How the Declaration of Independence Shaped Freedom Worldwide

A review of The Promise of America: Reflections on Our Enduring Ideals by various authors; 208 pages; Simon & Schuster (May 2026)

As the semiquincentennial of the American founding neared, a number of excellent books on the watershed events of 1776 were loosed upon the world. Titles like Michael Auslin’s National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, Sarah M.S. Pearsall’s Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution, and H.W. Brands’s American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington filled bookstores while their authors toured the podcast circuit. But one book in this recent glut stood out for its clarity, brevity, honesty, and inspiration.

The Promise of America: Reflections on Our Enduring Ideals is a compendium of seventeen essays issued by the National Constitution Centre, and it features reflections on the founding of the United States by some of the country’s most eminent historians, jurists, writers, and scholars. Readers intimately knowledgeable about the Declaration of Independence and those lacking familiarity with America’s foundational document will both find its insights rewarding. “We are a Nation, not of a single racially similar people,” former Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer writes in his foreword to the collection. “We are a Nation where very different kinds of people live together under legal and ethical documents.”

The Declaration of Independence, in particular, has anchored the American project for a quarter-millennium and served as a model for dozens of other countries. Reflecting on that document at its fiftieth anniversary in 1826, president John Quincy Adams (the son of the second US president John Adams) proclaimed that “the one people of the United States of America, became one separate sovereign independent power, assuming an equal station among the nations of the earth.” The Declaration laid the foundations for this project with an immortal line that the prolific biographer Walter Isaacson has described as “the greatest sentence ever written”: “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.” Within those 35 words, and the document they introduced, lay the blueprint for the unique country that the United States became.

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What exactly does the term “self-evident” mean here? In the original draft, Jefferson had described Americans’ natural rights as “sacred and undeniable,” but Benjamin Franklin deleted those words in favour of self-evident. In his contribution to The Promise of America, Isaacson recounts a 1771 visit by Franklin to see the Scottish philosopher David Hume at his home in Edinburgh. Hume had developed a theory of two types of truth: one that depends on empirical evidence and observations, and another that is true by definition or by reason alone. “Propositions of this kind,” Hume wrote of the latter category, “are discoverable by the mere operation of thought.” Franklin absorbed this distinction and applied it to the situation at hand. Determining that all Americans were created equal did not require empirical observation, it could be derived from reason alone. Isaacson shows how this notion found expression a month before the Declaration’s drafting in Virginia’s own Declaration of Rights, which stated that all men were “created equally free and independent.”

What kind of “liberty” did the founders want citizens of the new nation to enjoy? Did they conceive of a negative “freedom from” or did they embrace a broader and more positive “freedom to”? Princeton University’s Robert P. George argues that liberty, as articulated in the Declaration, “consists of persons freely engaging in the pursuit of self-mastery and the cultivation of authentic human goods.” America’s founding document empowered citizens to act civically, to flourish, to pursue the highest good for themselves and for society. Many of these liberties, however, struggled to find expression in the Constitution when it was drafted in 1787. Boston College Law Professor Mary Sarah Bilder reminds us that Hamilton, in Federalist 84, believed bills of rights protected the people against kings but were unnecessary in governments of the people themselves. Only years after the Constitution had been ratified did the first ten amendments enshrining critical rights to speech, religion, and a trial by jury finally come to fruition.

A spirit of virtue infused the “pursuit of happiness,” one of the core rights to which all humans are entitled. Far from a superficial, consumerist version of pleasure, happiness, according to the founders, resembled what Aristotle called eudaimonia: fulfilment, satisfaction, completeness. George calls this “felicity,” “all-round well-being,” and “flourishing.” Jeffrey Rosen (no relation), the CEO Emeritus of the National Constitution Center and author of the excellent 2024 book The Pursuit of Happiness, quotes Jefferson, who invoked Cicero: “If the Wise be the happy man, as these sages say, he must be virtuous too, for without virtue, happiness cannot be.” The founders practiced what they preached, too: Franklin devised a list of thirteen virtues and took care to recap them each and every day of his twenties with an inventory of whether he’d lived up to them.

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Securing the rights demanded by the Declaration, its authors argued, required governments “instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In an illuminating exploration of this idea, the late decorated historian Gordon Wood contends that “the Americans in 1776 meant the people giving their consent to the actions of government through the process of representation.” The colonists did not directly elect members of the House of Commons, which was de rigueur in Britain at the time. Even though many Englishmen lacked the right to vote, they were nevertheless considered “represented” by the members of parliament responsible for their constituency. In the colonies, however, the budding American people had become used to electing local, municipal, and colony-wide representatives directly. “Their different and more recent experience in creating coherent electoral districts had led them to a belief in what they called actual representation,” Wood writes. As this practice diverged further from that of Mother England, it became increasingly clear to the colonials that the Crown’s governance did not involve consent, properly understood.

And what meaning should we give to the words “one people,” which appear in the Declaration’s opening 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…”? In a creative chapter annotating the Declaration itself, the esteemed Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar and his student Samarth Desai show how Jefferson and John C. Calhoun believed that states retained the right to nullify congressional acts and to secede from the Union. Indeed, until the Civil War, the United States thought of themselves as a plural noun, only adopting the singular form after hundreds of thousands had perished in the conflagration.

Most challengingly, how should we interpret “all men are created equal”? Women and blacks did not merit inclusion in this dictate, given the tenor of the times, although some of the founders had broader intentions in mind. Still, these men did not live to see their vision fulfilled, especially as slavery loomed over their debates and undermined the universality they purported to attach to the value of freedom. Even Jefferson, who himself owned slaves and did not manumit them upon his death, disliked the “peculiar institution” and detested the slave trade. An early draft of the Declaration described the latter practice as a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended [the king].”

In the end, setting noble goals that are unrealised beats the alternative. “It is not a surprise that the Founders often fell short of their own ideals of moral perfection,” Rosen writes. “But what is a surprise is the seriousness with which they took the quest, on a daily basis, to become more perfect.” In a thoughtful epilogue, Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch observes that the Declaration represents something like a national report card: “at any point in history, the American people can assess how well we are living up to the Declaration’s promises—and what challenges remain.”

The “separation of powers” was not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence but it followed from its principles. It encompassed both horizontal divisions, as between the legislative, judicial, and executive powers of the federal government, as well as a vertical separation between federal and state authorities. In his essay exploring the former, my American Enterprise Institute colleague Yuval Levin cites Montesquieu, who wrote in his 1748 Spirit of the Laws that when government’s powers “are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.” And in his contribution chronicling the latter, appellate judge Jeffrey Sutton cites this federalism as “the central compromise that allowed thirteen skeptical states to ratify the Constitution in 1788.” He invokes Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who described the states as laboratories conducting “novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

The promise of the Declaration reverberated throughout the world, inspiring a wave of similar founding documents in Greece (1822), Belgium (1830), New Zealand (1835), Liberia (1847), and Hungary (1848). Even Ho Chi Minh adopted the individual rights set forth in the “greatest sentence ever written” almost verbatim, though he clothed it in a cosmopolitan coat: “In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.” In 1948, my current home, the State of Israel, announced its own Declaration of Independence; David Ben-Gurion and his co-authors consulted a printed copy of the American Declaration as they drafted their own.

As we mark 250 momentous years since Americans achieved their independence, we should marvel at the promises our courageous founders made and the considerable progress their descendants have made in fulfilling them—and in inspiring others around the world.