Bret Devereaux: On the Declaration of Independence

[muriel_volestrangler]

Bret Devereaux is an ancient and military historian who blogs at the marvellously titled 'A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry'. His main beat is how societies in history functioned, especially in war, with frequent examinations of how realistic fiction (which can include fantasy) and games are. This is his 4th of July presentation - an examination of the Declaration, including links for all the ways Trump is currently repeating the acts of Tyranny of George II and his government.

The argument begins with two assertions. The first is a natural law assertion of an equality of rights among men, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It is a claim of striking magnitude and remarkable finality – indeed, a claim of such magnitude that it very obviously conflicted with the practice of slavery in the colonies, something some of the framers recognized and then most shamefully did almost nothing about. The Declaration could have asserted those unalienable rights are being particular – to British subjects or Englishmen or Christians, perhaps – but it does not. Instead it insists upon their universality through an argument to natural law, a sensible choice for Thirteen Colonies that already had a multiplicity of faiths and ethnicity in them. Again, if that seems normal to us, it was not normal at the time and indeed is not normal now: most countries are not operated with the notion that anyone has unalienable rights (a reminder that at no point in human history have a majority of countries been anywhere remotely close to free).

We should also note that what the Declaration asserts are not collective rights, but rather individual rights, an important component of liberalism, but an enormous break with most pre-modern social assumptions, which tend to be communal, rather than individual. Compare for instance the ancient Greek notions of autonomia and eleutheria – autonomy and freedom – which in a political sense were really collective rights, possessed by the polis. An individual Athenian did not really have any rights that the Athenian demos – the people at large – were bound to respect. By contrast, the Declaration is asserting that all men individually possess key rights, including the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ which is rather an expansion of Locke’s original “life, liberty and property” formulation – to me it includes not just a right to property but also a right to make one’s own decisions, to pursue one’s own goals, to not be a tool of the community. Again, this is a really radical rejection of the way most societies had been organized – as Patrician Crone notes, in pre-industrial societies, “the individual existed for the benefit of the overall group, not the other way around.” The Declaration asserts the opposite: the group (governments) exist for the individual.
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It was also really radical in 1776, at a point when most states on Earth justified their power not from the consent of the governed but rather by divine right: the ruler was chosen by God, or had the Mandate of Heaven, or was of a divine lineage, and so on. The idea that government was by divine sanction was hardly new – we find it in some of the earliest governing documents that still survive. It seems to have been the governing principle of the earliest states, that the social order – with the king on top – was divinely ordained and thus any attempt to challenge it was a rebellion against God or the gods. One sees strains of this in certain forms of Christian nationalism in the United States, which regard either the American form of government or specific American leaders as divinely ordained, but the irony is that the Declaration is quite directly rejecting this vision. “Their Creator” who is also “Nature’s God” does not ordain rulers, rather he endows rights which earthly rulers may not in justice abridge and which humans cannot alienate – which is to say the rights can never be lost, only violated.
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Indeed, it is striking to me that while the Declaration in its ideals warmly embraces the immigrant, the fellow with an unfamiliar religion, the families with different lifeways, what is truly foreign to it is the notion that the United States is just some other blood-and-soil nation, that there are ‘heritage Americans’ or that the unalienable rights it asserts do not extend to some people. The authors and signers of the Declaration were brave enough, confident enough in their ideals to say all men; let us be at least half as brave to keep saying all men.

https://acoup.blog/2026/07/04/collections-on-the-declaration-of-independence/

[lastlib]

1. An excellent read!

It explains some things concerning our Declaration that most people have never really thought of. HIGHLY recommended, and worth bookmarking!

[cachukis]

2. An important read. Very shareable to those willing

to reflect.