This chapter examines how various civil rights movements have interwoven the Declaration into their advocacy for causes to combat social and legal discrimination, including chauvinism, labor exploitation, and election plutocracy. A variety of groups, including first-wave feminists and labor advocates, effectively relied on it to promote various constitutional causes. Among suffragettes, its statement of human equality stood out, while workers’ movements favored the document’s condemnation of autocracy and oppression. As with other groups who likewise relied on the Declaration’s mandates, it represented a national commitment toward achieving a liberal equality for the common good. The Declaration of Independence remains relevant today to matters as broad in constitutional scope as federalism, campaign financing, AI advertisement, and separation of powers. Its sweeping statement of unalienable human rights and equality continues to embody core American commitments to representative democracy. That manifesto of equality and freedom has for two centuries influenced politicians, civil rights organizations, and ordinary people in the United States and abroad.

As unprecedented as the Declaration was, it was not without intellectual antecedents. The Declaration interacted with and built upon recent expressions of European Enlightenment political philosophy in its focus on “Nature and Nature’s God,” and in its reliance upon the normative principles of “laws of Nature” as well as natural or “unalienable” rights. European Enlightenment political philosophers themselves stood in complex and varied relationships with their ancient and medieval predecessors; sometimes adding to, sometimes transforming, and sometimes rejecting these preceding ideas. The Declaration brilliantly navigates this complex web of intellectual antecedents by treating the ideas of laws of nature, natural rights, the social contract, and republicanism in such a way that the points of tension between their different interpretations are minimized and subsumed within a shared understanding of the importance of nature for political life. In so doing, the Declaration provides an intriguing hint of how the deep fault lines between these political philosophical traditions might ultimately be bridged. The Declaration’s succinct statement of political principles may be viewed as a transformative distillation of a few of its most important European antecedents.

This chapter situates the Declaration of Independence in relation to another founding document of the United States, the federal Constitution. It assesses the Declaration’s role in debates over the Constitution, first during the latter’s framing in 1787, then in the struggle for ratification, and then later as political actors sought to interpret each document in light of the other. From the outset, debate over the Constitution highlighted the Declaration’s multivalence as well as its rhetorical power. Both defenders and opponents of the Constitution have sought to show how their cause best aligned with the ideals and aspirations expressed in the Declaration. Anti-federalists and their successors constructed a powerful narrative which juxtaposed the Declaration’s call to liberty with the Constitution’s blueprint for authority. Yet there was from the beginning an equally strong tradition that saw the Constitution as a consummation of the Declaration’s promise. Either way, this chapter argues, the Declaration continues to help shape the meaning of the Constitution – and to have its own meaning remolded in turn.

This chapter describes the French Revolution in its general development and underlying logics, with particular attention given to individual equality and the ways in which it was fused – or not – with institutionalised political participation.

Chapter 6 turns to the attack on the Whig view of the state, and especially to the rejection of the Whig contention that no arbitrary or despotic power is any longer being exercised. The chapter focuses on two major challenges to this complacency. One line of criticism pointed out that, with the creation and rapid growth of the national debt, enormous sums were now being paid directly to the crown, thereby bringing an obvious danger of despotism. The second and epoch- making challenge came from the American colonies. When the British government resolved in 1764 to tax them directly, the colonists denounced this innovation as an obvious act of despotism. They argued that, because they had no representation in the British Parliament, they had no means of expressing or withholding their consent. They were thus being subjected to a wholly arbitrary form of power, and were consequently being treated as slaves. The chapter traces the development of this patriot case in the writings of Otis, Hopkins, Dulany, Dickinson, Jefferson and other colonists, and concludes with the defence of the patriot cause by Price and Paine and the publication of the Declaration of Independence.

The declarations of rights issued during the American and French revolutions are the most important outcomes of the eighteenth-century’s debates about natural rights. Concise and clear in their language, these declarations distilled decades of theorizing into easily understood axioms meant to make citizens aware of their rights and of their entitlement to participate in the making of the laws under which they lived. The eighteenth-century declarations on both sides of the Atlantic were drawn up by legislators determined to protect the institution of slavery that so flagrantly contradicted their sweeping statements about natural rights, and they were not intended to grant women equal rights with men. Their expansive language, however, provided a basis for excluded groups to formulate demands that rights be extended to them, even if the authors of the declarations had not intended to do so. The most influential of these documents, the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, used sweeping, universal language. Intended as temporary, it was swiftly canonized as the embodiment of the principles of the French Revolution. The more radical French Declaration of 1793 incorporated social rights to welfare, work, and education. Napoleon rejected the idea of including a declaration of rights in the constitution he imposed in France 1799, but the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights showed the lasting power of the tradition inaugurated with the Virginia Declaration of 1776.

Abolitionists adopted higher law to oppose the settled law which explicitly recognized chattel slavery in America. Emerson sometimes spoke on higher law but it was not his most comfortable position. Emerson was a Neoplatonist, and it is the gradualism of Neoplatonism that he embraced against the immediatism implied in higher law. But even before Emerson’s 1856 conversion to abolition, starting in 1854 Emerson began moving his self-reliance into Northern-reliance. He was working his way philosophically toward a political activism that he would, finally, enthusiastically embrace. Emerson borrowed from the Neoplatonist Plotinus the word and idea of living “amphibiously,” and that is what he learned to do.

This chapter brings readers’ attention to the fact that throughout United States history, government has been an active and necessary part of building the country. In the colonial period, for example, laws regulating taverns and other businesses proliferated. After the Founding, under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton and the federalists, the central government was seen as the necessary force needed to support an economy that then enabled the country to participate on the world economic stage. The anti-federalists, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, aceded to the need for the government to support the economy in the ways proposed by the Federalists.

The term “identity” often generates questions about the “essence” of the entity being “identified.” Ascriptions of “identity” become controversial inasmuch as given behaviors or traits are viewed as favorable or unfavorable. Within the United States, the rhetorical trope “this is not who we are” has become almost pervasive upon the occurrence of a regrettable, even heinous, act. President Obama had a particular affinity for the phrase. He suggested, for example, that the vicious racism revealed in the 2015 massacre of African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina was aberrant, revealing nothing essential about American culture. The current debate within the United States about the “1619 Project” is all about constitutional and cultural identity. Its adherents argue that American identity is rooted in the white supremacy instantiated in the practice of slavery, dating back to 1619. Opponents emphasize the 1776 Declaration of Independence, with its proclamation that “all men are created equal” and “endowed” with equal “inalienable rights,” as the key marker of American identity. Slavery, which is conceded to have existed, was simply epiphenomenal; “who we are” is defined by the Declaration. Much is thought to ride on ascribing a particular identity to any given country or, more particularly, its constitution.

One of the core themes of Gary Jacobsohn’s work has been his observation that constitutional aspirations tend to develop within a disharmonic constitutional order. Jacobsohn draws our attention to Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass as models for thinking about the unfolding of U.S. constitutional aspirations within a larger framework of constitutional disharmony. This essay revisits Jacobsohn’s theory of constitutional aspiration, including its underlying philosophical premises, and concludes by putting it in dialogue with recent revisionist accounts of the U.S. constitutional order that downplay, deny, or mute the aspirations that Jacobsohn’s body of scholarship highlights and celebrates.

Around the world today, right-wing authoritarian movements labeled populist claim to be vehicles of popular sovereignty. Analysts have debated the definition of populism and the economic and cultural sources of these movements. Few have closely analyzed the “stories of peoplehood” advanced by authoritarian populist movements, or explored how they can be countered by more inclusive and egalitarian stories of peoplehood. This chapter suggests criteria for developing better stories of peoplehood, using the example of American stories that might compete effectively with the Trump movement’s narrative of “making America great again.”

From 1764 to 1776, there was a political crisis regarding the authority of the British Parliament over America. Yet the British case for parliamentary sovereignty was not particularly clear, and by 1774, most Americans argued that Parliament had no authority over internal affairs in America. Even English politicians and lawyers, such William Pitt the Elder and Lord Camden, argued that Parliament had no ability to tax the American colonies. In 1776, the American colonies declared their independence and a war of independence ensued, that Britain lost. But what could explain this disagreement over sovereignty? This chapter looks to several factors for explanation. These include the fact of Britain’s uncodified Constitution, which rendered it unclear which laws were in any case ‘constitutional’. There was also disagreement as to how the British Constitution applied in the colonies. Many Americans asserted that only a shared monarch connected American colonies legally to Britain and to each other, and that colonial assemblies were comparable to Parliament. There was, however, no acceptance of this in Britain, where the doctrine of undivided and unlimited sovereignty was increasingly employed by those in power.

At the end of the eighteenth century a wave of revolutionary constitutions engulfs Western Europe and America. Most of these mark a new start and express the tenets of Enlightenment: rule of law, division of power, fundamental rights and the concept of conditional government power ( social contract).

This chapter reads Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad as a Janus-faced text in American literary history that looks back toward the persistent political conundrums illuminated by twentieth-century American fiction and reconfigures them in generative ways for the twenty-first century. Like earlier twentieth-century neo-slave narratives by Ishmael Reed, Octavia E. Butler, and Toni Morrison, Whitehead’s novel critiques a naïve historical story of inevitable Black progress, and it even flirts with the notion that American democracy and African American oppression are inextricable. But Whitehead rejects fatalistic narratives of inevitable injustice by showing how American normative myths can still be politically efficacious. Establishing himself as a key literary figure in contemporary Black political thought, Whitehead uses the speculative fiction genre to transform celebrated concepts in American political theory – e.g., individual freedom, legal equality, constitutional rights, representative democracy, popular sovereignty – by contextualizing them within Black experiences across time. Ultimately, his political vision amounts to a wary optimism, which Whitehead himself has called a politics of “impossible hope.”

Part I collects writings from Washington’s young manhood and early middle age, up to the time he became commander-in-chief of the American army. These materials reveal the public-spiritedness that was a constant throughout Washington’s life, but they also illustrate the most important change in its orientation. As a young man, Washington’s ambition sought distinction in the service of the Crown, while in his maturity that ambition was turned toward defending the rights of the rising American nation from the injustices that arose from British imperial rule.

English political customs, traditions, and institutions profoundly shaped the American founding, so much so that the major difference between them was that, following the break with Britain, the Americans “wrote down” those customs, traditions, and institutions into their constitutions and statutory laws.1 In 1760, both the British people and the American colonists held that the unwritten English Constitution had created and guaranteed the “rights of Englishmen.”2 This ensemble of abstract principles, maxims, and institutional relations gradually came to supersede the comparatively specific claims based on the individual charters of the separate colonies. For example, when the royal governor of Georgia rejected the man elected by the Georgia Assembly as speaker, John Zubly, in 1772, Zubly first cited the history of parliament as support for the assembly’s right to choose whomever it wanted as a presiding officer and then added: “[A]n Englishman I should think [is] entitled to English laws, which I suppose implies Legislation any where and every where in the British dominions, that this right is prior to any charter or instruction, and is held not by instructions to a Governor but is his [in this instance, the colonist’s] natural right.”3

In 1948, with the end of the British Mandate, Israel declared its independence. Israel based its declaration on the right of self-determination and the fact that the League of Nations and the UN had recognised this right. Israel’s legal position was not that these institutions had granted the right of self-determination of the Jewish people, but that they had recognised an existing right. The Declaration did not refer to the borders of the new State nor to its capital. Whether the Declaration created an independent State as from 14 May 1948 depends on an examination of whether Israel, at the time, fulfilled the Montevideo criteria for statehood.

The first Chilean constitutional republican experience of self government is examined, that includes the Declaration of Independence, the first Constitutions and the new efforts in the construction of an idea of citizenship. The First Republic is a search for an Independent Republic (1810-1830) that gives self government. It was also characterized by the development and creation of republican institutions. One of its main moments is the Declaration of Independence and the constitutional experiments of 1818, 1822, 1823 and 1826 that show a process of political trial and error. The consolidation of the First Republic is at last possible in the 1828 Constitution. The rise of new political agents and the end of the First Republic is finally explained