Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

“It is this: language is one of the most potent resources each of us has for achieving our own political empowerment. The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence grasped the power of words. This reveals itself in the laborious processes by which they brought the Declaration, and their revolution, into being.”

Allen presents language as a critical political tool. We may think of words as secondary to actions, but Allen presents speech and writing as worthy actions in themselves—an idea key to her claims about The Transformational Power of Language. The Declaration’s authors did their work with language: Their words drove history forward and made the world we now know. Language is also democratic in a larger sense—all of us can access it, unlike money, power, or influence.

“Political philosophers have generated the view that equality and freedom are necessarily in tension with each other. As a public, we have swallowed this argument whole. We think we are required to choose between freedom and equality. Our choice in recent years has tipped toward freedom. Under the general influence of libertarianism, both parties have abandoned our Declaration; they have scorned our patrimony.”

Allen argues that misinterpretation of the Declaration has profound consequences. By falling too strongly under the sway of political philosophers who argue that freedom and equality are always in competition, readers of the Declaration have missed its commitment to equality. Allen asserts that her project of reinterpretation is not partisan—all of America’s political leaders are making this error. Their failure is not merely intellectual but moral: They have “scorned [their] patrimony,” and all Americans have been deprived of their inheritance and birthright. In losing equality, they have lost something precious that is theirs by right.

“The point of political equality 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. Political equality is equal political empowerment.”

Allen often returns to this definition of equality, which stresses Humans as Social Beings. Importantly, it is about shared access and shared capacity.