How America Misunderstands the Declaration of Independence

It's crazy, but I've been teaching and reading and writing about the Declaration of Independence for almost 20 years. Over time, I have come to understand that that very, very short text is the single best education and political philosophy a person could have. There's one really, really important thing to know about the Declaration. For me, this is just the most important thing. This is the self-evident truth sentence. The self-evident truth sentence is incredibly long and it has five clauses in it. It's a long read. The only way I can explain what's important about it is to share with you the entire sentence. I recite that entire sentence because we have forgotten that it's one sentence. The first newspaper printer who published the text scooped everybody else. An unofficial copy stuck a period in the middle of that sentence after "pursuit of happiness" The official printer printed it correctly a few days later, but that first printing by Benjamin Towne circulated because it was the first printing. And as a result, our tradition for reprintings of the Declaration very often have a period after “pursuit of happiness.” I will tell you, I have seen time and again, people just stop reading at that period after “pursuit of Happiness.” In the 18th century, they used the concept of self evidence to explain logical relations among things. So the point is that the structure of that sentence is some premises: people have rights, governments are supposed to secure rights, and those premises lead to a conclusion. If governments aren't securing rights, it's the people's job to fix it up. And you need that whole sentence to understand the argument of the Declaration. If you have a period after “pursuit of Happiness,” you think that the document is telling you there is this self-evident truth: people have individual rights. Full stop, end of story. Whereas actually, the sentence about self-evident truths is about the relationship between our individual rights and what we do together as a community, building political institutions to secure our rights. As a teacher, I get a lot of questions from young people about how to bring change about and how to think about their own roles as changemakers. I think what young people are doing with social movements is tremendous and powerful, And one of the most important levers of change is political institutions, so one has to get out that user's manual and figure out how to operate state institutions at the state level and federal institutions at the national level. I think if you're building a social movement, you have to integrate that understanding about how the powers of government get organized. That's that language from the Declaration again. For me, it's a living document. It has in it this kernel about how to understand civic agency, even in the present.

Channel: The Atlantic

Views: 165,466

Keywords: danielle allen, harvard, harvard university, democratic theory, democracy, declaration of independence, Ethics, sociology, Democratic Knowledge Project, self-evident truths, american history, american history videos, history of america, history of the united states, history of the us

Id: AqiFMiQeXNQ

Length: 3min 59sec (239 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 02 2018