As part of the University’s Fall Focus lecture series, political theorist Danielle Allen delivered a lecture on Tuesday, Sept. 29, that analyzed the Declaration of Independence, primarily focusing on its function as a philosophical argument, rather than simply a document that rallied America into a revolutionary war.
Allen is a professor in the government department at Harvard University, serves as the chair for the Pulitzer Prize and has been a contributor to The Washington Post and Boston Review. She received her doctoral degree in classics from Cambridge University and doctoral degree in government from Harvard.
An author of a broad range of topics, Allen’s most recent publication was “Our Declaration,” which served as the basis for the lecture given Tuesday.
“I started working on a book to recapture the classroom experience I had with my students in teaching the Declaration of Independence,” Allen said.
During this time, Allen identified what she refers to as “the three myths” of the Declaration, referring to the ideas that only Thomas Jefferson wrote it, that it was written before the framework of the Constitution was created and that it served only as propaganda for the American Revolution.
“I discovered how much mythology we have around the text, and it’s worth looking past this in order to deepen our understanding of the place the Declaration has in our own history and its core meaning,” she said.
Contrary to popular belief, the Declaration of Independence was written by a committee of five men — not solely Thomas Jefferson — and committee members John Adams and Benjamin Franklin made significant contributions to the document.
“The fact that the Declaration of Independence was written by a committee is a huge tribute to the power of what democracies can do, that groups of people who disagree with themselves can nonetheless find a way to develop a shared set of principles,” she said.
Further, Allen identified documents written by John Adams before the Declaration of Independence that reveal his direct influence on the text’s language.
In the last part of her lecture, Allen said that the Declaration of Independence was far more than a tool that pushed the United States into revolution. Rather, she claimed that it was a carefully constructed argument for the value of democracy.
“There can’t be any other government that makes good on this feature of us other than democracy, because only when we are self-governing, are we acting on this principle,” Allen said.
After answering questions posed by audience, Allen concluded her visit with a book signing.
