A version of this article originally appeared in Constituting America, April 27, 2026.
As a declaration, the Declaration of Independence argues a claim before the international ‘court of public opinion,’ showing respect for “the opinions of mankind.” To do so effectively, it must appeal to some human capacity that transcends borders, languages, customs, even religions. Only the natural human capacity to reason can meet that requirement. That is why the independence the Declaration declares is a logical syllogism.
A logical syllogism consists of one or more ‘major’ premises–for example, “All men are mortal.” A ‘minor’ premise or set of premises—typically more specific than a major premise, such as ‘Socrates is a man’—comes next. To be reasonable, the conclusion of the syllogism must ‘follow from’ the premises: ‘Therefore, Socrates is mortal.’ No part of the syllogism may contradict any other part. The syllogism can be falsified not only if it is self-contradictory but if one or more of the premises are false. If, in this case, ‘Socrates’ is the name of my cat, the syllogism fails.
The Declaration is a more complicated syllogism than that one, but a syllogism it is, with several major premises, including the self-evident truths of equal, natural, unalienable rights and fifteen minor premises, with numerous subdivisions, all leading to the conclusion that the United Colonies are now “Free and Independent” United States.
One of the major premises that has most puzzled readers is the claim that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. If it is self-evident that one’s rights are unalienable, Creator-given, and governments that are rightly designed secure them, then what has consent to do with it? Why can’t a government simply serve our rights without asking our permission to exist in the first place?
The answer is that, first, if liberty is among those rights, the formation of any government must rest on the consent of those ruled by it, initially and continually. But more broadly, consent must mean assent under the rule of reason. It must follow from the overall logic of the syllogism. As a political declaration, not a philosophic treatise, the Declaration does not elaborate on this point. For the Founders, John Locke had already provided that elaboration.
Just as the rights asserted in the Declaration follow the account of natural rights Locke gives in his Essay on Civil Government, often called the “Second Treatise,” so too it is there that Locke defines a free action as one taken “within the bounds of the law of nature,” distinguishing liberty from licentiousness, which he defines as the condition in which “men’s opinions are not the product of judgment, or the consequence of reason…but the effects of chance and hazards as a mind floating at all adventures, without choice and without direction.”
That last sentence comes from Locke’s most philosophically rigorous book, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. There, he identifies reason’s purposes: to enlarge our knowledge and to “regulate our assent” by finding the logical connections between and among our perceptions. For this, “sense and intuition reach but a little way.” We need to make logical deductions and inferences to reach certainty and to establish probability in our opinions. This is a four-step process of, first, discerning truths by our immediate, “self-evident” perceptions; making regular and methodical disposition of these perceptions in a clear and fit order; perceiving their connection; and finally, coming to the right conclusion. (See An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, chapter xvii).
That is exactly what the Declaration of Independence does. The Law of Nature, Locke writes in the “Second Treatise,” is reason, which “teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life (or Limb), Health, Liberty, or Possessions”—a principle, if followed, that will conduce to “the Peace and Preservation of Mankind.” Human beings are equal in the sense that we are all “of the same species and rank” within the natural order, unless God ordains otherwise by a “manifest Declaration of his Will.” As such, we have the right to punish those who transgress upon our equal rights. Such predators, very much including predatory humans, are “dangerous to Mankind” and must be stopped. However, given the human tendency to mistake innocent actions for offenses against us, and worse, our tendency to persuade ourselves that dealing out injury and committing acts of seizure are simple acts of justice, we need “a common Judge” to settle our disputes. Such a judge isn’t easy to find, since early human societies were family-based, divided into small clans that inclined to define right as the advantage of ‘one’s own,’ the good of one’s kin. In that “State of Nature,” individuals and families wield “political power” in pursuing their own interests, often securing their own natural rights at the expense of others.
To remedy this condition effectively, Locke contends, men may join in a “Compact” with one another, “and make one Body Politick.” To do so, they must give up the right to self-enforce their natural rights. This requires consent, reasoned assent, since anyone who forms a political regime without the consent of those included in it “put[s] himself into a State of him” who is so included; if I have such “Absolute Power” over you, I have enslaved you, and having enslaved you, I can kill you whenever I want. Nothing could be more contrary to reason, contrary to the Law of Nature. Indeed, “the Freedom of Man and Liberty of Action according to his own Will, is grounded on his having Reason, which is able to instruct him in that Law he is to govern himself by, and make him know how far he is left to the Freedom of his Will.” Recourse to a tyrannical, ‘strong man’ regime to secure our rights is itself a violation of our natural right to liberty and is likely to fail to secure our rights to life and property, as well.
This is why, “the end,” the purpose, “of Law is not to abolish or restrain but to preserve and enlarge Freedom.” “Where there is no Law, there is no Freedom” from “slavery and violence.” Both the Law of Nature and the law of the political Compact depend upon the human person’s rational “capacity of knowing [the] Law.” Just as “we are born free,” we are “born rational” or, more precisely born with the capacity to reason after suitable parental governance and education.
Thus, “Politick Societies all began with voluntary Union”—from consent, whether formal or “tacit,” and so they are maintained, inasmuch as any person “is at liberty to go and incorporate himself into another Commonwealth” or to form another “in any part of the World, they can find free and unpossessed.” North America comes to mind, as it did in fact come to Locke’s mind when writing the “Second Treatise” in the 1680s: when human populations all around the world there were sparse and scattered, “all the World was America.
In any such Commonwealth, legislative power “can never have a right to destroy, enslave or designedly impoverish its subjects”—compromise their lives, liberty, or pursuit of happiness—since “the Law of Nature stands as an Eternal Rule of all Men.”
Locke emphasizes two features of “Bodies Politick” that need to be established in a manner consistent with the Law of Nature, of reason. They are property and majority rule. Both are justified and ruled by reason.
Property, which enables human beings to sustain their lives and to protect their liberty is “for use of the Industrious and Rational,” not for “the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious. Industrious: human labor substantially adds to the value of nature, fashioning building materials out of stones and trees, clothing out of plants and animal skins. Security of property encourages such labor; if the products of our labor can be arbitrarily taken away, why work? The wealth of the Commonwealth, especially if it is held not in common but by individuals and families, will strengthen the regime that protects property. “That Prince who shall be so wise and godlike as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of Mankind against the oppression of power and narrowness of party will quickly be too hard for his neighbours”—too hard for them to conquer. It is, again, by “common consent” that his citizens agree to the establishment and protection of private property and money, as well, so as better to exchange the products of their labor with one another. By contrast, an “absolute” monarch, one bound by no Compact securing this and other rights, heads a regime “inconsistent with civil society,” hurling his subjects back into a state of war, crushing liberty and, with his absolute power, making himself “licentious by Impunity.”
In governing themselves after establishing the social and political Compact, a people needs a practical way of legislating. Laws must be enacted by the consent of the majority of citizens. Majority rule must be a part of the Compact itself. Since it is hardly imaginable that any law will find unanimous favor with the people, this is the only reasonable way. Otherwise, the Compact “would signifie nothing, and be no Compact.” Such a regime would be effectively no different from “the State of Nature,” quickly dissolving. It “cannot be suppos’d that Rational Creatures should desire and constitute Societies only to be dissolved.”
Bringing the right to property and majority rule together, and upholding a principle the American Founders would restate and fight for, no government can take a man’s property “without his own consent.” Since no government can survive without revenues for such purposes as securing a more perfect Union, establishing Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general Welfare, and securing the blessings of Liberty, government will need to collect revenues with the consent of Constitutional majorities. There, too, the consent of the elective representatives and the tacit consent of those whom they represent exemplify the Lockean way, and the American way.
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