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

“A tour de force. . . . No one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one.” ―Gordon S. Wood, New York Review of Books

Our Declaration has already come to be regarded as a seminal work that reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and with over a decade of hindsight, renowned political philosopher Danielle Allen recontextualizes her revelatory book with a stunning new foreword. Combining a personal account of teaching the Declaration with a vivid evocation of the colonial world between 1774 and 1777, Allen reveals our nation’s founding text as not a catechism to be memorized but an animating force that can and did change the world. Challenging conventional wisdom, Allen finds “new meaning in Jefferson’s understanding of equality” (Joseph J. Ellis), boldly making the case that the Declaration is a document as much about political equality as about individual liberty. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Our Declaration is an “uncommonly elegant, incisive, and often poetic primer on America’s cardinal text” (David M. Kennedy).

35 illustrations

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and author of Justice by Means of Democracy, Cuz, and Our Declaration, winner of the Parkman Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.