The philosophy behind the Declaration of Independence
Review of Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence by Garry Wills
Garry Wills has a genius for explaining intricate, extremely complex nexuses of ideas, i.e. what people were thinking at the time, how it influenced their behavior, and what it meant in context. This book is a masterpiece on one of the greatest intellects in American history, Thomas Jefferson, as the chief writer of the Declaration of Independence. It is intellectual history at its liveliest and most rewarding.
In Part 1, the book places the Declaration of Independence in legal and philosophical context. Though there was no US Parliament strictly speaking, a “congress” of citizen-notables was addressing a note of grievance to the king, as was their right in a tradition dating back to the Magna Carta. Though it was not an official action that carried legislative weight, it was a legal document nonetheless. Many interesting details aside, I must admit that this section (nearly 100 pages) struck me as pretty dull.
It is not until the following sections that the real meat of the book – on which Enlightenment Philosophes exerted the greatest intellectual influence on Jefferson – gets in full swing. The principal meme is Newton’s clockwork universe: it is a wholly contained system of forces that act out on their own, a mechanism behaving in accordance with immutable laws that are best expressed with mathematical precision. Gravity is of course the most important force, the glue that holds everything together. With the typical expansiveness of the Philosophes, Jefferson assumed that a similar set of laws could be found in human society, offering a perfect way to rational governance (later called “technocratic”).
Once the Newtonian paradigm is established, Wills gets into the details of how it worked itself out in Jefferson’s version of the Declaration. Wills accomplishes this with a wonderfully evocative organization for the book: taking Jefferson’s rhetoric and explaining it in chapters built around philosophical themes. While this gets into way too much detail to encapsulate here, some examples illustrate the approach.
First, “necessity” refers to the inevitability of the split from Britain, which is following an inevitable and irrevocable course, much like a planet in motion or an asteroid headed for collision. Second, “created equal” is about the inherent moral sense in all men, not their economic or social status. Third, “inalienable rights” are about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Notably, there was no mention of property.
Beyond Newton, Jefferson’s other great lodestar was Francis Hutcheson, the Scots-Irish author of A System of Moral Philosophy – and not, as many have contended, John Locke. This is Wills’ most important scholarly argument in the book. Jefferson, he believes, was not an advocate of Lockean capitalism as based on private property, but had a far wider conception of society; man, Hutcheson wrote, had an internal moral sense that should guide him to promote the general welfare of mankind. It was a communal responsibility and mission, anticipating Bentham’s Utilitarianism (“the greatest happiness for the greatest number”) and decisively influencing one of his students, Adam Smith; it also reflected a a secular spin of Thomism, with its innate, God-given characteristics in our brains. If Wills’ argument is somewhat recondite in that it traces Jefferson’s reading and interprets the Declaration in light of that, it is a fun read in astonishingly lucid prose.
While the book goes into Jefferson’s inventions, I was expecting more about his times, a somewhat wider historical context than I found. Nonetheless, the book is the product of an original and great mind, one of the best writers of his generation.
Interesting. Wills has certainly "got the chops" (as musicians say), so he could be right-or at least substantially right. When I read Locke's "Second Treatise of Government" I was struck by how often the Declaration of Independence sounded borrowed or paraphrased from it. Though he seems to have differences with some of its current stances, Wills DOES come from a strong Roman Catholic background, and I wonder if it was Wills that needed the philosophical framework provided by Hutcheson more than Jefferson.
To ME, the most important contribution from Locke (and rooted in Sola Scriptura) was the notion that the "authority" that is the basis of government comes directly from "God" and does not need to be administered through church, monarch, or combination of the two, but rather that the collective right of individuals who are each covenanting directly with God is what gives "us" the right to self government.
Though it's not worth dropping all other activities to devote an hour to, the radio show at the attached link provides an entertaining illustration of how all "law" (and hence ownership) is ultimately derived from some assumption of "authority"-regardless of whether it's "divine" or not.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1892048963714