Danielle Allen - Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

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DANIELLE ALLEN

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Punishing in Democratic Athens

Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship

Since Brown v. Board of Education

Why Plato Wrote

Education, Justice, and Democracy

(co-edited with Rob Reich)

From Voice to Influence:

Understanding Citizenship in the Digital Age

(co-edited with Jennifer Light)

Copyright 2014 by Danielle Allen

All rights reserved

First published as a Liveright paperback 2015

Odyssey Project course taught by Danielle Allen and Robert von Hallberg,
session on the Declaration of Independence, Dec. 7, 2006, photograph credit:
Illinois Humanities Council.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation,
a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
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Book design by Barbara Bachman
Production manager: Julia Druskin

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Allen, Danielle S., 1971

Our Declaration : a reading of the Declaration of Independence in defense of equality /

Danielle Allen. First edition.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87140-690-3 (hardcover)

1. United States. Declaration of IndependenceCriticism, Textual.

2. EqualityUnited States. I. Title.

E221.A475 2014

973.3'13dc23

2014009825

ISBN 978-0-87140-813-6 (e-book)

ISBN 978-1-63149-044-6 pbk.

Liveright Publishing Corporation
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
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W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

PRAISE FOR

OUR DECLARATION

Our Declaration sets forth a bold thesis.... Allens passion for each of the Declarations 1,337 words is admirable.

Steven B. Smith, New York Times Book Review

In this profoundly intelligent and achingly intimate work, Danielle Allen lays bare the Declarations history and significance, in the process returning it to its true and rightful ownersyou and me. I can recall no book in recent memory that has given me so great a gift as Our Declaration .

Junot Daz, author of This Is How You Lose Her

Danielle Allen has written an uncommonly elegant, incisive, and often poetic primer on Americas cardinal text. Blending a seasoned scholars acumen with a master teachers artistry, this book is must-reading for all who care about the future as well as the origins of Americas democracy.

David M. Kennedy, author of Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 19291945

Allen brings the analytical skills of a philosopher, the voice of a gifted memorialist, and the spirit of a soulful humanist to the task at hand, and manages to do something quite rare, find new meaning in Jeffersons understanding of equality.

Joseph J. Ellis, author of Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

A rare and singular work that throws open a door to anyone with a stake in democracy.

Ann Marie Lipinski, curator, Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Harvard University

This wise and rich book is what we need in these troubled timesa robust and persuasive defense of equality and liberty grounded in our national scripture. Danielle Allen is a towering political philosopher of the democratic art of being and a force for good!

Cornel West, author of Democracy Matters: Winning the War on Imperialism

Danielle Allen celebrates the Declaration of Independence by reading it closelyline by line, comma by commaand invites her fellow citizens to do the same. The result is a richly rewarding book that demonstrates the pleasures of slow reading, the power of words to shape events, and the importance of equality to democratic life.

Michael Sandel, author of What Money Cant Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

It has always been the fate of the Declaration of Independence to bounce back and forth between the political equivalents of foster homes and orphanages.... Danielle Allen has stepped into this tricky breach with an elegant book, deeply moving in many places, personal and conversational in style and yet also seriously philosophical and closely exegetical of the Declarations text.

Steven F. Hayward, National Review

At once simple, sharp and deftly executed.

Kirkus Reviews

Allen, a mixed-race African American, argues that the hypocrisy of the eighteenth-century revolutionaries does not negate the enduring wisdom of their words. The same love of equality and freedom that courses eloquently though the Declaration motivated both her white great-grandmother to campaign for suffrage and her black grandfather to found a chapter of the NAACP in the Jim Crow South. Its legacy can be just as powerful today.

Michael Kazin, Dissent

Danielle Allen brings intense insight to the reading with a phrase by phrase exegesis. She elegantly demonstrates that we cannot have liberty without equality.

Dan Freeman, Galveston County Daily News

Allen... convincingly demonstrates that the Declaration is founded on the idea that equality is the sole foundation on which we can build lasting and meaningful freedom.

David Cochran, Southern Illinoisan

The Declaration has stirred Allen mightily. She describes teaching it as a transformative experience, and she has responded with all of her being, as a scholar, a citizen, and a human being. This is engaged scholarship in a fulsome sense. Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality is also clearly conceived and written.

Paul Seaton, Library of Law and Liberty blog

For Stefan, Isaac, Nora, and William

And for their peers, the parents of their peers,
and their own children.

Although we seem trapped in an age of anger and despair, the alternatives remain the same as in all other ages. We can scuttleor we can sail the seas. Navigare necesse est. One must chart his course and sail.

ALLISON DAVIS, first tenured African American professor at the University of Chicago, in a graduation address there in 1970