Political theorist Danielle Allen shed a modern light on the Declaration of Independence Tuesday by analyzing the U.S. colonists’ foundation for political equality in a lecture given at Memorial Union’s Shannon Hall.
Allen, who won $500,000 as part of the prestigious MacArthur fellowship award in 2001, centered her Distinguished Lecture Series talk on her latest book, “Our Declaration,” connecting the founding fathers’ original arguments for the declaration to her perspectives on equality.
“I myself [was] on somewhat of a journey to revitalize our commitments in this country to civic agency on the one hand and equality on the other,” Allen said, referring to the ability for citizens to work collaboratively in the political sphere.
Allen recounted her experience with the Odyssey Project through the University of Chicago, which aims to offer adults at or below the poverty level access to education in humanities. Most of her students had never read the declaration or thought deeply about the text. When her students took on that task, Allen said they recognized how the ideals could apply to them today.
“The story of the declaration is that basic, fundamental story of civic agency that [the students] could claim it as their own,” Allen said.
The political equality of civic agency, as described by Allen, is represented through the collective nature of the declaration. She broke down four different examples of the founders’ arguments about equality to further emphasize how the idea became a foundation for liberty and freedom.
One of Allen’s examples depicted the equality the United States wanted from fellow nations. As the founding fathers wanted to be recognized separately from Britain, they also wanted to be seen as an equally self-sufficient nation in the eyes of other countries.
A second example connected the equal access the founding fathers thought people should have with the “tool” of government, which is the citizens’ right to participate in governmental affairs. She described this participation as a status of a person’s political being.
“We are equal in sharing a status of rights-bearing creatures,” Allen said. “A status that requires a realization that we all have equal access to the tool of government.”
