers, as indeed it did end in the deaths of many soldiers under their command. “A time to try men’s deciding souls,” then—a “time for prudence.” (Instead of prudence, Platt prefers “sagacity” for practical wisdom, and that is no mean selection.) Without sagacity, not only might the revolution end in defeat, the Declaration “might be used to justify a program of radical equalization of condition, which cannot be achieved or even approached without destroying liberty” and without killing many more people than a war, even a deadly civil war, as the tens of millions murdered by Communists in the past century so cruelly proved. That is, “where the ends of government are conceived as rights they may fast become the enemy of all good government” (emphasis added). “Without sagacity, everything in human life may become unlimited.” That is why rights entail duties. (In one of his most admirable formulations, Platt distinguishes nihilists from “annihilists.” “A nihilist says of the world as it is, that it should not exist”; Americans saw him, continue to see him, among violent anarchists. “An annihilist says if we destroy the world as it is, the world as it should be will exist”; Communists and Nazis were annihilists, buoyed in their destructive folly by the supposition that ‘History’ is the course of events, and that it is proceeding to a happy ending over the dead bodies of those the storytellers choose to leave behind.)
As the syllogism proves, it has become the duty of Americans to remove the tyrant and to found a new, untyrannical, regime. That is, “the right to self-government is a duty”; “Nature and Nature’s God have endowed men with the duty of governing themselves.” It is one thing to acknowledge one’s rights as a human being; it is one thing to acknowledge a people’s title to independence under natural and divine law; it is another thing to maintain those rights “in the face of armed threat.” Maintenance of rights is a duty to our own nature. And if those rights are endowed by God, is it not also a duty to God? “Perhaps the disjunction” between Nature and Nature’s God,” if God is the Creator-God of the Bible, “is foreign to the Declaration.” “God’s gift of nature obligates you” to a defense of those unalienable rights both as belonging to you and as belonging to others. What others? Surely those who number among your people. And other peoples? Not primarily, as that is their own duty to themselves; nonetheless, we have a duty to respect their unalienable rights, as fellow human beings if not fellow citizens.
“Who should decide to revolutionize or not?” The people through their representatives, the Declaration more than suggests. “Many, including Christ (Luke 14:31) have pointed out” that “it is not wise to go into battle without measuring your forces, which includes their spirit, as Gideon, Miltiades, and Henry V knew to count on.” Genuine prudence will be guided by a concern for the genuine “common good” of the people who undertake the revolution, inasmuch as the achievement of some common evil could not be prudent, must be an unwise thing to do. There are limits to the sacrifices required in the pursuit of the common good. For example, “the right to life cannot be subordinated to the common good”; “no one can require another human being” to “risk, or even to sacrifice, himself, in a fight for the common good,” any more than anyone can force a mother “to sacrifice her life for a child.” Practically speaking, this would prohibit conscription, or at very least leave open the possibility of ‘conscientious objection’ to war, or even a particular war. The question is a notoriously vexed one, since individual human beings require the defense that they can only achieve as a people whose common good includes self-protection from murderous tyrants and their legions. Perhaps, as the American political scientist and decorated veteran of Patton’s army Robert H. Horwitz once suggested, conscientious objectors could be conscripted to Kitchen Patrol, peeling potatoes for the fighters.
The minor premises of the Declarers’ syllogism consist of 28 charges against King George. The American Congress had put him and their British brethren on notice in years past, but “not until the Declaration of Independence do we Americans charge George with being a tyrant.” Those charges define what ‘constitutes’ a tyrant; they are an exercise in regime recognition. A tyrant takes specific actions denying a people their pursuit of happiness, their liberty, and finally their lives—all of which George has done. Since government are rightly designed to respect those rights and to secure the ends of safety and happiness for their people, George has “abdicated government here,” as the Declarers conclude. So have the Americans’ “Brittish brethren,” who have shown themselves “deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity” in their refusal to offer a strong critique of their king’s policy, with a few honorable exceptions (Edmund Burke the best remembered). [4] That is why this became America’s first civil war.
But when it comes to the unalienable human right to liberty, what about the slavery Americans themselves imposed on their fellow human beings? A rightful question, Platt agrees, citing Frederick Douglass’s oration on the meaning of the Fourth of July to American blacks, the former slaves. The injustice of slavery, “though silent, glares in the truth, ‘all men are created equal.'” That truth “convict[s] all slavery silently,” “inexorably, as all truths do,” for “one you grasp a truth, it has already grasped you.” Therefore, again in line with the logic of the syllogism, “a shaft for a King fells a slaver.” Moreover, “it was the increasing Colonial characterization of their mistreatment [as] ‘slavery’ that more and more brought the practice of slavery itself under scrutiny.” All men are created equal. The United States “was not only founded on that truth…but as a consequence had to struggle with that truth.” [5] Platt suggests, “Ask yourself how each of the many practices of tyrant George also describe the relation of a master to his slave.” While you are at it, ask yourself how many of those practices might be found in a country ruled by a tyrannical majority or a tyrannical minority. Americans need to ask themselves such questions because they have seldom if ever tasted the bitterness of tyranny. They would do well to consider an aperçu of Bismarck (no great friend of republicanism), which Platt finely presents: “Fools say they learn from experience. I prefer to profit from others’ experience.”
War against tyranny will require warriors. The warrior spirit is aristocratic-thumotic, not democratic-appetitive, to put the matter in Socrates’ terms. That Americans—and not only the eminent gentry—met this challenge “attests to an aristocratic part in the largely ‘democratic theory of rights declared by the declaration.” Setting an example for their countrymen, the Declarers “are men who aspire to honor and judge themselves by it,” holding honor sacred. They also hold God sacred, relying, as they state, “on the Protection of Divine Providence.” “The God they worship recognizes as a good, present in the best of men a concern with honor,” a concern that should not be considered a “splendid vice,” as Augustine regarded all “the pagan virtues,” but as “something God may smile upon.” God Himself rightly demands honor and gracefully practices humility; for human beings, that is a hard balance to achieve. But did not some Americans achieve it? [6]
In the Declaration, “the four citations of God are designed with exceeding intelligence,” each of them “fitted to the theme of its section”: “God the natural lawgiver goes with separation; God the Creator of man, equal in his unalienable rights, goes with revolution; God the Supreme Judge goes with declaring independence, which will surely lead to war, a war God will witness and judge; and finally, God the Provident goes with the confidence the Declarers have that He will regard their prudence, protect their lives, preserve their fortunes, and honor their sacred courage by rewarding all Americans with victory.” This is because God’s act of Creation entails separation, separation of light from darkness, seas from land, all the distinctions among the kinds of creatures. Independence is Creation’s result, which God judges to be good; and the crown of that Creation, Man, is the “most independent” of all those created, the one created in the image of God. Such independence proves to require constraint, and so God eventually “gives the Law to Moses.” Since we are responsible for obeying His law, “He will judge us” in terms of that obedience. And in the meantime, “he may intervene providentially as a Statesman might to support us.”
The Declarers’ understanding of government as a triune unity of legislative, executive, and judicial powers may be taken, then not blasphemously but respectfully, as an imitatio Dei. “Good government is an image of God,” and, at the same time, God being God and men being men, the three powers of government must never be united in one person, as they are in one Person. Here is a link between the Declaration and the Constitution: “the image of the government brought forth in our Constitution is there in the Declaration.”
And “how do the people of the Declaration know these things about God?” First, they list the Creator’s existence “among the self-evident things.” “For the men and women of that time, there was only one Creator and one Creation,” and they founded their country “on a thesis in natural theology, that is, in an account (logos) of God (theo) in so far as He is evident to reason (logos), the natural power of man to know.” This is not “supernatural theology” or revelation, which gives us “things know through faith or miracle,” but “natural theology,” based on “things that can be known by reason.” Second, God created all men as equal in their rights. “No mere biologist would say that,” given the implication that man lives “in a graciously dependent relation to God.” Third, those unalienable rights are “specifically an endowment”—not a reward but “the kind of gift that comes to you just because you are the way you are,” a free expression of love. One might add, as the fourth thing to know about God, it is also an endowment in the sense that, like so many endowments, it comes with strings attached; one right is a duty, and all of them entail duties. And as for the regime that secures those rights, it is a republic if you can keep it. “Rights from God do require care.”
“Fifth, government is to be judged by the divine standard according to how much it secures the unalienable rights given by God and by the ends, safety to happiness, that have been written into the nature of things by Nature’s God.” George III does not meet that standard. Will we? That is, “not only” is “bad government…measured by God, but also…good government is in the image of God.” If human beings were created in God’s image, so too ought their government be, insofar as they govern themselves. And finally, “there is a profound difference between acting in the image of God and acting as God does.” Not only does God unite all three ruling powers in his one Person; not only is He entitled to do so because He is perfect. God also commits acts well beyond the range of human right, including the destruction of whole peoples. The Declarers would not teach, as Plato and Aristotle do, “that the wise man is precisely he who deserves to be entrusted” with Godlike power (emphasis added). No “supremely wise man is so free of vice as to be trusted with the absolute power’s temptation to corrupt absolutely.” It is not that the Declaration excludes the ‘pagan’ virtues; on the contrary, it includes them, “beginning with courage” and going on to wisdom, justice, and moderation, to say nothing of magnanimity.
For all its merits, by its very character as a declaration, the Declaration of Independence left “much to be worked out.” The first major legislative attempt to work out a sound regime for the United States was the Articles of Confederation, which instituted a government too weak for the tasks a government must undertake to secure a people’s safety and happiness. It was the United States Constitution that provided “a house founded on the truths of the Declaration,” a house strong enough to withstand a serious attempt to divide it, four score and four years after Americans declared their independence. It is to a meditation upon that constitution that Platt will now turn.
Notes
- Why “the course of human events” instead of “history”? Because the Founders did not think of “history” as the course of events, human or otherwise; for them, “history” meant a narrative of a course of events. For example, the Peloponnesian War consisted of a course of events; its history was Thucydides’ narrative of that course of events. For this point, see “America’s Declaration of Independence” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”
- On regimes, see “What Is a Regime?” on this website under the category, “American Politics” and “‘Regime’ Defined” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
- Platt presents his readers with a marvelous quote from Gouverneur Morris, who differentiated the French people from the American (and perhaps the British) people thusly: In their revolution, the French “have taken Genius instead of Reason for their guide, adopting Experiment instead of Experience, and wander in the Dark because they prefer Lightning to Light”—a flaw that Morris himself at times displayed, Platt remarks, showing that he “also knew himself” even as “he judged the French Revolution aright.” As an aside, one might recall that Morris’s younger contemporary, Chateaubriand titled his seminal book, The Genius of Christianity; in that as in so much else, he was very French, or at least very knowing when addressing the French.
- An account of British replies to the Declaration may be found on this website: “The Declaration of Independence: British Rejoinders,” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”
- “Founders Hamilton, Franklin, Jay, Laurens, Sherman, Dickinson, Mason, Paine, Gouverneur Morris, Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Benjamin Rush (first inspired by Anthony Benezet)” all opposed slavery in word and deed. One might add that George Washington, who gazes mildly but firmly at us from the book’s cover, freed his slaves in his Will, additionally providing them with assistance that would assist their transition to freemen.
- Platt points his readers to Paul Eidelberg: On the Silence of the Declaration of Independence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976) as the source of this understanding of the ‘aristocratic’ dimension of the American Founding.
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