Our Declaration

A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

25 July 2014

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, Singapore and Malaysia, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

Description

Featured on the front page of the New York Times, Our Declaration is already regarded as a seminal work that reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. Combining a personal account of teaching the Declaration with a vivid evocation of the colonial world between 1774 and 1777, Allen, a political philosopher renowned for her work on justice and citizenship reveals our nation’s founding text to be an animating force that not only changed the world more than two-hundred years ago, but also still can. Challenging conventional wisdom, she boldly makes the case that the Declaration is a document as much about political equality as about individual liberty. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Our Declaration is an “uncommonly elegant, incisive, and often poetic primer on America’s cardinal text” (David M. Kennedy).

Reviews

"The book is a tour de force of close textual analysis." — Gordon S. Wood, New York Review of Books

"Our Declaration sets forth a bold thesis… Allen’s passion for each of the Declaration’s 1,337 words is admirable." — Steven B. Smith, New York Times Book Review

"This wise and rich book is what we need in these troubled times—a robust and persuasive defense of equality and liberty grounded in our national scripture. Danielle Allen is a towering political philosopher of the democratic art of being and a force for good!" — Cornel West, author of Democracy Matters: Winning the War on Imperialism

"Danielle Allen celebrates the Declaration of Independence by reading it closely—line by line, comma by comma—and invites her fellow citizens to do the same. The result is a richly rewarding book that demonstrates the pleasures of slow reading, the power of words to shape events, and the importance of equality to democratic life." — Michael Sandel, author of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

"Our Declaration is a primer on all that we have been missing… Not just an invaluable civics lesson but also a poignant personal memoir… Allen is an evangelist for this romantic moment in American history when men of uncommon vision and political deftness stated their case and listed their grievances against the most powerful nation on Earth." — Thane Rosenbaum, The Washington Post

"At once simple, sharp and deftly executed." — Kirkus Reviews

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