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Danielle Allen
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Reading of the Declaration of Independence runs against the grain of our culture

Laura Rose

Reading of the Declaration of Independence runs against the grain of our culture

When is the last time you read the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence all the way through? Once you crack Da­nielle Al­len’s ex­cel­lent “Our Dec­la­ra­tion: A Read­ing of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence in De­fense of Equal­ity,” you will want to read it again and not just on Inde­pen­dence Day.


"OUR DECLARATION: A READING OF THE  DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE IN DEFENSE OF EQUALITY"
By Danielle Allen
Liveright ($27.95)

Ms. Al­len, a po­lit­i­cal phi­los­o­pher at the In­sti­tute for Ad­vanced Study in Prince­ton, N.J., leads read­ers through the Dec­la­ra­tion sen­tence by sen­tence, some­times word by word, in this as­tound­ing new book that should re­in­vig­o­rate pub­lic un­der­stand­ing of the found­ing doc­u­ment of the United States.

Ms. Al­len presents the act of read­ing the Dec­la­ra­tion as a way for any­one to be­gin to make a claim on demo­cratic cit­i­zen­ship. She wants to “draw dif­fer­ent cir­cles of read­ers to­gether: the so­phis­ti­cate and the nov­ice; the fre­quent and the oc­ca­sional reader; the his­tory buff and the self-help seeker; the lover of de­moc­racy at home or abroad.”

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She suc­ceeds in mak­ing the Dec­la­ra­tion in­ter­est­ing on all those lev­els and at demon­strat­ing its mean­ing, not only for the Found­ing Fathers in the 18th cen­tury, but for any­one in our own day also.

Ms. Al­len’s book emerged from her teach­ing of the Dec­la­ra­tion si­mul­ta­ne­ously to un­der­grad­u­ates at the Univer­sity of Chi­cago and to re­turn­ing adults strug­gling to fin­ish col­lege at night.

Lucid and en­gag­ing, Ms. Al­len mixes phi­los­o­phy with his­tory and com­mon sense in her ap­proach to read­ing the doc­u­ment. Along the way she muses on the demo­cratic po­ten­tial of such mun­dane ac­tiv­i­ties as writ­ing memos, at­tend­ing meet­ings and cook­ing pot­luck meals. She pays at­ten­tion to the cir­cum­stances of draft­ing the Dec­la­ra­tion, care­fully an­a­lyz­ing not only Tho­mas Jef­fer­son but also ev­ery mem­ber of the Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress who con­trib­uted to it, in­clud­ing the print­ers who com­posed var­i­ous orig­i­nal cop­ies.

Ms. Al­len’s clear writ­ing has the power to make in­ter­est­ing even deep con­sid­er­ation of punc­tu­a­tion marks and how they helped to shade the mean­ings of con­cepts like “the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness.” Ms. Al­len helps read­ers un­der­stand the im­ag­ery, au­di­ence, log­i­cal struc­ture and rhythm of the Dec­la­ra­tion as she ex­plains how the ac­tual words of the doc­u­ment con­sti­tuted ac­tions that cre­ated the na­tion and en­shrined many of its most im­por­tant po­lit­i­cal val­ues.

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Ms. Al­len also makes a pow­er­ful ar­gu­ment about U.S. de­moc­racy. She sub­mits that po­lit­i­cal phi­los­o­phers, and in­deed most U.S. pol­i­ti­cians to­day, see the fun­da­men­tal Amer­i­can ide­als of free­dom and equal­ity as con­flict­ing. In­stead, she uses her read­ing of the Dec­la­ra­tion to ar­gue that Amer­i­can free­dom and equal­ity rely on one an­other.

Ms. Al­len, who is African-Amer­i­can and the au­thor of sev­eral books on civil rights, be­lieves that the Dec­la­ra­tion fu­els Amer­i­can equal­ity — even though its draft­ers sup­ported slav­ery at the time.

She ar­gues that the Dec­la­ra­tion is a pow­er­ful en­dorse­ment of equal­ity of at least five dif­fer­ent kinds: “free­dom from dom­i­na­tion, equal­ity of the op­por­tu­nity to use the tool of gov­ern­ment, the use of egal­i­tar­ian meth­ods to gen­er­ate col­lec­tive in­tel­li­gence, and an equal­ity of agency achieved through prac­tices of rec­i­proc­ity” plus “equal­ity as co-cre­ation and co-own­er­ship of our shared world.”

Ms. Al­len doesn’t shy from the fact that this en­dorse­ment of equal­ity is out of fash­ion across the cur­rent Amer­i­can po­lit­i­cal spec­trum. She states forth­rightly that “the achieve­ment of equal­ity is the sole foun­da­tion upon which we can build last­ing and mean­ing­ful free­dom … [but] since lib­er­tar­i­an­ism cur­rently dom­i­nates our po­lit­i­cal imag­i­na­tions, this first ar­gu­ment runs against the grain of our con­tem­po­rary cul­ture.”

The book is far from com­bat­ive, how­ever, and even read­ers who find this po­lit­i­cal state­ment of­fen­sive to their way of think­ing will ben­e­fit from grap­pling with the Dec­la­ra­tion as Ms. Al­len ad­vises. She presents this as “a” read­ing of the Dec­la­ra­tion, not “the” read­ing, and she em­pow­ers read­ers to think for them­selves, even as she ar­gues for her way of see­ing things.

Read­ing Ms. Al­len makes read­ing the Dec­la­ra­tion mean­ing­ful and en­joy­able — a pow­er­ful enough les­son in its own right.

First Published: July 6, 2014, 4:00 a.m.

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Danielle Allen  (Laura Rose)
“Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality," by Danielle Allen.
Laura Rose
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