Danielle Allen in Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen


On Civil Rights: We've come to think the choice is liberty or equality

In the last half of the century, our public discourse has focused on burnishing the concept of liberty, not equality. Consequently, we understand the former idea better. We have ideas ready to hand about the dangers posed to personal freedom by excessive government regulations and the value that lies in autonomy and self-creation. What do we know any longer about equality? Because we have excepted the view that there is a trade off between equality and liberty, we think we have to choose. Lately we have come as a people, to choose liberty. Equality has always been a frail twin, but it has now become particularly vulnerable. If one tracks presidential rhetoric from the last two decades, one will find that invocations of liberty significantly predominate over praise songs for equality . This is true for presidents and candidates from both parties.
Source: Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, p. 22 May 4, 2015

On Civil Rights: For years, "separate but equal" entrenched segregation

The phrase "separate and equal' should be vaguely familiar, yet it also feels somehow out of time. For about 65 years, when this country used laws to segregate people by race, the people who wrote those laws insisted that they were providing 'separate but equal' accommodations. For instance, a Louisiana law of 1890 required all railway companies carrying passengers through Louisiana "to provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races." In 1892, a legally black, visually white activist, to challenge the law, bought a first class ticket for the New Orleans-Covington commuter line and sat in a whites only carriage. Arrested, he pursued his defense all the way to the Supreme Court [Plessy v. Ferguson], which in 1896 upheld the Louisiana law and entrenched legal segregation, an imposition of inequality whose effects reverberate to this day.
Source: Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, p.123-124 May 4, 2015

On Crime: The rule of law protects us from arbitrary punishment

Professional philosophers have trouble pinning down the precise meaning of the rule of law. They do agree though on some of its features. You need to know what the rules are before yo act. The rules can't change without a reasonable effort being made to alert you to the change. Also, your actions need to be judged after the fact by whatever laws were in place and had been made publicly known before you acted. The rule of law protects us from arbitrary punishment. It's not enough to pass laws and use them to judge people. If the legislature hasn't told anyone what the rules are, the system of rules is by definition unfair.
Source: Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, p.211 May 4, 2015

On Education: I want my students to own the Declaration

I cannot abide seeing someone bullied. Perhaps it is there in that small but fundamental instinct-that my own driven commitment to egalitarian democracy was born. Even the most intimate relations bring to light to how fundamental to human flourishing is equality.

This point, however, simply leads to another question. What seven league boots can take us from personal to political? And why does one leap from a concern, which surely we all have for decency inhuman relations to love a democracy? How does one come to understand that these things are connected. And how might this all happen in childhood? Because I did love democracy and, above all, equality before I left youth behind. Working with my night students brought me back to my origins.

Source: Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, p. 40 May 4, 2015

On Education: Students should read the Declaration by graduation

There are no silver bullets for the problem of civility in our political life. There are no panaceas for educational reform. But if I were to pretend to offer more, it would be this: all adults should read the Declaration closely; all students should have read the Declaration from start to finish before they leave high School. Doing this would help our own powers of reading; it would help our children with their reading. It would strengthen our reading and theirs. It would nourish everyone's capacity for moral reflection. It would prepare us all for citizenship . Together we would learn the democratic arts.
Source: Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, p.282 May 4, 2015

On Government Reform: Point of political equality is to engage entire community

In pledging to one another their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred fortunes, and their sacred honors, each signer of the Declaration anted up, on behalf of both himself personally and his state, an equal stake in the creation of a new political order. Each thereby claimed an equal ownership share. This is an ideal of equality as co-creation, where many people participate equally in creating a world together. They do so under conditions of mutual respect and accountability by sharing intelligence, sacrifice, and ownership. The point of political equality, then, is not merely to secure spaces free from domination but also to engage all members of community equally in the work of creating and constantly recreating that community.
Source: Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, p.269 May 4, 2015

On Principles & Values: The purpose of democracy is to empower individual citizens

The purpose of Democracy is to empower individual citizens and give them sufficient control over their lives to protect themselves from domination. In their ideal form Democracies empower each and all such that none can dominate any of the others, nor any one group, another group of citizens.

Political equality is not however, merely freedom from domination. The best way to avoid from being dominated is to help build the world in which one lives to help, like an architect, determine it's patterns and structure. 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.

Source: Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, p. 34 May 4, 2015

On Principles & Values: Family twice read the Bible through from start to finish

We were a family steeped in books. We were also a family of The Book. In my childhood, at an early point, we twice read the bible through from start to finish. Before we cleared the dinner table of it's dirty dishes, still seated in our nightly seat, in positions that would remain unchanged for nearly eighteen years, my father, mother, brother, and I read a chapter a night, reading verse to verse. It took a couple of years to complete two cycles.
Source: Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, p. 37 May 4, 2015

On Principles & Values: Colonies became states by organizing their own affairs

Simply by achieving this political capacity, the colonies had made themselves an independent political entity, no les and no more independent than any of our great powers. They were, for this reason, ready to assume, "among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station" of a self organizing, sovereign political unit.

The former colonies noted their acquisition of this capacity by changing their names from colonies to states. At last we can see it. That's the meaning of that change of name. A colony identifies a social group whose affairs are organized by someone else. A state identifies a social group that organizes it's own affairs.

Source: Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, p.121 May 4, 2015

On Principles & Values: One can be a non-believer but hold some things sacred

You do not have to be a Christian to accept the argument of the Declaration. That much is clear but do you have to be a theist? That is, do you have to believe in God. The answer is again, no.

You do not need to be a theist to accept the argument of the Declaration. You do however, require an alternative ground for a maximally strong commitment to the right of other people to survive and govern themselves. One needs a reason to commit to other peoples survival and freedom so strong as to command one's reverence. One way or another, one must hold sacred the flourishing of others.

Source: Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, p.138 May 4, 2015

On Principles & Values: With a purposeful tyrant; the time for talk is past

The real revolution has already happened--as one of life's turning points--when those who once suffered patiently suddenly see that he who is supposed to be a friend is in fact a foe. That experience is wrenching--painful but also forceful and dramatic. One picture clashes with another. A new reality displaces the old one. "It is their right; it is their duty" to throw off the old way of life. These clauses [of The Declaration] capture the true moment of revolution.
Source: Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, p.201 May 4, 2015

The above quotations are from Our Declaration
A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

by Danielle S. Allen.
Click here for other excerpts from Our Declaration
A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

by Danielle S. Allen
.
Click here for other excerpts by Danielle Allen.
Click here for a profile of Danielle Allen.
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Page last updated: Oct 09, 2021