Financially, morally, spiritually, politically, beating. And it stood. You cant keep doing this. Somebodys going to take advantage, and i think theres a lot of people that want to take advantage of this time. And if we dont heal ourselves, we will fall. Lincoln was right. It wont come from the outside, itll have to be national suicide. And i think the outside hitting us when were so divided, national suicide. The inhouse think tank for congress. I want to welcome you to the National Book festival, and to this presentation on the new book our declaring. Earlier today Walter Isaacson discussed his book, the 0 in which he places creativity at the intersection of science and art. Danielle allen, the author of our declaration finds her creativity at the intersection of classical studies and plate theory, a subject of which she is a master or a doctor, because she holds ph. Ds in in both subjects. Isaacson found that the brilliant that gave the world the programmable commuter and the internet could not have come from the inspired efforts of an effort. They sprang from the collaboration of many inspired individuals. Similarly, dr. Allen finds the assembling of the 1,337 words of the declaration of independence was the result of a vast array of conversations, collaborations, and debates among a surprisingly large number of collaborators. Indeed, this book itself is a brilliance born of collaboration. While a single hand, hers, wrote the text, the thought, the analysis, the philosophy, embodied thin, is a result of more than a decade of co lab racing, debate collaboration, debate, and discussions between her and her students. She received much wisdom from them, even as she tag them the mechanics of the declarations language, and a mechanic she is. She disassembled the declarations engine, word by word, sandblasts the part clean, shines them, lubes them and puts them back together so they run better than new. Dr. Allen has earned five university degrees. A bachelors in classics at princeton, master of philosophy and a doctorate in cass licks as kings conditioning cambridge, and a masters and doctorate in government from harvard. She has written five books 0, which this is one. She just completed an pinement at the institute for advanced study at princeton. Yes, that institute. The one with about einstein and j. Robert oppenheimer, at that place in new jersey. And has taken an appointment now as professor in harvards Government Department and as director of the Edmond Center please hem me welcome dr. Dan yell allen. Danielle allen. [applause] si so much, dance. Incredible introduction im in your duty. I truly appreciate it. And greetings to all of you. Its wonderful to see you here. I have to say i particularly loved dans description of me as a mechanic, because theres a sense in which you have just given me a way of overcoming a certain childhood failure that is always plagued me so my dad, when i was 11, gave me this car engine that it was my job to take apart and reassemble, and of all the things i was given in childhood, it was the only one that utterly confounded me. There was no way i could do this. I still have an image of that engine sitting there in the dining room, unfinished. So, thank you. Now i can have a different way of reporting that i did at last finish my project as a mechanic. Thats fantastic. Its terrific to see you all here tonight and to have the chance to talk with you about my book, our declaration, and about the declaration of independence. I wanted to tell you a little bit about why i wrote the book, what i was trying to do with it, and then to share a couple of what i think are some of the key stories in the book, or key ideas in the book. And i think the best way of trying to explain why i wrote the book is to Say Something about the first version of the book that i wrote. Not the book that is in front of you but the one that, when i gave it to people to read, they said, try again, danielle. So the very first version of this book was a dialogue, a conversation between a teacher and students. I want to give you a picture of the actual group of teachers and students. Im sitting there at the head of the table with my coteacher and other group of students, and we are working on at the declaration of independence. This is a picture of me explaining to people what a sill lowism is, a philosophical term for a kind of argument you have a premise, a premier and is conclusion. The traditional example is always socrates, i like to use bill gates. Give the charge a little bit better. The example goes, socrates, bill gates is a human being. All human beings are mortal, therefore, bill gates, even billgates, will die. So two premises, a conclusion drawn from them. Thats a silogism. It matters to know what it is to understand part of the declaration of independence. This is us in class, and this group of students is a group i taught in chicago on the south side, and in a course called the humanities, the odyssey project, whose purpose was to give people who had fallen out of the educational system a chance to start over again. And the course was ambitious because it was taking a group of students, many of whom didnt even have a high school degree, and it was saying, were going to give these students the same quality of education as during the day we are giving to university of chicago undergraduates. And university of chicago undergraduates are kid from all the best high schools all over the country, tons of preparation. How do you give the same quality of education to people with that kind of preparation on the one hand and people without the same preparation on the other hand . It turns out theres very straightforward answer. You pick short but great texts to talk about. And this comes back to dans point. The declaration is only 1,337 words. I have never had a student complain about the reading load when i assign the declaration. That in itself is a great gift to a teacher. So, out of basically pragmatic efficiency i started using the declaration to teach u. S. History, some cases philosophy, writing, lite tour, literature, but something magical happened in that classroom. It was in a conversation with the students thats magical thing happened, which i why my first effort to write this book was, as i said, a dialogue, conversation of a teacher with 18 students. But i gave it to my agent, and i gave it to my friends, and i gave it to my family members, and they all said, fess up, danielle, youre the teacher. Stop pretending this is about somebody else. Own what you have to say in this book. And write it in your own voice. So thats what i tried to do. The book you actually have is my admitting to the fact that i was that teacher. I was trying to write about. And as that teacher trying to share the magical thing that happened with my students. So, let me explain the magical thing, and then Say Something about why i think it matters, not just for history, not just for teachers, but for all of us as citizens of a democracy. So, the declaration, again. 1,337 words. You all know it. My students actually had mostly not read it the whole thing. Some read experts, none of them had read the whole thing. Otherwise then soon found that actually my day students at the university of chicago had also most live not read the whole of the declaration of independence. So, only 1,337 words. But anyway, the magical thing that happened was this text is so short but had the long list of grievances, complaints of about king george, not a stumbling block, people dont read it because the list seemed sort of opaque but nonetheless if you get through it, it turns out the text is extremely simple. Human and the most fundamental sense, the voice of a group of people who have surveyed their circumstances, diagnosed them, and decided to change their lives. And taking the time to explain themselves to the world. Thats it. Diagnosis, prescription, justification. And these night students of mine, going back to that last photo in this class, were all people who had decided to change their lives, and so they went to the heart of the declaration faster than i had ever seen students do. My day students, again the university of chicago, minimum ton place like prisonster later, this wonderful, talent, brilliant, exciting students from all over the country but who had always nope they were going to college and whose parentses had gotten them ready to go to coverage. They hadnt yet had to set the course of their lives, but my adult students were people who had encountered all crimeds of on stack tells, deaths from gun violence or diabetes or other difficulties, unstable employment, complexities witch calledcare arrangements. Try manage jobs and raise children in Public Schools that werent necessarily very good for the kids. Into they, the fact they were sitting in that class on those nights had already made this decision that they were going to change their lives, and for that reason, they were more proximate, closer in lived experience to the people who wrote the declaration of independence than anybody else id ever spoken to. And that is an extraordinary thing to think of a text from 1776, we think of belonging to these bewigged men, some of whom held slaves, that the people who might be most close to that text, nearest to it, living it most directly, would be ordinary people among us, struggling to make their lives flourish, to flourish in their circumstances. So that was the magic i got out of the class. The reason i think it matters, not just as i said for a teacher, not just for my students there, but for all of us, is because that basic lesson about human agency in the declaration, is the foundational idea underneath the ideal of equality. One of the twins, linked so tightly to freedom, that count as the foundation for democracy. Okay . So, equality. We need to talk about equality. This is a concept that has come up a lot in the last year. Its come up because of the black lives matter campaign, because of marriage equality, come up in many, many ways. I think as the concept of equality has returned to our public conversation, it also revealed something about us. We dont actually know how to talk about equality. We have lost our intellectual got a do that. We are good, very, very good, at talking about liberty and freedom. And we have been working on those concepts for a very long time, and we have lots of cliches at lisch and freedom. A mans home is his castle, and we can say things like government encroaches on freedom. You have to be careful about the relationship between government and freedom, and ideas like that trip off our tongues. What cliches do we have for equal these days . What trips off the tongue . Not very much in my experience, and yet the declaration of independence is built around the concept of equal fundamentally, and again, its built on that notion that any human being, any human being, is trying to flourish. Simple idea. So simple. And any human being has that capacity of human agency to survey their circumstances, diagnosis what is wrong with their circumstances, set a new course in life, and justify it. Thats it. That it. Thats it. Democracy is built out of that idea. So, how too we come to think about it again . How can we start remembering the ideas that make equality something that we can talk about easily, that we can use to diagnosis our own circumstances, to look around our own society, our own politics and say, yes, this is working and this is not and we need to make a change here because it is blocking our effort to realize for everybody the opportunity to be human agents in this kind of way. So, how can we reacquire that capacity . My Firm Conviction is that the declaration of independence can help us there. I am the second sentence, we hold these truths sentence. But before i do, i think i have to Say Something else about the history of the declaration and who wrote it, because the truth is that every time i suggest to people that we can take the declaration seriously. We can use it now in 2015 to understand our current circumstances. People will say, but jefferson wrote that document. And while lots of us may admire jefferson, others of us dont necessarily admire him so much because of the complication of his having been a slaveowner. Right . So why wasnt jefferson a hypocrite . Isnt every word of the declaration of independence merely an example of selfserving hypocrisy . That is a question i have gotten a lot as ive talked about the declaration, so before i take you into the text of the declaration, just brief live i need to Say Something about who wrote the declaration of independence. This is important, too, because as i understand it, on the u. S. Citizenship theres a question, who wrote the declaration of independence. The correct answer from the state department is thomas jefferson. Im going to give you a different answer. Jefferson, as you know on his tombstone but author, declaration of independence. That is a very good way to make sure you get credit for something. Keep that in mind. Consider now what you want credit for. This is not say he doesnt deserve credit. He does. He was the chair of the committee of five people who drafted the declaration. But who else is on the committee . John adams, benjamin franklin, rogershireman, robert livingston. Adams and franklin in particular made very substantial contributions to the draft, and then congress got the draft anded edited it by 25 . Beyond that, the declaration itself, the fact there was a declaration to declare, is really thanks to john adams. Thomas jefferson was really the draftsman. John adams was the politician turning the wheels, along with his colleague, Richard Henry lee. Let me show you a quick picture here. These are the men who havent gotten enough credit for the declaration, and above all john adams, man of mcdonalds of massachusetts who never held a slade. At dams wrote a todo list. This is one of my favorite archives. February 1776. His todo list you. Wont be able to see it but fine it online. The fourth home said government to be assumed in every colony. This is adams strategy for getting independence, was to convince all of the christians they basically were all in a state of anarchy and it was time for them to write their own con constitutions and then declare their own opposite himself project was build and then kickaway the old thing. Constituting first and then revolting. Then on the righthand side, fourth from the bottom, declaration of independency. That is where it comes from. John adams todo list. He worked consistently through 75 and 76 to get the colonies to the point to be ready to wright the constitution and declare independence and the gets the committee elected that would draft the declaration after Richard Henry lee on the right had stood up in congress and resolved that the colonies should declare themselves free and independent states. So, these were the two who drove the process forward. So, were going to come back to that because we really its john adams who gave us who really gave us pursuit of happiness. Its important to understand that. Let me now for a moment dwell on that allimportant second sentence. Again, why its important for all of white house are citizen of a democracy. Remind ourselves what it is we hold these truths to be selfevident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to skewer these rights governments are instituted among men, derife just pours from the consents of the governed. Whenever a government becomes destruct of these ends the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to Institute New government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Do you remember that it was that long, the sentence . People think it stops after pursuit of happiness. But i do note have my second sentence in here. Sorry. Here we go. In fact, the sentence goes all the way from the beginning, we hold these truths, to, their safety and happy inches heres where we get back to temperature silogism as i indicated at the beginning, the piece of philosophical argumentation. We start with a premise, all people have rights, amongst which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A way of describing human beings. Second premise, governments are instituted to secure these rights. This is why, as birds built nests, human beings build governments, and at the conclusion, then, when your government is not work, not doing the thing for which its been built, its the right of the people alter or abolish it. The sentence makes an argument that leads us from individual rights, through the tool that we build together, government, and use together, to explain where our responsibility is in relationship to that tool. Its our responsibility to make a judgment about whether that tool is achieving our shared safety and happiness and to take responsibility for such alterations are necessary to get us to that goal. Its a profound sentence, economical, philosophical, simultaneously, and again, its important to read it all the way through. It doesnt end after pursuit of happiness. Its important to think about what the whole sentence means, taking us from our individual rights, to the shared project of safety and happiness. And its here in this sentence that we get in capsule form the story of human appearing i described as being at the heart of my students experience. It is because each of us is charting a course for ourselves, pursuing happiness. That democracy is the best form for realizing our human potential. But in order for democracy to achieve that, we have to find a way to build something together. So that together we can protect ourselves, protect our freedom, on the Egalitarian Foundation of democracys shared project. Theres a lot more that could be said about this sentence and how important it is for helping us think about the work of democracy, but what id like to do for just my final moment before opening it up to you for questions, is to Say Something again about that happiness idea that i just alluded to. We think of the pursuit of happysness been one of jeffersons motor important phrase but its really to adams we owe this idea. This matters because the choice to use happiness was actually caught up in the debates over slavery. For those of you who have read other texts in the history of political thought, and thought about the history of rights in the 18th century, youll realize that this phrase, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, is radical. Innovative, because there were common formulations with life, liberty, and property. So how did we get from property to happiness in the declaration . Adams and Richard Henry lee served together on a committee in october of 1775, but had to answer the question, what New Hampshire should do, given the fact that its British Royal governor had fled and the governor was responsible for all of the operations of the administration in New Hampshire. New hampshire was in effect an anarchy. What was the colony to do . And the answer that adams and lee crafted with the three others on their committee, was as follows that it be recommended through provincial convention of New Hampshire to call a free representation of the people and that the representatives, if they think it necessary, establish such a form of government as in their judgment will best produce the happiness of the people and most eeffect actually secure peace and good order in the province, during the continuance of the present spews between Great Britain and the colonies. This language of the happiness, peace, and good order, is coming from adams, and we know that because in april of 1776, he produced a pamphlet arguing about what his vision of government was. Its called thoughts of government. Richry lee produced a post thats right was experts excerptses from the pamphlet. But here is the introduction to adams pamphlet. We ought to consider what is the end of government before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point, all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government. At all divines and moral philosophers will agree that happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or in one word, happiness to greatest number of persons and the greatest degree is best. Jefferson wasnt using the vocabulary of happiness in this period. We know that because we have other texts of his. For example, this from 1775. Where he his core lists of rights is the conventional life and property. And in the fall of 75, as the british were telling slaves in virginia in particular that if they fled, and fought for the british, they would receive freedom, the virginiaans had begun to complain about that move on the part of the british as a violation of their rights of property. The vocabulary of property balm quite closely linked to defense of slavery in the fall of 75 and spring of 1776. In may, george mason drafts the virginia declaration of rights, and he fuses the argument coming from adams, map of massachusetts, who thought slavery was a bad thing, and with the conventional view of the virginians and wrote all men are by n nature equally free and independent have sent inherit rights which they cannot by any compact deprive or devest their posterity. Namely the enjoyment of life, liberty, and the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. So here we see the two streams of conversation from that spring coming together. Leaving us with the mystery of why it was that property dropped out of the declaration of independence. Let me give you little snippet from the debates in Continental Congress that july on the articles of confederation to show you how closely property and slavery had been connected to each other. So this is lynch from south carolina. If it is debated whether theyre slaves or property there is the end of the confederation. So when we look at the declaration of independence, and look at the rights of life, liberty, and be pursuit of happiness, what were actually reading is one of the first compromises that made the new nation possible. A language capacious enough to be accept teen the antislavery side and the slavery side. A lot to be said about the danger and problematic nature of compromises in the american founding, but its important to recognize that this moment, this formation, was a africa the antislavery position. The notion that core rights were describe as lifeliberty, and pursuit of happiness, and this victory we could attribute to john adams who, over the course of the year, as ive said, was making the case that happiness was the end of society as it is for the individual person, and that was the ideal, that the colonists should use to pull themselves together and chart a new course for themselves. So let me conclude, then, by simply encouraging each of you to revisit the declaration of independence and to think of it as a living document. Let me take you back again to that second sentence. Ill just read it one last time because, again, its orientation is to the continual responsibility of a Democratic People to be the agents that they have the potential to be. Its not a historical claim. Its a present claim, claim for the present, for now, as for 1776, a claim that is always alive. We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inailannable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men derifeing their just powers from the consents of the governed. Whatever government becomes destructive off these ends its this right of the people to al temperature or abolish it and Institute New government, laying its foundation on such principle and organizing its power in such form as to them, together, shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Thank you. [applause] very glad to take questions. Please. Yes, thank you for your book. I have not read all of it. Just started today, but i really appreciate your kind of deconstructing the supposed dichotomy or conflict between liberty and freedom on the one hand and equality on the other, and the focus in the last sentence in the declaration on the collect different of effort it took to get the nation going and also the point about the ongoing need to participate together. Thank you. And im retired. I spent my career practicing psychotherapy, and so when you use the term human agency, its a psychological term as well as comes from other disciplines, i suppose. But youre talking bat collective human agency in turn e terms of the creation of the country and the writing of the declaration, and i guess i would ive thought about this a lot and the fact that psychology and psychotherapy tends to focus on the individual, i think, has historically, and the liberation of the individual being the end point, the goal of psychological help and psychotherapy. And which leaves out all of these other issues that youre bringing up, but in the context of psychology, which i think has gone to serve kind of a consumerist kind of culture, focused on the individual, and liberation through commodity, and consumption. Acquisition of commodities. I wonder if you could if this is kind of part of how you think about this stuff and the role that psychology has played in our modern era in terms of dividing ourselves the way we are . Thank you. Thank you very much. Its interesting because one of the experiences of teaching my students, working with my students and then writing this book, was this bizarre discovery of a closeness between individual human agency and the psychology of the individual trying to improve their lives, and the political question. And the fact that we think of politics as being so far removed from individual psychology, and yet its actually exactly the same thing about human beings thats at the heart of both. So i do think that policy is incredibly important. Laws are incredibly important, having the capacity to look at policy, look at laws and look for reforms is incredibly important, but so, too, is the capacity to actually build healthy interactions and relations within the citizenry, and it would be a great thing if psychologists would pay more attention to that issue of how we help build healthy relationships in the sense of a broader collective and not just at the individual and the close to our family unit and things like that. So thank you. I have a question about one of the last quotes you brought up of james john adams. John adams. What did he mean when he said that happiness would be the end of the individual and the end of government . Right. Great. So, by end there he meant goal, the thing youre reaching to, not conclusion, so i should clarify that. Its the use of end, your ambition, your objective, the thing youre iming for, and what he meant was he was really connecting to a longlived philosophical tradition that focuses on an idea of Human Flourishing or wellbeing. So, any human being is trying to do more than survive. We want in some sense to be able to get to the end of our lives and say, that was a life well lived. And that i think is at the core of adams conception of happiness, and the folks of 1776, women as well as men, you can include mercy otis ward, Abigail Adams in the group of thinkers who thought that human beings need to direct themselves in order for them to achieve that experience of being able to say that was a life welllived. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. I only visited a couple of times but im from massachusetts, and i am not trying to stop the gays from having freedom but freedom seems to be at a rivalry with freedom and family because the individuals rights to family and freedom and happiness are right they want the control of their children, but they brought their rights to be free of choice as individuals to massachusetts, and seem to be trying to oppress the freedoms of families, so how would you resolve the rivalry that is starting massachusetts with freedom and individual rights. Thank you for your question. So, its important that freedom and equality be linked to each other. I think when people build their way of thinking about their own lives and society around freedom alone it can lead to precisely that infringement on the rights of others, and so its important this is a little technical in the history of philosophy bit there are two different ways of thinking about freedom. You can think about freedom as being freedom from interference, or you can think about freedom as being freedom from domination. And these are different. So, freedom from interference gives one the idea that anything that interferes with ones life is a problem. So, the laws interfere with our lives. Right . The point of a law is in fact to put rules of the game top ground, a set of cop straints that protects everybody from domination and thereby provide everybody with freedom from domination, ensuring the ways which were interfered by the law are legitimate. That makes it acceptable. Right . So if you can focus on freedom from domination as the core definition it becomes clear how freedom and equality are linked to each other. If were thinking freedom for all, there has to be limits on our behavior toward one another. Right . There cant be such a thing as fro deem from interference so freedom for all requires a set of egalitarian limits we express through laws in order to protect one another. Happy in the i think we have in folks waiting over here, we have to take turns. Professor allen, ive been following your work at princeton, at university of chicago. I read your aims of education speech at the university of chicago. Very inspiring. Had a quick question. You said im a teach and you said we often lack the intellectual capacity to talk about equality. We have the capacity, the language, to talk about liberty but dont have the intellectual capacity to talk about equality. Can you talk more about this in the context of happiness . Sure. Thanks. Let me say two things. One, just to add a little bit to the remark i made about equality and thinll connect it to happiness. So, its important if somebody invokes the ideal of eye quality to ask them what kind they mean, political equality, moral equality, social equality . Do they mean something to do with economic relations . Economic equality or justice or opportunity. And you have to take the concept apart in the first instance. Were have forgotten how to do that. Thats what i meant about that. The declaration focuses primarily on political equality, which it rests on a ground of moral equality, and it pulls some elements ofs of social equality into it but doesnt have that much to say about economic questions. So its important to be very precise about the way equality works. I take it your question about happiness is whether were government at thinking about happiness as well, whether we have also lost the capacity to do that. I would say, yes, i think our capacity to think about happiness has also weakened. You see some astonishing once you work on the declaration you see itself use everywhere itch dont know if the rest of you noticed this but pursuit of happiness is used all over the place, in ads. It has become our basic way of talking about what it means to buy stuff. That count arizona pursuing happiness. Counts as pursuing happiness and yes, that is a remarkably weakened sense of what happiness means how much does one rebuild on idea that happiness is about the flourishing of the whole person . Mind and spirit, well beyond matters of material questions. And happiness is about being able by the end of your life to ask and satisfactorily answer that question, have i lived well . And to feel in your spirit that, yes, i can look back and say that the past i have crafted was a life worth living. So i think it takes a lot of work to start rebuilding also our ability to understand what happiness consists of. I appreciate you coming. I learned a lot just in your small session. Thanks. Any main question is what inspired you to write actually about the declaration of independence . Thank you. I feel im not very good at answering that question. The answer on one level is my students. As i said in the beginning, it was truly magical in the classroom. It will, i think, by the modifies life, be my best teaching experience. To date it has been, teaching my students and teaching the declaration and it was magical because it was a text that the students did not think of as belonging to them or pertaining to them, and the centrality of the agency they were claiming and the fact that is what this text was about, it crystallized them and led them to say that text is mine. That declaration is mine. Maybe ill pull out the lives of grievances in there and put in a new list of grievances that pertains to my current circumstances but that declaring is mine. To see people come into a sense of their personal and Political Agency is a privilege, incomparable to any other i can imagine. So, it was my students studentso inspired me, and there was a paper an aural about the course i was teaching. A student was quoted as saying that the declaration session had been one of her favorite parts. That confirmed to me it hadnt just been me who was feeling something, and that inspired me to go ahead and try to put it on paper. Thanks. Yes, dr. Allen, wonderful to hear you lecture, thank you so much. My pleasure. I appreciate your comments about how some people today dont appreciate the restitution of the declaration of independence today. I take that to mean that in people just dont see it has necessarily a lot of value. It seems to me a significant contrast between the writers of the declaration of independence and our leaders today, is the writers of the declaration of independence were revolutionaries who were feeling oppressed. And they were looking for freedom from england. Leaders today in the United States are not in that position. And so im not sure that if you were to ask many of the elected officials today how closely they identify with the declaration of information. They might not because they dont feel that kind of oppression that the american revolutionaries felt. Im wondering whether you see that is an issue in terms of getting elected officials today in government to be responsive to our requirements. Thank you for your question. Our politics has confounded by a long list of problems, and so i would probably myself describe our difficulties somewhat differently in the sense that it dont think you need to be, say, the subject the oppression of Something Like the British Empire to understand the declaration to make use of it. Again, because what the declaration charges us with is the responsibility of surveying our circumstances, when in course of human events. What are the course of human events around us now . What have the course of human events the last 20 years. What patterns and directions. Responding to that question of how our world is changing around is us as relevant today as then. For me, the greater concern is what is pointed to by the end of the second sentence, which i sort of emphasized in quoting it, when its the responsibility of the people to Institute New government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. What are these . Principles. The declaration of independence was the statement of principle the articles of confederation was the first effort at form, and then we tried ten with the constitution. So, what i am most concerned about with regard to our contemporary leaders is their very poor i dont know how else to say it capacity to engage with principle and in a principled fashion. So thats where i would put my emphasis. Applause. Thank you. Yes. My question, professor allen, certainly appreciate your analysis of this. I was just suggest that perhaps it needs to go a tad bit further because the greatest challenge to this union occurred, of course, during the civil war when you had secession and then purportedly everybody was almost at a point, except for john wilkes booth, of moving forward once the gettysburg address was proclaimed and once you had general lee give general grant his sword, and in my view, from what the president who followed lincoln did, i think they should have been impeached. He should have been tried for treason, and what occurred in terms of taking all of the northern troops, the union troops out of the south and allowing the rampage against the former slaves to take place and the horrors that took place for many years thereafter, i think is a betrayal of this these lofty statements that are contained in the forming of this union, and the further betrayal happens to be what has occurred in every war where africanamericans were told you will be free, you will have equal rights, et cetera, and we have riots, murders, ate, taking place thereafter. Do you think that maybe the next step that is important would be to right the wrong of maybe where a lot of folks who were the confederacy just think that, well, lee just gave grant his sword and that was it. He wasnt the president of the confederacy, et cetera, or what would be your thoughts on that in terms of the next steps . Thank you very much. That a very challenging question. So, for me its very important to say that there were multiple political traditions that flowed out of the moment of 1776. So, from the moment of the writing of the declaration you saw the beginning of an Abolition Movement that used the language of the declaration to make its case, and you saw the case of abolition moving forward, pennsylvania, massachusetts, by 1782. All using the language of the declarations. And in the south you have the invention of the cotton gin, which entrenches slavery. Up until the invention of the cotton gin it was reasonable for people to believe, at George Washington did, that slavery was on the way out. Its important to recognize the politics of slavery in the country have not been stable. Its not its been one thing from the beginning all the way through. So, a. There have been multiple traditions. B. , the politics of slavery was powerfully flaked by the invention of the cotton gin, which changed the direct it liked like slavery was headed out and that made it durable so the temperature of the the story of the country is one about tradition contesting with each other, struggling with each other. That is true from the beginning to the present day. Some i dont have Silver Bullet to the answer of the kuo how to take the struggle and move the direction of peace and revolution ump it continues to be hard work but we have to be committed to the idea of achieving peace and resolution. We have be to explicit that every multiple traditions in the country, some are worthy, others are not, and in that regard, we have the hard challenge of helping ourself discard those of our traditions which are not worthy of us. [applause] i was intrigued. I just finished reading your book on our declaration. Thank you. And im tying that in with a book ive written a while back. American epic by similar method was used for the text or both, and so im trying to tie the two im thinking with the linkage is between the catalogue of grievances against the king, and how that fit in with the in other words, no longer when they were going to try to ratify the constitution, they wanted to have rights, not just implied but eanymore rated. Enumerate. Thats why the bill of rights came about and almost like some of the things listed in the list of grievances showed up in the bill of rights. Yep. Thats exactly right. That very well put. If you want too make the list of grieve vans a heck of a lot more fun to read, than it often is for people, notice simply the fact that it actually contains a constitutional theory. The first few complaints are all complaints about the legislative branch of government. And then you get complaints about the Judicial Branch of government. And then you get complaint about the executive power of government. And then, in you get a long list of stuff stuck in by jefferson, his pet peeves. Thats the quebec act, and then at the very end you get complaints about violations of the law of war. That constitutional structure in the list of grievances come from adams. His thoughts on government. The stuff on the quebec act is jeffersons pelt peeves. In the middle, you can see the two minds, the two hands working together, and, yes, the list is bill of rights, its precisely an enumeration of what the put in a negative form in the complains in the declaration which heavens are of course, importantly, that its not the case that first we had the declaration and it about equality, and then we had the constitution and it was about liberty. And those were different things. The documents belong together. They share the same constitutional theory. They are about the union of equality and liberty. Thank you. Were out of time . Thank you so much. Appreciate it. [applause] [inaudible conversations]