Natural Rights, the Common Good, and the American Revolution

July 4, 2026, will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and, therefore, of the United States of America. Much was new about the American republic when the founders launched it. Theirs was among the first successful colonial revolts in the known history of the world. It created the first modern democracy and modeled a new form of liberal republicanism that had barely been theorized, let alone enacted before. But the founding was also distinct, and the nation it brought forth has been, too, for its rootedness in a particular philosophy of society and ultimately of the human person.

The Declaration of Independence was a political statement, and the founding was a political act, but both were therefore also inextricably connected to a set of philosophical principles. And in declaring those ideas, the founders of the United States also declared them to be rooted in a conception of nature. “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle” the nations of the world to assume separate and equal stations among one another. Those laws, in turn, point to a set of propositions about the character of politics and of society. The Declaration states these compactly and powerfully in its famous second paragraph:

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, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This declaration of principles invites a host of questions. Just what is the connection between these truths and the right by which nature and God are said to entitle nations to independence? And just what is their connection, in turn, to the relations of individual citizens and their societies? The rights with which all men are said to be endowed seem at first glance like purely individual rights, yet the Declaration of Independence speaks on behalf of a nation and asserts that each nation derives its right to its place in the world from some natural and divine source. Nations are said to be equal just as individuals are. What connects these two bearers of rights—the individual and the community—and which is prior and preeminent?

These questions and countless related ones have given form to the politics of the United States since the founding, and they were of course crucial to what brought about the founding to begin with. They are essential to better understanding the character of our society, yet they remain perplexing and demanding.  

Better understanding the character of our society is precisely the purpose of the American Enterprise Institute’s “We Hold These Truths: America at 250” initiative, an ambitious celebration of the founding, of which this volume forms a part. Over several years leading up to the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are inviting scholars both within AEI and from other institutions to take up a series of themes important to understanding the American Revolution. These scholars represent a variety of fields and viewpoints, so they will approach each of these themes from various angles. The papers they produce will be published in a series of edited volumes intended to help Americans think more deeply and clearly about our nation’s origins, character, and prospects.

Natural Rights, the Common Good, and the American Revolution is the fourth of those books. Its chapters began as papers presented at an AEI conference held in Washington, DC, on December 2, 2024. Other volumes in the series consider the American Revolution in relation to other themes, such as democracy, religion, the legacy of slavery, and the Constitution. In each case, our goal is to help reintroduce readers to their nation’s history, thereby enabling them to maturely appreciate the reasons for celebrating the extraordinary milestone of its 250th anniversary.

In the chapters that follow, five eminent scholars of history, philosophy, law, and government consider how we ought to understand the place of natural rights and the meaning of the common good in the American Revolution and the life of the nation it produced.

Robert P. George lays out the natural law foundations of the arguments advanced in the Declaration and sketches the ideal of the common good that emerges from considering the founding in their light. 

Charles R. Kesler examines the ways in which the text of the Declaration of Independence was altered by its assorted congressional editors and shows how these changes highlight the Declaration’s classical character and purpose.

Michael Zuckert details the structure and substance of the argument put forward in the Declaration’s immortal second paragraph. He suggests that it marks not only the document’s philosophical premises but also its political ambition.

Daniel E. Burns contends that attributing the political philosophy of the Declaration and the founding primarily to John Locke misrepresents both Locke and the founders—and so obscures the genius of American political ideas rather the clarifying it.

And Janice Rogers Brown elucidates the founders’ conception of the pursuit of happiness. She explores how our nation has strayed from that conception and so has too often put happiness, properly understood, beyond our reach.

The scope of these arguments helps to show just how foundational the questions surrounding natural rights and the common good are to the American political tradition, and so how essential they are to what we celebrate when we mark the 250th anniversary of our extraordinary nation.

During the first presidential administration of Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked me to assist in the creation of a commission to reevaluate the concept of human rights as it functions in United States foreign and diplomatic policy. The promotion of human rights abroad—and the deployment of the United States’ soft and hard power in behalf of human rights—has sat at the center of State Department policy for much of the post–World War II era. Our task, to quote the commission’s notice of establishment in the Federal Register, was twofold: to identify where the department’s human rights discourse had “departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights” and to propose reforms to recover the historic understanding of human rights.¹

Given the ideological sympathies of many State Department career employees, I was not surprised when news of the commission’s creation was leaked to the hostile press. Critics on the left attacked the very idea of the commission, mostly by repeating the same cynical (and tired, having been refuted many times) notion that a robust and reason-based account of human rights grounded in timeless principles of natural law was nothing more than a pretext for smuggling sectarian, irrational, and blindly dogmatic religious doctrines into American public policy. In The New Republic, for example, Alexis Papazoglou wrote that political arguments based on natural law theory are rooted in “theological” sources that “tend to obscure the political agendas of those invoking them,” while the LGBTQ magazine Advocate published an article titled “Is State Department’s ‘Natural Law’ Effort Code for Homophobia?”² 

But in his quest to dismiss natural law theory and a natural law account of human rights as medieval religious dogma that should not be taken seriously in the 21st century, Papazoglou made the important observation that

the wording in the State Department’s announcement of this new Commission on Unalienable Rights implies the premise that international human rights have expanded over the years to include rights that would not be recognized under the tradition of natural law and of natural rights embodied in the U.S.’s eighteenth-century founding documents.³

Exactly. That overreach—the detachment of human rights from any rigorous philosophical substance or comprehensive vision of human goods and human flourishing, with the accompanying marginalization of the understanding of human rights that the founders endorsed in, above all, the Declaration of Independence—was precisely what the State Department commission was intended to identify and rectify. Its mission was to correct the ideologically motivated redefinition of human rights—or, to use the traditional term that invokes the concept’s philosophical origins, natural rights—that viewed rights as rooted in nothing more than ill-defined and highly abstract notions of autonomy, self-determination, self-authorship, and the ability to fulfill one’s desires (whether those desires are rational and morally defensible or not).

Having spent the better part of 25 years editing the Claremont Review of Books, I am happy to confess an occupational bias. This would be a better world if we had more and better editors. In their absence, without their authority, book publishing, journalism, politics, and the web have grown anarchical and ugly. The world grows hyper-Protestant—every man his own priest and editor, or non-editor. All id and no ego or superego.

Although editors are not perfect, at their best they introduce an element of reflection, circumspection, and regard for the audience and the argument that even the best authors could use from time to time. This is true even of Thomas Jefferson, “Author of the Declaration of American Independence,” as he styled himself on his tombstone, one of the three accomplishments he thought worthy of inclusion there. (The other two were author of “the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom” and “Father of the University of Virginia.” He discreetly omitted president of the United States, vice president, US secretary of state, governor of Virginia, and other, lesser achievements.)

Properly speaking, however, Jefferson was not author but draftsman of the Declaration, inasmuch as he drafted it as an official paper of, and for, the Second Continental Congress. He refrained from using the definite article and calling himself “the” author because he served as one of five members of the committee appointed by the Congress to produce a declaration of independence, which the Congress edited and then ratified. He didn’t call himself its “principal” author, either, presumably because, as Thomas Hobbes wrote, shared honors are diminished. So he left it at the proud but slightly ambiguous or even misleading “Author of the Declaration of American Independence.” To be fair, Jefferson was not always so possessive about his authorship. In his famous letter commenting on the subject, he wrote to Henry Lee on May 8, 1825:

All American Whigs thought alike on these subjects. when forced therefore to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. this was the object of the Declaration of Independance . . . to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; [in] terms so plain and firm, as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independant stand we were compelled to take. . . . It was intended to be an expression of the american mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. all it’s authority rests then on the harmonising sentiments of the day, whether expressed, in conversns in letters, printed essays or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney Etc.¹

Fascinating in several respects, that letter traces the Declaration’s authority not to Jefferson’s role as its author but to “the harmonising sentiments of the day,” including the sentiments of at least four authors of “elementary books of public right,” and, it seems, common sense, none of them American. Jefferson is the advocate who arranges and pleads the American case before the jury of mankind.

The story of how the Declaration was drafted and edited has been well told—so far as we understand it, for there are still gaps in our knowledge of the process—by Carl Becker in his classic The Declaration of Independence: A Study on the History of Political Ideas (1922) and 75 years later by Pauline Maier in her impressive American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997). But the story does not draw out its own implications. In this chapter, I ponder the significance of Jefferson’s draft and the editorial changes to it that yielded the official text—and especially their significance for the understanding of natural rights and the common good in the American Revolution.

Strictly speaking, the document we call the Declaration of Independence is misnamed. The actual or official declaration of independence occurred on July 2, 1776, when the Second Continental Congress adopted the resolution for independence introduced a month earlier by Virginian Richard Henry Lee. The relevant part of Lee’s resolution was incorporated in the July 4 document near its end:

That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.

What then is the so-called Declaration of Independence? The opening sentence of that document announces its aim: Acting with “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” the Americans propose to “declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” A better title for our document, then, would be “The Declaration of the Causes Which Impel the Americans to Declare Independence.”

The Structure of the Declaration

As a declaration of causes meant to explain and justify the Americans in the eyes of the world in terms of “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” the Declaration of Independence (let us stick to its traditional title) intended to show the “causes” in the sense of the impelling reasons for the Americans’ actions and the “causes” in the sense of moral justification for their action. The Declaration thus contains not only much historical information relating to the recent relations between Britain and the colonies but also a general theory of political right meant to show the colonists to be justified even in the eyes of “the Supreme Judge of the world.”

This justificatory intention dictates the general structure of the Declaration. It takes the form of a long but recognizable syllogism. After an opening paragraph announcing the authors’ intention in the document, the Declaration proceeds to lay out the major premises of its argument, presented here as “truths” held to be “self-evident” by the colonists, the final one of which proclaims that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [for which government is instituted], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

Following this major premise is a series of “Facts . . . submitted to a candid world,” purporting to show that the government under which the British held the colonies was one that was indeed “destructive of these ends.” If that is so, then the conclusion, introduced by the word “therefore,” “that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States,” follows with the logical necessity of a geometric proof. Contrary to the opinion of some scholars that the parts of the Declaration are disparate and of unequal importance, the main parts—the theory of rightful government contained in the major premises of the second paragraph and the list of grievances comprising the minor premise—are integrally connected and equally essential to accomplishing the aim of the document.¹

I begin with the syllogistic character of the Declaration, for too often this is missed and the various ideas present in it, especially in its second or theoretical paragraph, are taken as separate nuggets and interpreted in a free-floating way, independently of the rest. This is particularly true of such resonant ideas as the first of the so-called self-evident truths: “All men are created equal.” Throughout American history, this phrase has been treated as especially important, and many of the hopes and aspirations of various political movements have been projected onto these five words. Most notable, probably, has been Abraham Lincoln’s quotation of them in his best-known speech: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This was a prelude to his call for a “new birth of freedom,”² to be effected through the liberation of the enslaved persons he had begun to achieve in his Emancipation Proclamation.

When Americans in 1789 heard of France’s new revolution, many assumed it was a logical successor to their own. Both revolutions seemed to be born from the same new Enlightenment-era consciousness of the universal and natural rights of man. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen even contained many echoes of their own Declaration of Independence. But within a few years, they were wondering, as many generations have since wondered, how the world’s second natural rights revolution could have gone so poorly after the first had produced such impressive results.

We can find three very different and characteristic answers to that question in the writings of three of that period’s greatest political actors. If we begin with a quick look at those three different views of the relation between the French and American Revolutions, we can better see what remains at stake today as we inquire into the meaning of the American Declaration’s natural rights teaching.

Edmund Burke drew a sharper distinction between the American and French Revolutions than perhaps any other thinker of the period. He consistently supported the Americans’ demands against Britain, defended their decision to declare independence, believed Britain was on the wrong side of the Revolutionary War, and insisted that he would rather have America as an independent ally than subjugate it by force.¹ This is not to say that he defended the text of our actual Declaration. The “declaration of independency” that he defends appears to be the one-line declaration of July 2—not the more memorable one of July 4, which Burke never mentioned in public.

We can infer what Burke must have thought about the Declaration’s natural rights language from what he did say, in 1774–75, as the colonists increasingly justified their resistance to Great Britain by appealing to abstract principles of political right. Burke treated these appeals with benevolent condescension. He said that most citizens would never be interested in such abstract political principles unless they were provoked by some concrete grievance. In this case, that grievance was Parliament’s novel and imprudent attempts to tax the Americans. So as soon as Parliament repealed all American taxes, the Americans’ seeming concern for abstract principles, “born of our unhappy contest, will die along with it.”² At the same time, Burke honored the principles that the Americans were actually acting on—because he thought they were traditional British constitutional principles, not metaphysical abstractions about the rights of man.³

When it came to the French, however, Burke seemed convinced that they really were acting on those metaphysical abstractions. Hence he wrote his longest book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, as a radical attack on not just the French Revolution but the deeper principles animating it. He even managed to predict (almost a decade before he or any Englishman knew the name of Napoléon) that, by acting on those principles, France would soon bring itself under a military dictatorship.⁴

Burke particularly objected to any attempt to confuse these newfangled, abstract, natural rights principles with the traditional British constitutional principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Nearly the first quarter of his book was devoted to rebutting his countryman Richard Price, who had just published a pamphlet identifying the French revolutionary natural rights theory with the principles of their own Glorious Revolution.⁵ And although Burke was too tactful to say it, Price was following there the interpretation of the Glorious Revolution originally given by John Locke. Locke had boldly asserted, in the 1689 preface to his Two Treatises of Government, that his own abstract natural rights theory would provide the true justification for William III’s recently successful revolution. According to Burke, then, the main difference between the American and French revolutionaries was this: Although angry Americans may sometimes have been driven to use Lockean language, only the French really acted on Lockean principles.

A translucent decal on the window of a muscular truck in the parking lot of a rural community center looks like a humble homage to the Constitution. Not quite. Though it begins by proclaiming, in the beautiful familiar script, “We the People,” it concludes with a combative three-word coda: “have had enough.”

It is a motto that could speak for a lot of Americans in our time, who have come to the view that what they want and take to be good is not what the people in charge of our civilization are after. Many Americans are not just unhappy; they are frustrated, angry, maddened, and fearful of the lumbering Leviathan that seems to control every aspect of their lives. They long ago lost their polite, fair-minded, always-for-the-underdog naivete. A sizable majority can relate to Fannie Lou Hamer’s poignant riff about trying to live under the South’s Jim Crow laws: “Tired,” she said. “Sick and tired. . . . And sick and tired of being sick and tired.”¹ They are no longer innocent. They understand how the rule of a self-righteous elite rubs the heart raw, how easily political compassion’s shreds and patches allow the scarifications of contempt to show through. They increasingly have the sense that what governing elites around the world mean by happiness is nothing the American founders would deem worthy of pursuit.

William Blackstone contended that God had “so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual” that “obedience to this on one paternal precept, ‘that man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness,’” is “the foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law.”² The members of the founding generation had in mind a very specific notion of the pursuit of happiness—one that was inseparable from virtue. Their view was a unique synthesis of classical political philosophy, the Christian natural law tradition, the English common law, the republican natural rights tradition, and the insights of the commonsense philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Thus, they defined happiness as the pursuit of virtue—as being good, rather than feeling good.³

An abundance of evidence makes clear that the American founders sought to establish a nation that relied on these essential concepts. Without their revival, the revival of our national civic project is unimaginable.

Self-Evident Truth

America is an exceptional nation. It found the sweet spot: that space equidistant from Homo sapiens and homo deus. Kermit the Frog used to tell us, with a wry crimp of his fabric lips, “It’s not easy being green.” We understood his need to flourish in his frogginess. We could have added our own baleful note to that chorus. It is not easy being human. Our deepest vulnerability is our vanity. The longest distance between two places may be time, but the longest distance between civilization and barbarity, between freedom and tyranny, between human flourishing and human failure, is hubris.

Americans were reminded from the pulpit that “liberty was an inalienable right according to the Natural Law of Creation.”⁴ These ideas constituted our constitutional premises. Consistent with these natural law premises, the founders “believed that certain aspects of human nature were immutable and that they tightly constrain what is politically and culturally possible.”⁵ The Declaration of Independence contains what philosopher Leszek Kolakowski described as “the most famous single sentence ever written in the Western Hemisphere.”⁶ It starts with us and ends with happiness: “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.” The founders really believed that most famous statement about human beings being equal in the eyes of God and before the law. Kolakowski acknowledges that most of the writers and thinkers—ancient and modern—who have shaped the political imagination of the West reject this notion of equality.⁷ And, on the eve of the nation’s 250th birthday, what the founding documents meant by equality remains a hotly contested issue.