Analysis Of The Declaration Of Independence In Defense Of Equality By Danielle Allen

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Citizens in America are uncertain about their natural rights, being uncertain about one's right is damaging for generations to come. Americans who don’t know what they are entitled to causes them to lose a piece of their freedom little by little. Our Declaration A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen, a professor at Chicago University teaches by “slow reading” a technique used by Allen to examine text in detail to show what the Declaration of Independence really states in order for students to understand their full rights. Allen claims that the Declaration helps us to see that we cannot have freedom without equality and conveys a lessons of patrimony importance in the text’s own eloquence. Danielle’s …show more content…
The prologue of the book Allen states when referring to the Declaration, “When we think about how to achieve political equality, we have to attend to things like voting and the right to hold office” (Allen 21). Citizens being able to participate in their natural duties, their voice matter by voting which selects the people in office. Being able to participate is a result of our freedom and having equality lets anyone go into office. If equality or freedom is not in place, us not being equal would let certain individuals only to go into office or only certain people being able to vote. This is the point that Allen is conveying that one can’t work without the other. Democracy in the United States is founded on Equality and liberty and is mention in the Declaration when Allen adds, “Equality and liberty-these are the summits of human empowerment; they are the twinned foundations of democracy” (Allen 22). Allen is claiming that equality and liberty is the root of democracy. Democratic writing made the Declaration, which means a group of people came together and agreed on terms for this country. One of the terms was freedom from domination in which Allen revises in her own words to her night students. This is a patrimony lesson for future generations to understand political …show more content…
She uses sound bites to summarize the eloquence in order for readers to get the message that, “(1)King George has sponsored harms to the colonists, in particular usurpations and injuries; (2)that the pattern of these harms spells ‘tyranny’; (3) that King George is not generating this pattern by accident; he is becoming a tyrant on purpose; and(4) that the colonists are good anticipators; they know how to spot the warning signs of tyranny correctly” (Allen 204). This summarize version of the list of grievance makes it much more easier for people to understand the main ideas. Allen believes that “grievances are in fact composed to be nonspecific and general” (Allen 207) because they describe an erosion of the power of the people. Than the professor goes in depth to conclude that the people also “..learn the opposite: what it takes to make people power real” (Allen 211). The professor connects this idea back into grievance one and two, to conclude the colonists are saying that King George is causing the legal system to break down. Laws that protect the “most wholesome and necessary for the public good”(Allen 212) are not going to be their no more for the colonist to be able to pursue the common good. This is to show that the list of grievances in the Declaration is a “portrait of a tyrant” (Allen 223) in which King George fits. By

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