Libertarians refer to the American Revolution as the first libertarian revolution. The fact that, as a libertarian, I could be quite hostile to the federal government yet feel very patriotic in doing so was and is, I suspect, still an attractive aspect of libertarianism for young recruits and old radicals. But there's a lot more to America's founding principles than freedom from government. For example equality and the need for a strong government are also themes that appear in our Declaration of Independence. Harvard professor Danielle Allen has written a beautiful counter to the libertarian paradigm in "Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality." Below is an excerpt:
(from the Preface) The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us see that we cannot have freedom without equality. It is out of an egalitarian commitment that a people grows--a people that is capable of protecting us all collectively, and each of us individually, from domination. If the Declaration can stake a claim to freedom, it is only because it is so clear-eyed about the fact that the people's strength resides in its equality.
...When we think about how to achieve political equality, we have to attend to things like voting rights and the right to hold office. We have to foster economic opportunity and understand when excessive material inequality undermines broad democratic political participation. But we also have to cultivate the capacity of citizens to use language effectively enough to influence the choices we make together. The achievement of political equality requires, among other things, the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures.
Equality and liberty--these are the summits of human empowerment; they are the twinned foundations of democracy.
What fragile foundations they are!
(from Chapter 49) It is time, then, to spell out the compete content of the ideal of equality that guided the thinking of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
In reading the Declaration slowly, we have encountered the five facets of this ideal.
First, the colonists wanted to establish that their new states were separate from and equal to the other powers of the earth. They wanted to be equal as powers. This means they did not want any other state to try to dominate them. For them, the ideal of equality required securing conditions free from domination.
Second, there was the phrase "that all men are created equal." Here the idea is that each human being is the best judge of her own happiness and all are therefore participants in the project of political judgement, which entails considering whether one's community fares well or ill. The ideal of equality, in this dimension, involves recognizing and enabling the general human capacity for political judgement. Moreover, recognition of this fact of human equality requires that each of us have access to the single most important tool available for securing our happiness: government. This is an idea of equality of opportunity where the opportunity that we all need is access to the tool of government.
Third, we considered the list of grievances and reflected on how that list came to exist. We saw in it the use of a "poltluck method" for developing a community's knowledge stock. Now we would call it "crowd sourcing." Instead of relying on experts alone, Jefferson and his colleagues drew on extensive conversational networks among ordinary people to develop a clear picture of the course of human events. The idea of equality here entails finding what each member of the community can contribute to the collective supply of knowledge, for the sake of maximizing the community's knowledge capacities.
Fourth, we focused on the importance of reciprocity or mutual responsiveness to achieving the conditions of freedom. Securing conditions in which no one dominates anyone else requires a form of conversational interaction that rests on and embodies equality in the relationships among the participants. It is not merely that the ideal of equality requires securing conditions free from domination--the first facet of equality that we looked at--but also that equality of agency achieved through reciprocal responsiveness, itself provides the means for securing freedom.
And now, here at the very end of the Declaration, we are presented with a final, fifth facet of the ideal.
In pledging to one another their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, each signer of the Declaration anted up, on behalf of both himself personally and his state, an equal stake in the creation of a new political order. Each thereby claimed an equal ownership share. This is an ideal of equality as co-creation, where many people participate equally in creating a world together. They do so under conditions of mutual respect and accountability by sharing intelligence, sacrifice, and ownership. The point of political equality, then, is not merely to secure spaces free from domination but also to engage all members of a community equally in the work of creating and constantly re-creating that community.
Equality is the foundation of freedom because from a commitment to equality emerges the people itself--we, the people--with the power both to create a shared world in which all can flourish and to defend it from encroachers. On the basis of the Declaration's five facets of equality--and for the freedom secured by them--the colonists were willing to risk everything.
Equality & Freedom.
The colonists judged them worth all they had.
(From the Epilogue) That the achievement of equality is the sole foundation on which we can build lasting and meaningful freedom is a fundamentally antilibertarian argument. Since libertarianism currently dominates our political imaginations, this first argument runs against the grain of our contemporary culture.
Importantly, the Declaration gives us a reason to believe its argument about human equality and the capacity of all of us to participate in political judgement. If the Declaration is right that all people are created equal--in the sense of all being participants in the project of political judgement--then all people should be able to read or listen to the Declaration, understand the work that it is doing, and carry on similar work on their own account, with no more help in unleashing their capacities than can be provided by the example of the Declaration itself. And this, in fact, seems to be true. The Declaration and its import are accessible to any reader or hearer of its words.
My second argument, conveyed through my expression of love for the Declaration, is that I endorse its egalitarian case. I judge it valid and worthy. It is in the hopes of conveying the Declaration's egalitarian argument as clearly and succinctly as possible that I have written this book.
With my reading of the Declaration, then, I hope to have brought us into awareness of our own democratic powers. I hope to have inspired the conviction that their source is inside us, all of us. I hope I have made visible the democratic art of doing things with words. I hope, in sum, to have brought the Declaration to life and at the same time to have brought all of us together into a different kind of shared life--as citizens and thinkers, as political deliberators and decision makers, as democratic writers and group artists. I hope that collectively we will reclaim this text as ours.
I also, however, understand the limits of words; I understand the entanglements of desire. when articulated in 1776, these words made only modest inroads against the desires of white Americans to dominate Americans of color, whether native or non-native. They made scant inroads against the desires of men to maintain patriarchal social structures, or against the desires of communitarian monitors to regulate private intimacies.
Yet these words also supported the cultivation of solidarity among people committed to their principles, people who could see new ways of being in a world that more fully embodied these ideals. And in supporting the cultivation of solidarity, the text built roads to action that changed worlds. Hosts of abolitionists were, for instance, inspired by the Declaration. Members of the Indian Congress Party took it as a model when they decided to launch their own independence struggle against Britain in 1930.
In an important way, the Declaration itself acknowledges the complex entanglement of ideas with desire. Human beings, it argues, are masters enough of their own fate to inch their way toward happiness--this is a a supremely optimistic document. At the same time, though, it makes clear that the best we all can do is inch in that direction. Humans are long-suffering; evils are long suffered. The Declaration reins in its own optimism. On its own, it admits the halting, partial nature of human progress. This is another reason it is worth reading. The Declaration tells the truth about itself.
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