Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

Allen’s basic argument is not simply that the Declaration makes claims about equality but rather that it embodies and creates the kind of equality it discusses. Thus, the power of language to shape reality is central to Our Declaration.

Allen first asserts the power of language in the Prologue, when she argues that “language is one of the most potent resources each of us has for achieving our own political empowerment” (21). What she means by this becomes clearer as she notes that the Founding Fathers “grasped” the transformational “power of words,” which they wielded to bring “the Declaration, and their revolution, into being” (21). She then lays out her argument that the Declaration conducts transformative work: As it opens the colonists are still British subjects, and by the end they are independent citizens of new states. In part, her point is that the colonists use language to assert their right to a reciprocal relationship with the king and to portray him as a tyrant, thereby seeking support for their cause. However, Allen also notes that language is a tool of the logic and reasoning that the Declaration relies on; in making its assertion that the right to happiness is a right to properly constituted government, for example, the Declaration hinges on the assumption that people can evaluate the text’s language and thus engage with it as equal participants in a political community. Allen’s students, for instance, were transformed from exhausted adults into empowered citizens by their slow reading of the Declaration. 

The act of reading is thus as central to Allen’s conception of language’s power as the act of speaking or writing. Indeed, Our Declaration is an extended act of reading—of the Declaration of Independence itself. Allen presents the Declaration between her Prologue and first chapter; we are invited to read its entirety then and many times over throughout the text. Likewise, Allen makes it clear that it was a lifetime of reading that established her interest in equality. She used these skills to teach her night students and then began an even slower reading of the Declaration that produced her book. Indeed, writing and reading cannot easily be disentangled, pointing to the reciprocal (i.e., equalizing) nature of language itself. Certainly, reading is inextricable from what Allen calls “democratic writing”; the members of the Declaration committee were constantly reading each other’s work, talking about it, and then editing documents to produce final drafts. 

Allen does not suggest that the change produced by language is necessarily good. She remarks, for example, that careful editing of the Declaration produced the sentences we now know, including the gaps in our understanding of the text that Allen argues have had catastrophic consequences. Nevertheless, Allen’s contention that human actions must typically play catch up to human ideals suggests language’s foundational role in progress: It establishes the template for a better world.