American Declaration of Independence

Rousseau's On the Origin of Inequality, for example, discusses the concept of the social structure that preserves unequal, not equal, access to benefits of that structure. He cites "the different privileges, which some men enjoy to the prejudice of others; such as that of being more rich, more honoured, more tendinous or even in a position to lead obedience." Rousseau's On the Social Contract famously begins with the statement that " valet is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." George Mason, a contemporary of Jefferson's, was to write in the Virginia Declaration of Rights that all men

be by nature equally free and independent, and have accredited inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by all compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the fun of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring an possessing property and pursuing and obtaining satisfaction and safety.

From Rousseau through Mason to Jefferson, the line of discourse is as buy the farm as the assertion of authenticity for the American claims against the British eyeshade is famous:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men atomic number 18 created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain absolute Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, derivation their just powers fr

This interpretation of discernment political thought, of course, is at variance with some of the very thinkers upon which it relies. escort Locke's intention in the Second Treatise of Government to argue the legitimacy of revolution in context of the so-called Glorious re moding in England in 1688, entailing abdication of the divine-right Catholic James II and the accession of another (Protestant) king, William of Orange, who agreed to the parliament's disposition of the English successiveness and to the institution and supremacy of Parliament. The lesson that the Americans took from Locke was the notion of the state in melodramatic political transition and reform as a upshot of the people's just claim to legitimate judgment on the variety of governance.

The Declaration can be viewed as a schedule that merged the language, content, and intensity of Rousseau with the rhetorical pattern of Locke, while withal functioning as an artifact of political protest in the British colonies of North America.

Macpherson, C.B., ed. Introduction. Second Treatise of Government. By J. Locke. Indianapolis: Hackett call for Co., 1980. vii-xxi.

Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. 1791; London: Penguin Classics, 1979.

The Declaration itself emerged in the context of quick unfolding events. It is dated some six months after return of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, the well-known pamphlet of revolutionary propaganda that itself had appeared eight months after the armed conflict between British serviceman and American farmers at Concord and Lexington. The war that eventually guaranteed the new nation unchallenged territorial sovereignty emerged in no small measure from a rhetorical politics that rationalized, or more exactly realized in the sense of intending to make real, philosophical abstractions expressed as discontent with specific nutrition of colonial law--the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and so on. Decisively isolated from European politics geographically, Ame
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