Essay 1-C The Declaration of Independence, The Lockean Idea and The Founding Documents

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

As a declaration, the Declaration of Independence argues a claim before the international ‘court of public opinion,’ showing respect for “the opinions of mankind.” To do so effectively, it must appeal to some human capacity that transcends borders, languages, customs, and even religions. Only the natural human capacity to reason can meet that requirement. That is why the independence the Declaration declares is a logical syllogism.

A logical syllogism consists of one or more ‘major’ premises – for example, “All men are mortal.” A ‘minor’ premise or set of premises – “Socrates is a man” – follows. To be reasonable, the conclusion of the syllogism must ‘follow from’ the premises: “Therefore, Socrates is mortal.” No part of the syllogism must contradict any other part.

The Declaration is a more complicated syllogism than that one, but a syllogism it is, with several major premises, including the self-evident truths of equal, natural, unalienable human rights, and fifteen minor premises, with numerous subdivisions, all leading to the conclusion that the United Colonies are now “Free and Independent” United States.

One of the major premises that has most puzzled readers is the claim that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. If it is self-evident that one’s rights are unalienable, Creator-given, and governments that are rightly designed secure them, then what has consent to do with it? Why can’t a government simply serve our rights without asking for our permission?

The answer is that, first, if liberty is among those rights, the formation of any government must rest on the consent of those ruled by it. But more broadly, consent must mean assent under the rule of reason. It must follow from the overall logic of the syllogism.

Just as the rights asserted in the Declaration follow the account of natural rights given by John Locke in his Essay on Civil Government, often called the “Second Treatise,” so too Locke there defines liberty as an action “within the bounds of the law of nature,” distinguishing it from licentiousness, which he defines as the condition in which “men’s opinions are not the product of judgment or the consequence of reason…but the effects of chance and hazards as a mind floating at all adventures, without choice and without direction.”

That last sentence comes from Locke’s most philosophically rigorous book, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. There, he identifies reason’s purposes: to enlarge our knowledge and to “regulate our assent” by finding the logical connections between and among our perceptions. For this, “sense and intuition reach but a little way.” We need to make logical deductions and inferences to reach certainty and to establish probability in our opinions. This is a four-step process of, first, discerning truths by our immediate, “self-evident” perceptions; making a regular and methodical disposition of these perceptions in a clear and fit order; perceiving their connection; and finally, coming to the right conclusion.

That is exactly what the Declaration of Independence does. The Law of Nature, Locke writes in the “Second Treatise,” is reason, which “teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life (or Limb), Health, Liberty, or Possessions” – a principle, if followed, conducing to “the Peace and Preservation of Mankind.”

To do this effectively, he contends, men may join in a “Compact” with one another, “and make one Body Politick.” This requires consent, reasoned assent, since anyone who forms a political regime without the consent of those included in it “put[s] himself into a State of War with him”; if I have such “Absolute Power” over you, I have enslaved you, and having enslaved you, I can kill you whenever I want. Nothing could be more contrary to reason, contrary to the Law of Nature. Indeed, “the Freedom of Man and Liberty of Action according to his own Will, if grounded on his having Reason, which is able to instruct him in that Law he is to govern himself by, and make him know how far he is left to the Freedom of his Will.”

This is why “the end,” the purpose, “of law is not to abolish or restrain but to preserve and enlarge Freedom.” “Where there is no Law, there is no Freedom” from “slavery and violence.” Both the Law of Nature and the law of the political Compact depend upon the human person’s rational “capacity of knowing [the] Law.” Just as “we are born free,” we are “born rational” or, more precisely, born with the capacity to reason after suitable parental governance and education.

Thus, “Political Societies all began from a voluntary Union” – from consent, whether formal or “tacit,” and so they are maintained, inasmuch as any person “is at liberty to go and incorporate himself into another Commonwealth” or to form another “in any part of the World, they can find free and unpossessed.” North America comes to mind, as it did in fact come to Locke’s mind, when human populations there were sparse and scattered, “all the World was America.”

In any such Commonwealth, legislative power “can never have a right to destroy, enslave or designedly impoverish its subjects” – compromise their lives, liberty, or pursuit of happiness – since “the Law of Nature stands as an Eternal Rule of all Men.”

Will Morrisey is a native of Rumson, New Jersey. He has a B.A. from Kenyon College, an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the New School for Social Research. A professor emeritus of Politics at Hillsdale College, he is the author of ten books, including Self-Government, The American Theme: Presidents of the Founding and Civil War. His essays and book reviews can be found online at Will Morrisey Reviews.

Click here to receive our Daily 90-Day Study Essay emailed directly to your inbox.

Click here for the essay schedule with today’s essay and previously published essays hyperlinked.

PRINT ARTICLE