The Lockean social contract theory of morality and politics rests on the idea that human beings mentally create social institutions through collective recognition of those institutions as symbolic realities, which Locke identified as the language of "mixed modes." While other animals can mentally create cultural traditions, only human beings have the evolved cognitive capacity to create collective symbolic traditions, because human beings are unique in having 16 billion neurons in their cerebral cortex, which probably gives them the capacity for collective symbolism.
The human capacity for language and symbolism enables us to create a reality by representing that reality in our minds as existing and agreeing among ourselves to accept that reality as existing, which allows us to create a social and institutional reality out of language, symbolism, and collective intentionality.
If Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions. We can see this manifested in the Declaration of Independence, particularly in its famous second paragraph that echoes Locke's Second Treatise ("We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .).
The Declaration of Independence is what John Searle calls a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C." So, for example, a twenty-dollar bill has monetary value as long as we recognize that a twenty-dollar bill (X) counts as currency (Y) in the monetary system of the United States (C). Similarly, the American Revolutionaries declared that "these United Colonies [X] are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States [Y]" in the European system of states [C]. The success of that Declaration depended on whether in their "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," they could persuade world opinion to recognize their status as "Free and Independent States."
Their success depended on both the intellectual persuasiveness of their reasoning in the Declaration and the forceful persuasiveness of their winning the Revolutionary War. Of those people both inside and outside the American colonies who were not persuaded by the intellectual argument of the Declaration, many were persuaded to accept it once the Americans had won the war. Going to war to settle the dispute was what Locke called the "Appeal to Heaven"--the appeal to the "God of Battles."
In March of 1776, the Continental Congress asked for prayers "that it may please the Lord of Hosts, the God of Armies, to animate our officers and soldiers with invincible fortitude." In the following October, King George III issued a Proclamation "putting Our Trust in Almighty God, that he will vouchsafe a Special Blessing on Our Arms, both by Sea and Land" (Shain 2014: 407-408). This is the same as what Abraham Lincoln saw in the Civil War: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other" (Second Inaugural Addess). The "God of Armies" will decide.
The first major victory for the Americans was in the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. When French King Louis XVI saw this, he agreed to a formal Franco-American alliance. This proved to be a turning point in the war (Weddle 2021). If the British had won that battle, that might have been enough to refute the Declaration of Independence. As I have argued in previous posts, there is a sense in which might does make right.
The Continental Congress was a practical demonstration of the truth of the Lockean principles of the Declaration of Independence. Acting in a state of nature, the Congress exercised the Lockean executive power of the law of nature in punishing Great Britain for violating that natural law, in establishing the Continental Army to settle the dispute by force of arms, and in instituting a new government to secure their natural rights.
There are many good objections to my Lockean and Darwinian reading of the Declaration of Independence. And over the years, I have responded to most of them.
But I haven't yet answered in full an objection suggested by David Armitage in his important book--The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. 2026 will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. As its subtitle indicates, Armitage's book is a global history of the Declaration from 1776 to the end of the twentieth century, concentrating mostly on its implications for international law, particularly as expressed in the many "Declarations of Independence" from Vermont in 1777 to Eritrea in 1993. The American Declaration of Independence was the first of over one hundred such declarations over the past 250 years.
Armitage claims that the primary purpose of the Declaration of Independence is prominently stated in the opening and closing sentences of the Declaration. It begins with one long sentence:
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
It concludes:
"We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do."
This shows, Armitage observes, that this was a "document of state-making" declaring that these previously dependent colonies in the British Empire were now free and independent states in the international system of states. "The rest of the Declaration," he explains, "provided only a statement of the abstract principles upon which the assertion of such standing within the international order rested, and an accounting of the grievances that had compelled the United States to assume their independent station among 'the Powers of the Earth'" (17, 66). Therefore, the abstract principles in the second paragraph (about the rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness") were "strictly subordinate to these claims regarding the rights of states, and were taken to be so by contemporaries, when they deigned to notice the assertions of individual rights at all" (17).
But notice that in the first sentence, it's "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" that "entitle" this "one people" to claim a "separate and equal station" among "the Powers of the Earth." And so, the immediately following paragraph ("We hold these truths . . .") explains exactly how the Laws of Nature and Nature's God "entitle" them to become free and independent states. Even Armitage says that their claims to independent statehood "rest upon" these principles, which provide the foundation for their claims. This denies his attempt to denigrate the second paragraph as unimportant or dispensable, because this paragraph constitutes the indispensable ground for entitling them to independence as states.
At the end of the Declaration, the Continental Congress claimed to act "in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies" to declare that the colonies are "Free and Independent States." But the Congress had no legal authority under British law to do this. Their authority came from the Laws of Nature and Nature's God, as stated in the second paragraph, that entitled them to secure the "unalienable Rights" of men by exercising the "Right of the People" to "alter or abolish" a government that fails to secure their natural rights and "to institute new Government . . . as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
As I have argued, not only the second paragraph but the whole of the Declaration of Independence echoes the language and principles of Locke's Second Treatise of Government. This is certainly true for the Declaration's claims about "free and independent states." In the state of nature, men are "by Nature, all free, equal, and independent," and no one can be subjected to the political power of another without his consent (ST, 95). But while once people have formed political societies by consent, they have left the state of nature, the governments they have formed are in themselves in a state of nature: "all Princes and Rulers of Independent Governments all through the World, are in a State of Nature" (ST, 14). These governments can enter into international agreements by mutual consent, but as long as they are politically independent of one another, they are in an international state of nature, and each government is naturally equal and independent.
This Lockean understanding of the law of nature in the international state of nature was elaborated in Emer de Vattel's Law of Nations in 1758:
"Nations being composed of men naturally free and independent, and who, before the establishment of civil societies, lived together in the state of nature,--nations or sovereign states are to be considered as so many free persons living together in the state of nature."
"It is a settled point with writers on the natural law, that al men inherit from nature a perfect liberty and independence, of which they cannot be deprived without their own consent. In a state, the individual citizens do not enjoy them fully and absolutely, because they have made a partial surrender of them to the sovereign. But the body of the nation, the state, remains absolutely free and independent with respect to all other men, all other nations, as long as it has not voluntarily submitted to them" (Vattel 2008: 68).
Armitage recognizes Vattel's book as "the standard text on the subject in Europe and the Americas for more than half a century," and thus the best guide to the American understanding of how people can claim the rights and powers of "free and independent states" as rooted in the law of nature. But he does not recognize how this contradicts his argument that the appeal to the law of nature in the Declaration's second paragraph is unnecessary for the primary purpose of the Declaration in declaring independence for the United States in the international system of states.
Armitage also argues that the many declarations of independence after 1776 show the unimportance of the second paragraph of the Declaration in the global history of the document: "The earliest imitations of the Declaration in Europe and beyond set the pattern for most later documents by taking the Declaration's opening and closing sentences as their template while overlooking the self-evident truths of the second paragraph" (113). Surveying the more than one hundred such documents, he says that "relatively few . . . contained a declaration of individual rights that paralleled the second paragraph of the American Declaration" (104).
But Armitage's reader should notice that of the ten declarations that he reproduces in his book, seven contain passages that echo the language of the second paragraph (187, 199, 205, 211-12, 217-18, 227-29, 231, 239-40). For example, the Manifesto of the Province of Flanders (January 4, 1790) opens by saying; "Since it has pleased Divine Providence to restore our natural rights of liberty and independence by severing the bonds that once fastened us to a Prince and House whose domination was ever harmful to the interests of Flanders, we feel obliged to recount for present and future generations the events which inspired and accomplished this happy Revolution" (187). The Declaration of Independence by the People of Texas (March 2, 1836) appeals to "the first law of nature, the right of self-preservation, the inherent and inalienable right of the people to appeal to first principles, and take their political affairs into their own hands in extreme cases, enjoins it as a right toward themselves, and a sacred obligation to their posterity, to abolish such government, and create another in its stead, calculated to rescue them from impending dangers, and to secure their welfare and happiness" (212).
Even those declarations that do not explicitly speak of the "natural rights of liberty and independence" do implicitly assume the natural right to government by consent of the governed and the right to overthrow governments that do not secure the natural rights of the people. After all, any group of people who declare their independence from an established government and their right to establish a new government are engaged in an extralegal act that can only be justified by an implicit appeal to a natural right beyond positive law.
REFERENCES
Armitage, David. 2007. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Shain, Barry Alan, ed. 2014. The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context: American State Papers, Petitions, Proclamations, and Letters of the Delegates to the First National Congress. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Vattel, Emer de. 2008. The Law of Nations. Eds. Bela Kapossy and Richard Whatmore. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Weddle, Kevin J. 2021. The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
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