Happy Independence Day

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. — Thomas Jefferson, United States Declaration of Independence

I expect the overwhelming majority of English-speakers in the world will be at least vaguely familiar with the sentence above, the start of the second section of the Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Second Continental Congress on 4.vii.1776. They are probably the most recognisable version of a concept that had emerged by the mid-18th century in much European political philosophy, which owed its origins to the argument of the 17th-century English writer John Locke that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions”.

Locke’s position found its way into several US documents before the Declaration of Independence, not least the Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted in George Mason’s formulation by the Virginia Convention of Delegates on 12.vi.1776, which includes the following:

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

This phrasing is altogether broader and more intricate than the famous equivalent, based on a more succinct version, “life, liberty and property”, that appears in the Declaration of Colonial Rights, a resolution of the First Continental Congress of 5.ix.1774.

It is common knowledge that the American rebels’ successful defeat of the British forces inspired the French Revolution that followed it only a few years later, and the tripartite motto evolved into liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, brotherhood) in France and “peace, order and good government” as a guiding principle in the parliaments of several Commonwealth countries, most notably Canada. The exact phrase was incorporated into Chapter III, Article 13 of the 1947 Constitution of Japan, and Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has the very similar stipulation that “[e]veryone has the right to life, liberty and security of person”.

What is interesting here is quite what a range of other principles are listed alongside liberty as the perceived ‘unalienable rights’ of mankind. Starting with Locke, health can, I suppose, be retermed ‘good quality of life’, which is embodied in, and could probably be subsumed into, most modern definitions of what the US Declaration refers to as ‘Life’. This leaves possessions, or property, from which derive the property rights so fiercely defended by libertarians like Robert Nozick – what is fascinating and telling in equal measure is that the Declaration of Colonial Rights lists property as the third crucial element instead of the pursuit of happiness, while the Virginia Declaration includes both terms. Given the chronology of the three documents, it would perhaps not be unreasonable to hypothesise that the Founding Fathers debated which of the two was more important as a complaint to be held against the British Crown – a brief skim through some of the more prominent subsequent US cases that have referred back to the famous hendiatris seems to indicate that the possession of personal property came to be seen an implicit condition without which the pursuit of happiness is impossible, or at least severely impeded. Also, I suppose, the textual change was made to allow for cases in which the forcible reallocation of property ownership is necessary to achieve the pursuit of happiness – a shift from a libertarian slant to a more utilitarian one.

Equally as intriguing is the progression from the US phrase to the French variant – liberty is still included, but life and happiness have been replaced with equality and brotherhood. Equality has strong connotations of social redistributivism, or at least the deference of property rights to a conception that status as an equalisandum is a social ideal. Brotherhood is an odd term, although I guess the implications it is supposed to embody are ones of mutual equal treatment and respect, communitarianism and implicit duties of care and concern between citizens. The theorists that derived these two concepts would, I expect, argue that quality of life and happiness will automatically be maximised in a society that safeguards equality and communitarianism – much as Jefferson and the others thought that right to property is an inherent part of the pursuit of happiness.

In many ways, I think that the two mottos of the American and French Revolutions are indicative of one of the major divides that have characterised political thought: the American version highlights (in its original versions more explicitly) the need for citizens to have some base of personal property to act as material extensions of the self, from which to evolve aspirations and by which to measure satisfaction and achievement; the French version instead stresses the need for some sense of shared community or commonality within any societal structure, even at the most basic level of inter-citizen interactions. At the purest level, equality and respect for property rights are extremely hard to reconcile – and then only with restrictions on the definition of each one – but nonetheless it is probably worth remembering on days like today that the ability to debate such distinctions is exactly what the revolutionaries in Europe and America fought and died for. On which note, have a happy Independence Day!

~ by Marius Ostrowski on July 4, 2009.