At the moment, no book is more visible or abundant at the gift shop of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where more than a million visitors a year come to view the earliest copies of America’s founding documents, than Our Declaration—the most recent work by Danielle Allen, Ph.D. ’01. The title, appealing boldly to a spirit of national wholeness, is so prominent that it’s easy to overlook the argumentative note in its smaller subtitle: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.
Allen, a recently appointed professor of government and director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, writes that in the past century, equality has been pushed to the side—by philosophers, politicians, and laypeople—in favor of its sibling, liberty: “I routinely hear from students that the ideals of freedom and equality contradict each other.” She rejects this notion that liberty and equality are on a seesaw, that one can rise only at the expense of the other. Instead, she contends, “Equality is the bedrock of freedom.” Her evidence? The Declaration of Independence, read line by line as a masterpiece of plain-language philosophy. The Declaration’s authors, she contends, were far from being libertarians in the modern sense. To the contrary: they were proud and eloquent egalitarians.
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Harvard Magazine: The Egalitarian
About Danielle Allen's newest book. A taste:
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14 comments:
The concept of "égalité" as used by today's left and yesterday's French Revolution is heavily laden with equality of outcome, whereas in the American context it can only mean inherent equality of natural rights.
For the signers of the Declaration, the only question of equality was: By what right does one man rule another? Their answer: Only with his consent. Sans consent, there is no right, for that suggests that the ruler is inherently superior to the ruled.
certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it
Allen has an estimable background and an interesting synthesis of ideas from Aristotle and Hayek, but unfortunately as a creature of the left [Obama campaign, the UK's Labour Party], her thesis takes her to where she cannot go, for instance, that diversity/multiculturalism and social trust/cohesion are fundamentally at odds.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/apr/30/danielle-allen-obama-equity-equality
As a classicist, she may reference Aristotle, but as a leftist she cannot be caught in bed with him.
"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." ---Aristotle
TVD:
The concept of "égalité" as used by today's left and yesterday's French Revolution is heavily laden with equality of outcome, whereas in the American context it can only mean inherent equality of natural rights.>>>>
That is a huge difference.
Our Cuban brother, Wilter, sat at our dining room table a couple of weeks ago. He was visiting churches here in the US, and we were able to have him in our home. It was his first time off the island. We have been in his home on the island.
Anyway, he asked us why Cuba has to have a system that doesn’t allow businesses to operate freely. Answer is it doesn’t. Cuba is egalitarian, the kind that I call jack-booted egalitarianism.
Not all forms of egalitarianism are created equal.
jack-booted egalitarianism
Is égalité achievable by any other means than jack booting?
Well I'm not feeling her thesis that the DOI is more egalitarian than liberal. The "republican" tradition had an egalitarian stress to it. This part was interesting:
Allen calls the social vision that incorporates her work on equality “egalitarian participatory democracy.” It evolved out of a belief that civic republicanism and liberalism, the most robust traditions of thought addressing democratic political equality, needed modification in order to work in a diverse modern society. Allen is trying to answer the same questions about liberty—about freedom from domination, and freedom to participate—that concern proponents of civic republicanism and liberalism, but says that, given the contemporary American context of great diversity, “the only way in which all the different parts of a population can be protected is if we focus first on political equality.” Her egalitarian participatory democracy is “participatory like civic republicanism; it’s egalitarian like a combination of civic republicanism and liberalism, but the emphasis is on democracy in order to underscore how important it is to secure political equality for everybody as the underpinning for achieving both kinds of freedom: the republican freedom and the liberal freedom.”
Words and terms often conceal more than they reveal.
It evolved out of a belief that civic republicanism and liberalism, the most robust traditions of thought addressing democratic political equality, needed modification in order to work in a diverse modern society.
Newspeak. Argle-bargle. Gobbledygook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
Once again proving that the modern left has no legitimate claim to the Founding principles. They are obsolete.
I read up on Dr. Allen, see above. She sees the truth per Aristotle and Hayek but cannot speak it. Another prisoner of her career, of her intellectual captors in the edu-industrial complex.
Academic Stockholm Syndrome. What a pity. She had promise.
"The concept of "égalité" as used by today's left and yesterday's French Revolution is heavily laden with equality of outcome, whereas in the American context it can only mean inherent equality of natural rights."
I don't think this is right, that the modern left and FR get connected with equality of outcome, especially as it pertains to property distribution, as distinguished from "the inherent equality of natural rights" of the American Founding.
Bold face mine.
Though I admit I'd have to read up on how they dealt with property distribution. But from their first document:
"1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
"2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression."
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp
This sounds a lot like what was put in bold.
It could be that there were elements in the French Revolution that stressed a equal property distribution more so than the American. But if so, Eric Nelson's research credits the Agrarian movement that influenced the British and American "republicans."
From his paper I quoted in another piece:
"Writers from Montesquieu to Rousseau, and from Jefferson to Tocqueville, would regard it as axiomatic that republics ought to legislate limits on private ownership in order to realize a particular vision of civic life."
Three of those four were French, and fortunately the other one had nothing to do with drafting the Constitution.
You're subverting Allen's argument.
Probably more amusing is demurral from Ms. Allen's left.
http://crookedtimber.org/2015/06/22/the-declaration-of-independence-isnt-egalitarian-enough/
Wilson at Crooked Timber:
My doubts caution that we must commit to fully egalitarian versions of the facets of the ideal, and work out just what those egalitarian versions entail for our democratic political practice. In doing some of that work, Danielle Allen has given us reasons to be inspired by the Declaration of Independence. But we will also need to go well beyond it.”>>>>
Indeed. Where are egalitarians going? Why must we commit to fully egalitarian versions of the facets of the ideal? What is the ideal? Do we all have to go with them?
Tom Van Dyke said...
jack-booted egalitarianism
Is égalité achievable by any other means than jack booting?>>>>
No. Thou shalt be equal, or else!
"Is égalité achievable by any other means than jack booting?"
---No. Thou shalt be equal, or else!
heh
reasons to be inspired by the Declaration of Independence. But we will also need to go well beyond it
uh oh
I think you got it, Mrs. Webfoot.
It occurred to another of Ms. Allen's leftperson interlocutors that the Founding principles are her "patrimony." He doesn't seem to realize that in accepting the inheritance of one's patrimony, one accepts not only the rights but duties and encumbrances that come with it.
http://crookedtimber.org/2015/06/19/the-declaration-as-patrimony-2/
This is perhaps why the book, after reprinting the Declaration of Independence in full, doesn’t turn immediately to exegesis, or a history of its composition. Instead, it starts with personal history. First, a discussion of teaching the Declaration to her night students, working students who “generally entered into the text thinking of it as something that did not belong to them [representing] instead institutions and power, everything that solidified a world that had, as life had turned out, delivered them so much grief, so much to overcome.” And then, a description of Allen’s family history, and inheritance from both African American and WASP ancestors. Together, these provide Allen with the understanding that the Declaration is part of her “patrimony.” Allen is careful with her choice of words, and patrimony is freighted with meaning. On the one hand, it is something that has come from your father or fathers (pater). On the other, it is something that is now unmistakably yours. To claim it is to accept your relationship with your fathers but also to take what they have given you, and turn it to your own needs and purposes. You inherit your patrimony when your father is dead, and no longer stands to tell you what to do with it.
You inherit your patrimony when your father is dead, and no longer stands to tell you what to do with it.>>>
It seems that the author understands what Allen is really saying.
Well, of course it's our patrimony too, so I intend to have quite a say in what they intend to do with it.
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