A Different Idea of Our Declaration

Gordon S. Wood

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality
by Danielle Allen
Liveright, 315 pp., $27.95

This is a strange and remarkable book. There must be dozens of books on the Declaration of Independence written from every conceivable point of view—historical, political, theoretical, philosophical, and textual—but no one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one. If we read the Declaration of Independence slowly and carefully, Danielle Allen believes, then the document can become a basic primer for our democracy. It can be something that all of us—not just scholars and educated elites but common ordinary people—can participate in, and should participate in if we want to be good democratic citizens.