The US declaration of independance in a world context

Résumé du document

On the 16th January 1984 Ronald Reagan declared in his Address to the Nation and Other Countries on United States-Soviet Relations that "Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance, it must be fought for, and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people." This can be read as a reference to the founding circumstances of the United States of America: the Founding Fathers didn't fight (diplomatically and military) to the bitter end in order to get freedom, but to keep and concretize a strong feeling of liberty they had already experienced. According to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (who both belonged to the commission in charge of the drafting of a declaration of independence), the very act of leaving England had been a decisive step towards freedom. Should we therefore conclude that the Declaration of Independence was only part of a war arsenal?

Extraits

[...] Hence the government being an expression of the people's will, in order to accomplish the greater good. But government only relies upon God's natural law that gave Reason to each man such as to make him independent from others' authority. Before Aquinas, Plato and Aristotle saw a logical order but also purposefulness in the world's elements. Nature -the true nature of things- embodied order, and this order made men able to understand themselves, to reason and to perceive their own highest good. [...]

[...] Locke contributed to the Declaration through his Civil Government where he affirmed that being ( ) by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.” But since Rousseau was greatly impressed by Locke's theories about beginning of political societies”, which was in fact a kind of social contract, we might assume that the Declaration's resemblance to the Social Contract was only fortuitous, and that both Jefferson and Rousseau developed Lockean ideas about building government on a basis of mutual consent. In Two Treatises of Government probably also originated the affirmation of divine benevolence expressed by Jefferson through the reference to the Creator who endowed men with rights. But the affirmation of a natural law's existence is not to trace back only from Locke on. [...]

[...] How did the Haitian revolution bring about the departure from French colonists? The “gens de couleur” considered themselves as native Haitians, and deeply felt the unfairness of being governed on their own land by a foreign government. And being a majority, they held their desires for the “public good” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. Hence their resolution to part from French governing. And it was not the only country on the American continent to take inspiration from the US Declaration of Independence: the text of the Texas Declaration of Independence parallels somewhat that of the United States, which was signed sixteen years earlier (the Texas Declaration was signed on March 1836). [...]

[...] No place given : Quadridge/Presses universitaires de France. - Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. No place given : The Project Guttenberg EText - Révoltes et Révolutions en Amérique. No place given : édition Atlande, Coll. Histoire moderne, clés concours - The Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence - Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract or Principles of Political Government. [...]

[...] This is an example of misuse, or even deviance of the philosophical ideals contained in the US Declaration of Independence. Another “recuperation” of the Declaration might also seem quite unusual, even if it does not reach that degree of deviance: The Declaration of Independence of the Provinces of Holland adopted in 1999 but not recognized by any state so far. Even more sentences than in the Rhodesian declaration are directly copied from the American one: as the Holland soil had been given without referendum to the European Union, as the government of the Netherlands is only directed by NATO, it has become necessary for Holland assume among the independent countries of the earth, the separate and equal station to which freedom entitle them.” The famous phrase hold those truths to be self evident . [...]