Danielle Allen and "Our Declaration"

Christopher J. Lebron talks at significant length about Danielle Allen’s emphasis on “introduc[ing] new lessons concerning co-citizenship” (Lebron 131).  Allen explains that rather than focusing on “oneness” in society, we should rather focus on “wholeness” of society by “accept[ing] differences but in which we identify each other as co-participants in the project of ongoing cooperation for the common purpose of upholding democracy, even as we may disagree about how to best secure that vision (Lebron 132).  Thus, Allen explains that we must be willing to work with “others” or “strangers,” in other words, those who believe different things or have different features, as co-participants and co-citizens “for the common purpose of upholding democracy” (Lebron 132). 

Interestingly, last semester, I read one of Danielle Allen’s later books, “Our Declaration.”  In this book, Allen performs a “close reading” of the Declaration of Independence with the ultimate goal of demonstrating its ability to defend equality for all citizens as co-participants in American democracy.  She explains that equality is “the single bond that makes us a community” and she further demonstrates that equality is the most important principle evoked in the Declaration (Allen 23).  She spends the first several chapters of her book talking about the ways in which teaching the Declaration to others is beneficial.  She ultimately concludes that teaching the Declaration is important because it allows every person, regardless of background, to reclaim and transform the role of citizen, “deepen[ing] our capacity for moral reflection” and “grow[ing] as citizens” (Allen 44).  By understanding the language of the Declaration, we are claiming it as ours. 

In particular, Allen talks about teaching the Declaration to a night class of “adult students who were without jobs or working two jobs or stuck in dead-end part-times jobs” (Allen 31).  She explains, “my night students generally entered into the text thinking of it as something that did not belong to them.  It represented instead institutions and power, everything that solidified a world that had, as life turned out, delivered them so much grief, so much to overcome” (Allen 34).  Yet, Allen points out to her students that, on the other hand, the Declaration serves to uphold political equality, “engag[ing] all members of a community equally in the work of creating and constantly re-creating that community” (Allen 34).  With political equality, “citizens become co-creators of their shared world” (Allen 34).  Just as Lebron argues for re-education in order to change our national character, Allen demonstrates that her students “experienced a person metamorphosis” by re-learning the Declaration of Independence, which, in turn, changed the character of her students (Allen 35).  Allen shows that there are ways in which we can be taught to change our personal attitudes, morals, and implicit biases by being “re-educated” about our systems of democracy and of formal equality. With “full public knowledge to aid in the development of being good democratic selves,” Allen supports Lebron’s claim that we “would be better positioned to be effective partners in sharing a scheme of ongoing cooperation” (Allen 146). In this way, Allen would explain, re-education would help bring us closer to "wholeness."