capitalism

Declaration of Independence 113
computer-generated reply, or I may cast a vote in the next
federal election: impersonal and probably futile acts.
The devitalizing, dispiriting effect of centralization was captured
by novelist Norman Mailer, who in his 1969 campaign
for the mayoralty of New York City proposed that the city
become an independent state and that this new state devolve all
political power to the neighborhood level. Mailer wrote:
Our authority has been handed over to the federal power. We
expect our economic solutions, our habitats, yes, even our
entertainments, to derive from that remote abstract power,
remote as the other end of a television tube. We are like wards
in an orphan asylum. The shaping of the style of our lives is
removed from us—we pay for huge military adventures and
social experiments so separated from our direct control that .
. . our condition is spiritless. We wait for abstract impersonal
powers to save us, we despise the abstractness of those powers,
we loathe ourselves for our own apathy.
From Thomas Jefferson to Norman Mailer, the faces
change, the styles too, but decentralists endure.
See also Federalism; Hess, Karl; Jefferson, Thomas; Subsidiarity;
Urban Planning
Further Readings
BK
Agar, Herbert, and Allen Tate, eds. Who Owns America? A New
Declaration of Independence. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999
[1936].
Berry, Wendell. Home Economics. San Francisco: North Point Press,
1987.
Bryan, Frank, and John McClaughry. The Vermont Papers.
Colchester, VT: Chelsea Green, 1989.
Chesterton, G. K. The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Mineola, NY:
Dover, 1991 [1904].
Davidson, Donald. The Attack on Leviathan. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1938.
Hess, Karl. Dear America. New York: Morrow, 1975.
Jefferson, Thomas. Writings. New York: Viking, 1984.
Mailer, Norman. “An Instrument for the City.” Existential Errands.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.
Naylor, Thomas, and William H. Willimon. Downsizing the U.S.A.
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997.
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
Adopted on July 4, 1776, by the Second Continental
Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, the Declaration of
Independence is the founding document of the United
States of America. In addition to the Congress’s official
explanation of “the causes which impel” Americans to declare
their independence from Great Britain, the document also
identifies the founders’ political philosophy of limited government
dedicated to the protection of individual rights.
On June 11, 1776, anticipating a vote on Virginia delegate
Richard Henry Lee’s resolution calling for independence,
Congress appointed a five-man committee to draft a declaration
justifying that momentous step. The committee members
were John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin
of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert
Livingston of New York, and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.
Jefferson was assigned the task of drafting the document.
Late in life, Jefferson wrote that the purpose of the
Declaration was “to place before mankind the common sense
of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their
assent, and to justify” American independence. In drafting
the document, he sought to express “the harmonizing sentiments
of the day,” the views of Americans’ rights, and their
violation by the British government—subjects, he maintained,
on which “all American whigs thought alike.”
“Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor
yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was
intended to be an expression of the American mind.”
In making the case for American independence,
Jefferson employed the language of 18th-century logic and
rhetoric. The argument of the Declaration is in the form of
a syllogism, with a major premise, a minor premise, and a
conclusion. Jefferson supplemented those basic components
of the syllogism with corollary principles that reinforced
the overall argument.
The second paragraph, which states the major premise,
posed the greatest difficulty for Jefferson as the many changes
he marked in his “original rough draught” attest. “We hold
these truths to be sacred & undeniable,” he originally wrote,
“that all men are created equal & independent, and from that
equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable,
among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit
of happiness.” After Jefferson substituted the more precise
term self-evident for the phrase sacred & undeniable, he
made further changes suggested by Franklin and Adams,
resulting in the familiar language: “We hold these truths to be
self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are
endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that
among these are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.”
The concept that all men equally enjoyed certain natural
rights was one of the “harmonizing sentiments of the day”
to which Jefferson later alluded; it reflected the influence
on Jefferson and other American Patriots of a variety of
sources, including 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment
treatises and English radical Whig writings, particularly
John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. Although
much of the language in the second paragraph of the
Declaration closely paraphrases passages from Locke’s
work, Jefferson departed from Locke’s identification of
“life, liberty, and property” as the three fundamental natural
rights. Contrary to what some modern scholars have