The celebration of the 4th of July is more than the coming together of friends and family to share a meal and to watch a fireworks display; it is an opportunity to reflect on the document that set in motion the founding of the United States of America. Cited among the reasons given in the Declaration to dissolve the political bands that existed between the British and those living in the thirteen united states of America are the repeated injuries and usurpations by the King of Great Britain.
The Declaration notes that the King’s actions were contrary to his responsibilities. The excellent legislator, as Aristotle explains in his Politics is: “to see how a city, a family of human beings, and every other sort of partnership will share in the good life and in the happiness that is possible for them” (VII.2). Aristotle’s works certainly informed the thinking of Jefferson, the primary drafter on the committee appointed by Congress for the purpose of drawing up the document.
As he explains the object of the Declaration of Independence in a letter written to Henry Lee (Monticello, May 8, 1825): “All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”
Beyond the contrast that we can draw between the excellent legislator and the King of Great Britain, there are several themes in the Declaration of Independence that are informed by Aristotle’s Politics. In addition to the reference to happiness as among the charges of the excellent legislator, near the end of Aristotle’s discussion of the best regime he explains that “happiness is the actualization and complete practice of virtue” (VII.13). Aristotle explained earlier in the Politics (III.9) that virtue must be a care for every city, thus making a connection between happiness resulting from the virtuous behavior of the citizens and a government providing the conditions for its citizenry to engage in those virtuous activities that lead to happiness. Jefferson, in turn, proclaims in the Declaration that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are among the unalienable rights of all. Jefferson asserts that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men. The actions of the King of Great Britain hindered those living in America to pursue the fundamental right of happiness and thus it was necessary to institute a new government.
Jefferson, like Aristotle, makes an appeal to nature when he calls on the people to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal state to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them. Later philosophers develop the teaching on the natural law, but Aristotle’s teaching on nature, which clearly informs Jefferson, is comprehensive and is included in his works on Physics and Metaphysics as well as Politics and Ethics. Aristotle discusses in the Physics both nature and motion and what is in all human beings that moves them or causes them to act. In the Politics he recognizes the city as existing by nature and that human beings are by nature political animals. “Accordingly, there is in everyone by nature an impulse toward this sort of partnership. And yet the one who first constituted [a city] is responsible for the greatest of goods. For just as man is the best of the animals when completed, when separated from law and adjudication he is the worst of all” (I.2).
Declaring independence from Britain was an act that would set in motion a series of events destined to touch not only the lives of all Americans, but also the lives of many across the Atlantic. Jefferson explains that governments should not be changed for light or transient causes. Regime change is a grave matter requiring serious deliberation. Given Aristotle’s pronouncement that the city exists for living well and that the happiness of the citizenry is dependent not only upon their choices and behaviors, but upon a good political regime that allows for and encourages such conduct, it was of paramount importance that the despotic and tyrannical conditions be ended. Aristotle may not have envisioned a time when a people were so constituted as to be able to make a declaration of independence from a tyrannical regime, but his Politics is a teaching of good government that makes possible the appeal to nature for the exercise of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
These thoughts were written in 2015 in remembrance of a fine teacher, Professor Harry V. Jaffa, who died earlier that year. R. I. P.
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