Galtland Index

The Declaration of Independence

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The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence (4 July 1776), drafted principally by Thomas Jefferson, is the natural-rights tradition’s most consequential political statement. Where Locke argued the theory, the Declaration enacted it — turning natural law into the founding creed of a state. (Not to be confused with Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, the cypherpunk echo also in this wiki.)

The Argument

The document’s force is concentrated in its second paragraph, which states the Lockean syllogism as self-evident:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”

— The Declaration of Independence (1776)

The core argument is Lockean: rights are natural and prior to government (Jefferson’s “unalienable” tracks Locke’s “life, health, liberty, or possessions”); government is instrumental, instituted to secure pre-existing rights; its authority rests on consent; and a government that turns against those rights forfeits its claim, justifying the right of revolution. (Locke was not Jefferson’s only influence, but the rights-and-consent spine is his.) The long bill of particulars against George III that follows is the factual case that this forfeiture had occurred.

Place in This Wiki

The Declaration is where the wiki’s natural-law lineage becomes practice. It draws its core argument directly from Locke and is defended and radicalized by Paine. It also marks a boundary the libertarian tradition keeps testing: the Declaration’s natural-rights premises underwrite the whole anti-state critique, even as the state it founded becomes, for later figures like Spooner, an institution that failed to honor them. Jefferson is used here for this single canonical text, not as a full author profile.

See Also

  • Natural Law and Natural Order - the tradition this document enacts
  • Second Treatise of Government - Locke’s theory the Declaration applies
  • Rights of Man - Paine’s revolutionary defense of the same natural-rights creed
  • Lysander Spooner - later individualist who turned the Declaration’s premises against the state it founded
  • Thomas Paine - Short author reference for Thomas Paine (1737–1809), the Anglo-American revolutionary pamphleteer whose Common Sense helped spark the American Revolution and whose Rights of Man carried

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