>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Good day.
My name is Dan Else.
I'm a policy analyst at the
Congressional Research Service,
which is a part of the
Library of Congress.
We are the in-house
think tank for Congress.
I want to welcome you to
the National Book Festival
and to this presentation on the
new book, "Our Declaration."
Earlier today, Walter
Isaacson discussed his book,
"The Innovators," in
which he places creativity
at the intersection
of science and art.
Danielle Allen, the author of "Our
Declaration" finds her creativity
at the intersection of classical
studies and political theory.
Subjects of which she is
a master, or a doctor,
because she holds Ph.D.s
in both subjects.
Isaacson found that the brilliance
that gave the world the
programmable computer
and eventually the
Internet, could not have come
from the inspired efforts
of an individual.
Of necessity, they sprang
from the collaboration
of many inspired individuals.
Similarly, Dr. Allen finds that
the assembling of the one thousand,
three hundred, thirty-seven
words of the Declaration
of Independence was the result
of a vast array of conversations,
collaborations, and debates
among a surprisingly large number
of collaborators.
Indeed, this book itself is a
brilliance born of collaboration.
While a single hand-- hers-- wrote
the text, the thought, the analysis,
the philosophy embodied therein is
the result of more than a decade
of collaboration, debate,
and discussion
between her and her students.
For she received much
wisdom from them.
Even as she taught
them the mechanics
of the Declaration's language.
And a mechanic she is.
Like many really good mechanics,
she disassembles the
Declaration's engine word by word,
sand blasts the parts clean,
shines them, lubes them,
and puts them back together, so
that they run better than new.
Dr. Allen has earned five university
degrees, a Bachelors in Classics
at Princeton, a Master of Philosophy
and a Doctorate in Classics
at Kings College Cambridge,
and a Masters and a Doctorate
in Government from Harvard.
She has written five
books, of which this is one.
She has just completed an
appointment at the Institute
for Advanced Study
at Princeton-- yes--
that Institute, the one with
Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer,
at that place in New Jersey, and
has taken up an appointment now
as professor in Harvard's government
department and as Director
of the Edmond J. Safra
Center for Ethics.
So please help me welcome
Dr. Danielle Allen.
[ Applause ]
>> Dr. Danielle Allen:
Thank you so much, Dan.
That was an incredible introduction.
I am in your debt.
Truly appreciate it.
And greetings to all of you.
It's wonderful to see you here.
I have to say I particularly
loved Dan's description of me
as a mechanic because
there's a sense
in which you've just given me a way
of overcoming a certain childhood
failure that's always plagued me.
So my dad, when I was about 11,
gave me this car engine [chuckles]
that it was my job to
take apart and reassemble.
And of all the things I was given
in childhood, it was the only one
that utterly confounded me.
There was no way I could do this.
I still have an image of
that engine sitting there
in the dining room unfinished.
So thank you.
Now I can have a different
way of reporting that.
I did at last finish my
project as a mechanic.
That's fantastic.
It's terrific to see you all here
tonight and to have the chance
to talk with you about my
book, "Our Declaration,"
and about the Declaration
of Independence.
I wanted to tell you a little
bit about why I wrote the book,
what I was trying to do with it.
And then to share a couple of what
I think are some of the key stories
in the book, or key
ideas in the book.
And I think the best way of trying
to explain why I wrote the book is
to say something about the first
version of the book that I wrote,
not the book that's in front of you,
but the one that, when I gave it
to people to read, they
said, try again, Danielle.
[Chuckles] So the very first
version of this book was a dialogue.
It was a conversation between
a teacher and students,
and I want to give you a picture
of the actual-- doing this right--
group of teachers and students.
So I'm sitting there at the head
of the table with my co-teacher
and a group of students,
and we are working
on the Declaration of Independence.
This is a picture of me explaining
to people what a syllogism is.
So a syllogism is a philosophical
term for a kind of argument
that you've got a premise,
a premise and a conclusion.
The traditional example
is always with Socrates.
I like to use Bill Gates.
It gives the charge
a little bit better.
The example goes, Socrates,
Bill Gates, is a human being.
All human beings are mortal.
Therefore, Bill Gates,
even Bill Gates, will die.
All right.
And so two premises, a conclusion
drawn from them, that's a syllogism.
A syllogism, actually it matters
to know what a syllogism is
for understanding part of the
argument of the Declaration.
I'll come back to that.
But at any rate-- so
this is us in class.
And this group of students was
a group I taught in Chicago
on the South side in a course called
the Clemente Course of Humanities,
the Odyssey Project, whose purpose
was to give people who had fallen
out of the educational system
a chance to start over again.
And the course was ambitious because
it was taking a group of students,
many of whom didn't even have a
high school degree and was saying,
we're going to give these students
the same quality of education
as during the day we're
giving to University
of Chicago undergraduates.
And University of Chicago
undergraduates, of course,
are kids who've come from
all the best high schools all
over the country, tons
and tons of preparation.
How do you give you the same
quality of education to people
with that kind of preparation
on the one hand and people
without the same preparation
on the other hand?
It turns out there's a very
straight forward answer.
You pick short, but great
texts to talk about.
And this comes back to Dan's point,
the Declaration is
only one thousand,
three hundred, and
thirty-seven words.
I have never had a student
complain about the reading load
when I assign the Declaration.
That, in itself, is a
great gift to a teacher.
So, out of basically
pragmatic efficiency,
I started using the Declaration to
teach U.S. history; in some cases,
philosophy, writing, literature.
But something magical
happened in that classroom.
And it was in the conversation
with the students
that the magical thing happened,
which is why my first effort
to write this book was,
as I said, a dialogue--
a conversation of a
teacher with 18 students.
But I gave it to my agent,
and I gave it to my friends,
and I gave it to my family
members, and they all said, fess up,
Danielle, you're the teacher.
Stop pretending this
is about somebody else.
Own what you have to say in this
book and write it in your own voice.
So that's what I tried to do.
So the book that you actually
have is my admitting to the fact
that I was that teacher I was trying
to write about, and that I was
that teacher trying to
share the magical thing
that had happened with my students.
So let me explain the magical
thing, and then say something
about why I think it
matters, not just for history,
not just for teachers, but for all
of us as citizens of a democracy.
So, the Declaration-- again--
one thousand, three hundred,
and thirty-seven words.
You all know it.
My students actually had mostly
not read it, the whole thing.
Some of them had read excerpts, none
of them had read the whole thing.
Although, I then soon found
that actually my day students
at the University of Chicago had
also mostly not read the whole
of the Declaration of Independence.
Again, it's only one
thousand, three hundred,
and thirty-seven words,
so no excuse.
But anyway.
So the magical thing that happened
was, this text is so short,
but it has in the middle of it
that long list of grievances,
complaints about King George,
not really as a stumbling block.
I think lots of people
don't read it just
because that list seems
sort of opaque.
But nonetheless, if you
get all the way through it,
it turns out that the
text is extremely simple,
human in the most fundamental sense.
It is the voice of a group of people
who've surveyed their circumstances,
diagnosed them, and decided
to change their lives,
and taken the time to explain
themselves to the world.
That's it.
Diagnoses, prescription,
justification.
And these night students of mine,
going back to that last photo
in this class, were all people who
had decided to change their lives.
And so they went to the heart
of the Declaration faster
than I had ever seen students do.
My day students, again at
the University of Chicago,
places like Princeton in later
period of years, were those, again,
wonderful, talented, brilliant,
exciting students from all
over the country,
but who nonetheless had always
known they were going to college,
and whose parents had gotten them
ready to college, they hadn't
yet had to set the
course of their lives.
But my adult students were people
who had encountered all kinds
of obstacles, enumerable deaths
in the family from gun violence
on the south side, or from diabetes
or all other kinds of difficulties,
unstable employment, complexities
with childcare arrangements,
trying to manage a couple of jobs
simultaneously and raise children
in public schools that weren't
necessarily very good for the goods.
So they, the fact that they
were sitting in that class
on those nights had already made
this decision that they were going
to change their lives, and for that
reason, they were more proximate,
closer in lived experience to the
people who wrote the Declaration
of Independence than anybody
else I'd ever spoken to.
And that's an extraordinary thing
to think that a text from 1776,
that we think of as belonging
to these bewigged men,
some of whom held slaves, that
the people who might be most close
to that text, nearest to
it, living it most directly,
would be ordinary people
among us struggling
to make their lives flourish, to
flourish in their circumstances.
So that was the magic
I got out of the class.
And the reason I think it matters,
not just as I said for a teacher,
not just for my students
there, but for all of us,
is because that basic lesson, that
little lesson about human agency
in the Declaration,
is the foundational idea
underneath the ideal of equality.
One of the twins linked so
tightly to freedom that counts
as the foundation for democracy.
Okay. So, equality.
We need to talk about equality.
This is a concept that has
come up a lot in the last year.
It's come up because of the
Black Lives Matter campaign,
it's come up because
of marriage equality,
it's come up in many, many ways.
But I think as the concept
of equality has returned
to our public conversations, it's
also revealed something about us.
We don't actually know how
to talk about equality.
We've lost our intellectual
capacity to do that.
We are good, very, very good at
talking about liberty and freedom,
and we've been working on those
concepts for a very long time,
and we have lots of cliches ready
to hand about liberty and freedom.
You can think about things like,
a man's home is his castle,
and that's a way of describing a
certain kind of freedom connected
to property and a freedom in one's
privacy in one's own interest.
And we can say easily things like
government encroaches on freedom.
You have to be very careful
about the relationship
between government and freedom.
And ideas like that
trip off our tongues.
But what cliches do we have
for equality these days?
What trips off the tongue?
Not very much in my experience.
And yet, the Declaration
of Independence is built
around the concept of
equality fundamentality.
And again, it's built on that
notion that any human being,
any human being, is
trying to flourish.
Simple idea.
So simple.
And any human being has that
capacity of human agency
to survey their circumstances,
diagnose what's wrong
with their circumstances, set a
new course in life, and justify it.
That's it.
That's it.
That's it.
Democracy is built out of that idea.
So how do we come to
think about it again?
How can we start remembering the
ideas that make equality something
that we can talk about
easily, that we can use
to diagnose our own circumstances,
to look around our own society,
our own politics and say yes, this
is working and this is not working,
and here we need to make a change
because it is blocking our efforts
to realize for everybody
the opportunity
to be human agents
in this kind of way.
So how can we reacquire
that capacity?
My firm conviction is
that the Declaration
of Independence can help us there.
And I'm going comment a minute
to the Declaration's all
important second sentence,
that we hold these truths sentence.
But before I do, I think I have to
say something else about the history
of the Declaration and who
wrote because the truth is
that every time I suggest to people
that we can take the
Declaration seriously.
We can use it now in 2015
to understand our current
circumstances, people will say,
but Jefferson wrote that document.
And while lots of us may admire
Jefferson, there's others of us
who don't necessarily admire him
so much because of the complication
of his having been a slave owner.
All right.
So, why-- wasn't Jefferson
a hypocrite?
Isn't every word of the Declaration
of Independence merely an example
of self-serving hypocrisy?
All right.
That's a question I have
gotten a lot as I've talked
about the Declaration
over the last year.
So before I take you into the text
of the Declaration just for briefly
at the end, I need to say something
about who wrote the
Declaration of Independence.
And this is important, too,
because as I understand it,
on the U.S. Citizenship
Exam, there is a question,
who wrote the Declaration
of Independence.
And the question answer
from the point of view
of the State Department
is Thomas Jefferson.
But, I'm going to give
you a different answer.
You see, Thomas Jefferson, as you
know, on his tombstone put, author,
Declaration of Independence.
And that it is a very good way
to make sure you get
credit for something.
Keep that in mind.
Consider now what you
want credit for.
And this is not to say
that he doesn't deserve
credit, he does deserve credit.
He was the chair of the
committee of five people
who drafted the Declaration.
But who else was on that committee?
John Adams, Benjamin Franklin,
Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston.
Adams and Franklin in particular
made very substantial contributions
to the draft, and then
Congress got the draft
and edited it down by about 25%.
So it was truly a group
writing effort.
But even beyond that,
the Declaration itself,
the fact that there
was a Declaration
to declare is really
thanks to John Adams.
Thomas Jefferson was
really the draftsman,
John Adams was the politician
turning the wheels along
with his colleague in
arms, Richard Henry Lee.
So let me just show you a
quick picture here for a sec.
These two-- these are the men
who haven't gotten enough
credit for the Declaration.
And above all, John Adams, man of
Massachusetts who never held slaves.
Adams wrote a to-do list.
This is one of my favorite
artifacts from the archives.
This is in the Massachusetts
Historical Society.
February of 1776, his to-do
list for continental Congress.
You won't be able to see
from where you're sitting,
but go find it online.
The fourth item on the
left hand side says,
government to be assumed
in every colony.
This is Adams' strategy for getting
to independence was to convince all
of the colonies that they basically
were already in a state of anarchy,
that it was time for them to
write their own constitutions,
and then once they had done that,
they would be ready to
declare independence.
That is to say, his
project was build
and then kick away
the old thing, okay,
constituting first
and then revolting.
And then on the right hand
side, fourth from the bottom,
on his to-do list,
Declaration of Independency.
Now that's where it comes
from, John Adams' to-do list.
And he worked consistently through
'75 and '76 to get the colonies
to the point of being ready
to write constitutions
and then declare independence,
and he is the person
who worked the hustings to
get the committee elected
that would draft the Declaration
after Richard Henry Lee,
on the right, had stood up
in Congress and resolved
that the colonies should
declare themselves free
and independent states.
So these were the two who
drove the process forward.
All right.
So, we're going to come back to that
because we really, it's John Adams
who gave us, who really
gave us pursuit of happiness
and it's important
to understand that.
But let me now, for a moment,
just dwell on that
all-important second sentence.
And again, say something that why
I think it's so important for all
of us who are citizens
of a democracy.
So let's remind ourselves
of what it is.
"We hold these truths
to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights,
that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness,
that to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among
men deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed,
that whenever a government
becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the right of the people
to alter or to abolish it,
and to institute new
government laying its foundation
on such principals and
organizing its powers in such form
as to them shall seem most likely to
affect their safety and happiness."
Did you remember that
it was that long?
The sentence.
Lots of times, people think it
stops after pursuit of happiness.
But-- let's see; do I not have my
second sentence in here; sorry.
Here we go.
In fact, the sentence goes all
the way from its beginning,
"We hold these truths" to
"their safety and happiness."
And here's where we get back
to our syllogism as I indicated
in the beginning, that little piece
of philosophical argumentation.
We start with a premise, all people
have rights among which are life,
liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness.
That's a way of describing
human beings.
Second premise, governments are
instituted to secure these rights.
This is why, as birds build nests,
human beings build governments.
And conclusion then, when
you're government's not working,
when it's not doing the thing
for which it's been built,
it's the right of the people
to alter or to abolish it.
The sentence makes an argument.
It leads us from individual
rights through the tool
that we build together,
government, and use together,
to explain what our responsibility
is in relationship to that tool.
It is our responsibility to
make a judgment about whether
that tool is achieving our
shared safety and happiness
and to take responsibility for
such alterations are necessary
to get us to that goal.
It's a profound sentence,
economical,
philosophical, simultaneously.
And again, it's important
to read it all the through.
It doesn't end after
"pursuit of happiness."
It's important to think about what
the whole sentence means together
as it takes us from
our individual rights--
life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness--
to that shared project
of safety and happiness.
And it's here in this sentence,
that we get in the capsule form,
again that story of human agency
that I described for you as being
at the heart of my
students' experience.
It is because each of us is
charting a course for ourselves,
pursuing happiness, that
democracy is the best form
for realizing our human potential.
But in order for democracy to
achieve that, we have to find a way
to build something together, so that
together, we can protect ourselves,
protect our freedom, on
the egalitarian foundation
of democracy's shared project.
There's a lot more that could
be said about this sentence,
and how important it
is for helping us think
about the work of democracy.
But I'd like to do for just my final
minutes before opening it up to you
for questions, is to
say something again
about that happiness idea
that I just eluded to.
Again, we think of the pursuit
of happiness as being one
of Jefferson's most
important phrases,
but it's really Adams
to whom we owe the idea.
And this matters because the choice
to use happiness was actually caught
up in the debates over slavery.
For those of you who've read
other texts in the history
of political thought and thought
about the history of rights
in the 18th Century, you'll
realize that this phrase--
life, liberty, and
pursuit of happiness--
it's radical, innovative,
because there more common
formulation was life,
liberty, and property.
So how did we get from property
to happiness in the Declaration?
Adams and Richard Henry Lee served
together on a committee in October
of 1775 that had to
answer the question
of what New Hampshire
should do given the fact
that its British Royal
Governor had fled.
And the Governor was responsible
for all of the operations
of the administration
in New Hampshire.
New Hampshire was, in
effect, in anarchy.
What was the colony to do?
And the answer that Adams and
Lee crafted with the three others
on their committee was as follows.
That it be recommended to
the provincial convention
of New Hampshire to call a full and
free representation of the people
and that the representatives,
if they think it necessary,
establish such a form of government
as in their judgment will best
produce the happiness of the people,
and most effectually
secure and good order
in the province during the
continuance of the present dispute
between Great Britain
and the Colonies.
This language of the happiness,
peace, and good order is coming
from Adams and we know that
because in April of 1776,
he produced a pamphlet arguing about
what his vision of government was.
It's called "Thoughts
on Government."
Richard Henry Lee produced a poster
that was basically just excerpts
from Adams' pamphlet, and these were
circulated throughout the colonies
that spring as part of their
campaign to get all of the colonies
to be ready to write constitutions.
But here is the introduction
to Adams' pamphlet.
"We ought to consider
what is the end
of government before we
determine which is the best form.
Upon this point, all
speculative politicians will agree
that the happiness of society
is the end of government.
As all divines and moral
philosophers will agree
that happiness of the
individual is the end of man.
From this principal it will
follow that the form of government
which communicates ease, comfort,
security, or in one word, happiness,
to the greatest number of person
and in the greatest degree is best."
Jefferson wasn't using
the vocabulary
of happiness in this period.
And we know that because
we have other texts of his.
For example, this from
1775, where his core list
of rights is the conventional
life and property.
And in the fall of '75, as the
British were telling slaves
in Virginia, in particular,
that if they fled and fought
for the British, they would receive
freedom, the Virginians had begun
to complain about that move on the
part of the British as a violation
of their rights of property.
The vocabulary of property became
quite closely linked to defense
of slavery in the fall of
'75 and spring of 1776.
In May, George Mason drafts the
Virginia Declaration of Rights,
and he fuses the argument coming
from Adams, man of Massachusetts
who thought slavery was a bad
thing and never held slaves,
with the conventional view of
the Virginians, and he wrote,
"All men are by nature
equally free and independent
and have certain inherent rights, of
which when they enter into a state
of society, they cannot
by any compact deprive
or divest their posterity, namely
the enjoyment of life and liberty
with the means of acquiring and
possessing property, and pursuing
and obtaining happiness and safety."
So here we see the two
streams of conversation
from that spring coming
together, leaving us with then
of course the mystery of why
it was that property dropped
out of the Declaration
of Independence.
Let me give you a little
snippet then from the debates
in Continental Congress that July
on the Articles of Confederation
to show you how closely property
and slavery had been
connected to each other.
So this is Lynch from
South Carolina.
"If it is debated whether they're
slaves or they're property,
there is the end of
the confederation."
Okay. So when we look at the
Declaration of Independence and look
at the rights of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness,
what we're actually reading is
one of the first compromises
that made the new nation possible.
A language capacious
enough to be acceptable
to both a nascent anti-slavery
side, and the slavery side.
Lots to be said about the danger and
problematic nature of compromises
in the American founding, but
it's important to recognize
at this moment, this
formulation was a victory
for the anti-slavery position--
the notion that core rights would
be described as life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.
And this victory, we could attribute
to John Adams, who, over the course
of that year, as I've
said, was making the case
that happiness is the end of society
as it is for the individual person
and that that was the ideal
that the colonists should use
to pull themselves together and
chart a new course for themselves.
So let me conclude then by
simply encouraging each of you
to revisit the Declaration
of Independence and to think
of it as a living document.
Let me take you back again to
that second sentence right here,
and I'll just read it one last time,
because again, it's orientation is
to the continual responsibility of
a democratic people to be the agents
that they have the potential to be.
It's not a historical claim.
It's a present claim.
Claim for the present,
for now, as for 1776,
a claim that is always alive.
"We hold these truths
to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights,
that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness,
that to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among
men deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed,
that whenever a government
becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the right of the people
to alter or to abolish it,
and to institute new
government laying its foundation
on such principals and
organizing its powers in such form
as to them together
shall seem most likely
to affect their safety
and happiness."
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Very glad to take questions.
Yes. Please.
>> Yeah. Thank you for your book.
I, I haven't read all of it.
I just started it today.
But, I really appreciate your kind
of deconstructing the
supposed dichotomy or conflict
between liberty and freedom on the
one hand and equality on the other,
and the focus in the last
sentence in the Declaration
on the collectivity of effort that
it took to get the nation going and,
you know, also the point
about the ongoing need
to participate together.
>> Dr. Danielle Allen: Thank you.
>> And I'm retired.
I spent my career practicing
psychotherapy and so
when you use the term human
agency, you know, it's this,
it's a psychological
term as well as comes
from other disciplines, I suppose.
But you know you're talking about
a collective human agency in terms
of the creation of the country and
the writing of the Declaration.
And I guess I would, I've thought
about this a lot, you know,
and the fact that psychology
and psychotherapy tends to focus
on the individual, I think, has
historically, and the liberation
of the individual being kind
of the end point, you know,
the goal of psychological health
and psychotherapy, and which leaves
out all of these other issues
that you're bringing up.
But in the context of psychology,
which I think has gone to serve kind
of a consumerist kind of
culture, focus on the individual
and liberation through commodity,
you know, and consumption,
acquisition of commodities.
So I wonder if you could, if this
is kind of part of how you think
about this stuff, and the role
that psychology has played
in our modern era in terms
of dividing ourselves
and the way that we are?
>> Dr. Danielle Allen: Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
It's interesting because one of the
experiences of teaching my students,
working with my students,
and then writing this book,
was this bazar discovery
of a closeness
between individual human
agency and the psychology
of the individual trying
to improve their lives
and the political question.
And the fact that we think of
politics as being so far removed
from individual psychology, and yet,
it's actually exactly the same thing
about human beings that's
at the heart of both.
And so yes, I do think that
policy is incredibly important,
laws are incredibly important,
having the capacity to look
at policy, look at laws,
and look for reforms,
is incredibly important,
but so too is the capacity
to actually build healthy
interactions
and relations within the citizenry.
And I do think it would be a great
thing is psychologists would pay
more attention to that issue of how
we help build healthy relationships
in the sense of a broader
collective,
and not just at the
individual and the close,
sort of family unit
and things like that.
So thank you.
Yes. Yeah.
>> I have a question about
one of the last quotes
that you brought up
of James; James...
>> Dr. Danielle Allen: John
Adams, or Thomas Jefferson?
>> John Adams.
Adams, not James.
And what did he mean when he said
that happiness would be the end
of the individual and
the end of government?
>> Dr. Danielle Allen: Right.
Great. So by end there,
he meant goal, right.
A thing you're reaching
to, not conclusion,
so I should clarify that, right.
So it's the use of end, where it's
your ambition, your objective,
the thing you're aiming for.
And what he meant was,
he was really connecting
to a long-lived philosophical
tradition that focuses on an idea
of human flourishing, or well-being.
So, any human being is trying
to do more than survive, right.
We want, in some sense, to be able
to get to the end of our lives,
and say that's was
a life well-lived.
And that I think is at the core of
Adams' conceptions of happiness.
And the folks of 1776,
women as well as men,
you can include Mercy Otis
Warren, Abigail Adams,
and the group of thinkers who
thought that human beings needed
to direct themselves in order for
them to achieve that experience
of being able to say that
was a life well-lived.
Thank you.
>> Thank you.
>> Hi.
>> Dr. Danielle Allen: Hi.
Greetings.
>> I didn't see you Harvard.
I only visited a couple of times.
But I'm from Massachusetts, and
I'm not trying to stop the gays
from having freedom, but
freedom seems to be at a rivalry
with that freedom and family because
the individual's right to family
and freedom and happiness
are rivaling
because they want their
control of their children,
but they brought their right to
be free of choice as individuals
to Massachusetts, and
seem to be trying
to oppress the freedoms of families.
So how would you resolve the
rivalry that starting Massachusetts
with freedom and individual rights?
>> Dr. Danielle Allen:
Thank you for your question.
So, it's important that freedom and
equality be linked to each other.
I think when people build their way
of thinking about their own lives
and our society around freedom
alone, it can lead to precisely
that infringement on
the rights of others.
And so it's important-- this is
a little technical in the history
of philosophy, but there
are two different ways
of thinking about freedom.
You can think about freedom as
being freedom from interference.
Or you can think about freedom
as being freedom from domination.
And these are different.
So freedom from interference
gives one the idea that anything
that interferes with
one's life is a problem.
So, but laws interfere
with our lives, right.
The point of a law is, in
fact, to put rules of the game
on the ground instead of constraints
in effect, that protect everybody
from domination and thereby
provide everybody with freedom
from domination ensuring that those
ways which we are interfered by,
by the law, are legitimate.
So that's what makes
it acceptable, right.
So if you can focus on freedom from
domination as the core definition,
then it becomes clear how freedom
and equality are linked
to each other.
If, you know, if we're seeking
freedom for all, then there have
to be limits on our behavior
toward one and another, right.
There can't be such a thing as
no freedom from interference.
So freedom for all requires a set of
egalitarian limits that we express
through laws in order to
protect one and other.
>> Okay. So you think happiness...
>> Dr. Danielle Allen: I think
we've got some folks waiting
over here if you don't mind.
I think we have to take turns.
Thanks.
>> Hi, Professor Allen.
Thank you so much for
making it out here.
I've been following your work at
Princeton, at University of Chicago.
I read your Aims of Education
speech in the University
of Chicago-- very inspiring.
>> Dr. Danielle Allen: Thank you.
>> I had a quick question.
You said-- I'm a teacher,
and you said, you know,
we often lack the intellectual
capacity to talk about equality.
We have the capacity, the
language to talk about liberty,
but we don't have the intellectual
capacity to talk about equality.
Can you talk more about this
in the context of happiness?
>> Dr. Danielle Allen: Sure.
Thanks. Let me say two things.
I mean one, just to add a little bit
to the remark I made about equality
and then, I will connect
it to happiness.
So, it's important if somebody
invokes the ideal of equality
to ask them what kind they mean.
Do they mean political equality?
Do they mean moral equality?
Do they mean social equality?
Do they mean something to
do with economic relations,
economic equality, or
justice, or opportunity?
And you have to take the concept
apart in the first instance,
and we're not, we've
forgotten how to do that.
So that's what I meant about that.
The Declaration focuses primarily on
political equality, which it rests
on a ground of moral equality,
and it pulls some elements
of social equality into its account,
but it doesn't have that much to say
about economic questions.
So it's important to be very precise
about the ways equality works.
I take it your question about
happiness was whether we are good
at thinking about happiness,
as well,
or whether we've also lost
the capacity to do that.
And I would say, yes.
I think our capacity to think
about happiness has also weakened.
You see-- it's astonishing.
Once you work on the
Declaration, you just,
you see its use everywhere, right.
So I don't know if the rest
of you have noticed this,
but pursuit of happiness is used
all over the place in ads, right.
I mean it has become
our basic way of talking
about what it means to buy stuff.
That counts as pursuing happiness.
And yes, that is absolutely
a remarkably weakened sense
of what happiness means.
So how does one rebuild an idea that
happiness is about the flourishing
of the whole person,
mind and spirit,
well beyond matters
of material questions.
And happiness is about being able
by the end of your life to ask,
and satisfactorily answer that
question, have I lived well,
and to feel in your spirit, that
yes, I can look back and say
that the path that I have
crafted was a life worth living.
So, I think it takes a lot of work
to start rebuilding also our ability
to understand what
happiness consists of.
Let's see, this side.
>> I appreciate you coming.
I learned a lot just
in your small session.
But my main question is, what
inspired you to write actually
about the Declaration
of Independence?
>> Dr. Danielle Allen: Yes.
Now, thank you.
I feel I'm not very good
at answering that question.
I mean the answer on one
level is my students.
I mean, as I said in the beginning,
it was truly magical
in the classroom.
It will, I think, by
the end of my life,
by my best teaching experience.
I mean, to date, it certainly has
been teaching the night students
and teaching the Declaration.
And it was magical because it was a
text that the students did not think
of as belonging to them
or pertaining to them,
and the centrality of the
agency that they were claiming
over their own lives, and the fact
that that's what this text was
about, it crystalized and led them
to say, that text is mine.
That Declaration is mine.
Maybe I'll pull out the list of
grievances that's there and put
in a new list of grievances
that pertains
to my own current circumstances,
but that Declaration is mine.
To see people come into
a sense of their personal
and political agency is
a privilege incomparable
to any other I can imagine.
So, it was my students who
inspired and I, there was a paper,
there was an article about
the course I was teaching in,
there a student was quoted as saying
that the Declaration session had
been one of her favorite parts.
And so that confirmed to me
that it hadn't just been me
who was feeling something, and so
that's what inspired me then really
to go ahead and try
to put it on paper.
Thanks.
>> Yes, Dr. Allen.
Wonderful to hear your lecture.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
>> Dr. Danielle Allen: My pleasure.
>> I appreciate your comments
about how some people today
don't appreciate the relevance
of the Declaration of
Independence today.
I take that to mean that
some people just don't see
that it has necessarily
a lot of value.
It seems to me a significant
contrast between the writers
of the Declaration of Independence
and our leaders today, of course,
is the writers of the Declaration
of Independence were revolutionaries
who were feeling oppressed, right.
And they were looking for
freedom from, from England.
Leaders today in the United
States are not in that position.
And so I'm not certain
if you were to ask many
of the elected officials today
how closely they identify
with the Declaration
of Independence.
They might not because they don't
feel that kind of oppression
that the American revolutionaries
felt.
So I'm wondering whether you
see that as an issue in terms
of getting elected
officials today in government
to be responsive to
our requirements?
>> Dr. Danielle Allen:
Thanks for your question.
Our politics is confounded
by a long list of problems
and so I would probably, myself,
describe our difficulties
somewhat differently in the sense
that I don't think you need to be,
say the subject to the oppression
of something like the British
empire to understand the Declaration
and make use of it, again because
what the Declaration charges us
with is the responsibility of
surveying our circumstances.
When in the course of human events.
What are the course of
human events around us now?
What have been the course of human
events for the last 20 years?
What patterns are in them?
What trends?
What directions?
I think that, responding to that
question of our world is changing
around us is as relevant
today as then.
For me, the greater concern is
what is pointed to by the end
of the second sentence, which I
sort of emphasized in quoting it,
when it's the responsibility of the
people to institute new government,
laying its foundation on such
principals, and organizing its power
in such form, as to them
shall seem most likely
to affect their safety
and happiness.
We're, principals form,
what are these two things?
Principals.
The Declaration of Independence
was a statement of principal.
The Articles of Confederation
was the first effort at form.
And then we tried again
with the Constitution.
Okay. So what I am most
concerned about with regard
to our contemporary
leaders is their very poor--
I don't know how else to say it--
capacity to engage with principle
and in a principled fashion.
So that's where I would
put my emphasis.
[ Applause ]
Thank you.
>> Yes. My question, professor,
and I certainly appreciate
your analysis of this.
I would just suggest that perhaps
it's need to go a tad bit further,
because the greatest challenge
to this Union occurred
of course during the Civil War
when you had succession and then,
purportedly everybody, you
know, was almost at a point,
except for John Wilks
Booth, of hugging
and let's move forward once the
Gettysburg Address was proclaimed
and once you had General Lee
give General Grant his sword.
And in my view, from what the
president who followed, Lincoln did,
I think they should
have been impeached.
He should have been
tried for treason.
And, what occurred in terms of
taking all of the Northern troops,
the Union troops out of the
south and allowing the rampage
against the former slaves to
take place and the horrors
that took place for many, many years
thereafter, I think is a betrayal
of this, these lofty
statements that are contained
in the forming of this Union.
And a further betrayal happens to
be what's occurred in every war
where African Americans
were told, you will be free,
will have equal rights, et
cetera, and we have riots, murders,
et cetera, taking place thereafter.
Do you think that maybe the next
step that's important would be
to write the wrong of maybe
where a lot of folks who were
in the Confederacy just think that,
well Lee just gave Grant his sword,
and that was it, he wasn't the
President of the Confederacy,
et cetera, or what would
be your thoughts on that
in terms of the next steps?
>> Dr. Danielle Allen:
Thank you very much.
That's a very challenging question.
So, for me it's very
important to say
that there were multiple
political traditions that flowed
out of the moment of 1776.
So, from the moment of the
writing of the Declaration,
you saw the beginning
of an abolition movement
that used the language of the
Declaration to make its case.
And you saw abolition beginning to
move forward, 1780 in Pennsylvania,
ditto in Vermont, Massachusetts
by 1782,
all using the language
of the Declaration.
In the south, you have, you know
in the not too distant future,
the invention of the cotton
gin, which entrenches slavery.
Up until the point of the invention
of the cotton gin, it was reasonable
for people to believe,
as George Washington did,
that slavery was on its way out.
So it's important to recognize
actually that the politics
of slavery in this country,
have not been stable.
It's not that it's been one thing
from the beginning
all the way through.
So, A there have been multiple
traditions, B the politics
of slavery was powerfully affected
by the invention of the cotton gin,
which you know, changed
the direction.
It looked like slavery
was headed out,
and that entrenched it
and made it durable.
So the story of the country is
1, about traditions contesting
with each other, struggling
with each other.
That is true from the
beginning to the present day.
And I don't have a silver bullet
to the answer for the question
of how do we take this
struggle and move
in the direction of
peace and resolution.
I think it continues to be
hard work, but I think we have
to be committed to the idea of
achieving peace and resolution,
and I think we have to
be explicit that, again,
there've been multiple
traditions in the country.
Some are worthy, others are not.
And in that regard, we
have the hard challenge
of helping ourself discard
those of our traditions
which are not worthy of us, so.
>> Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> I was intrigued.
I just finished reading your
book on "Our Declaration."
>> Dr. Danielle Allen: Thank you.
>> And I'm tying that in with
a book I read a while back.
It was "American Epic"
by Garrett [inaudible]
where a similar method was used
of explicating the text of both.
And so I'm trying to tie the two,
and I'm thinking what the linkage
is between, like the catalog
of grievances against the King
and how that fit in with the,
in other words, no longer when
they, when they were going to try
to ratify the Constitution.
They wanted to have rights, not
just implied, but enumerated,
so that's why the Bill of Rights
came about, and along the,
almost like, some of the things
that are listed in that list
of grievances showed up
in the Bill of Rights.
>> Dr. Danielle Allen:
That's exactly right.
And that's very well put.
If you want to make the list of
grievances a heck of a lot more fun
to read than it often is for
people, notice simply the fact
that it actually contains
a constitutional theory.
The first few complaints
are all complaints
about the legislative
branch of government,
and then you get complaints about
the judicial branch of government,
and then you get complaints about
the executive power of government,
and then, in all honesty, you
get a long list of stuff stuck
in by Jefferson that are his pet
peeves, that's the complaints
about the Quebec Act, and then, at
the very end, you get complaints
about violations of the law of war.
That constitutional structure in the
list of grievances comes from Adams.
It's in his some thoughts
on government.
The stuff on the Quebec Act
is Jefferson's pet peeves,
that's stuck in the middle,
that's another place you
can see the two minds,
the two hands working together.
And yes, the list of the Bill of
Rights is precisely an enumeration
of what they've put in the
negative form in the complaints
in the Declaration, which
means, of course, importantly,
that it's not the case that first
we had the Declaration and it was
in favor, it was about equality,
and then we had the Constitution
and then it was about liberty,
and those were different things.
The documents belong together.
They share the same
constitutional theory.
They are about the union
of equality and liberty.
Thank you.
We're out of time.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at www.loc.gov.