During Joe Biden’s short campaign for reelection to the U.S. presidency in 2024, he frequently said that “America is an idea.” His inability to communicate the meaning and significance of that idea is perhaps one of the reasons that his campaign was unsuccessful. He cannot, however, be completely blamed for this, since many contemporary historians have also found it difficult to explain the idea of America, even in its original expression in the Declaration of Independence. Instead, when scholars discuss the declaration, they often minimize the importance of its abstract ideas and focus on its political importance as an announcement of American independence from Great Britain.¹ When they do focus on those abstractions, many historians and political philosophers criticize the founders for their failures to act on them.²

Steven Sarson’s new book, The Course of Human Events, is an example of this phase in the scholarship. He agrees with much recent writing on the declaration that says its primary purpose was to announce the United States’ independence. He argues that the most significant words in the declaration are “when in the course of human events” in the first paragraph rather than the now more famous phrase “all men are created equal” in the second paragraph, and justifies that claim by arguing that the declaration did not represent a radical break with the past, as is often popularly imagined.³ The “first paragraph not only takes the reader from the beginning of time to the present but also looks to the future” (15), he writes. He stresses the continuity of thinking during the tensions with Great Britain, suggesting that the declaration did not represent a novus ordo seclorum. He supports his reading of the document with an extensive history of the arguments of eighteenth-century philosophers, the founding fathers, and legal scholars and historians. His in-depth discussion of the arguments of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abigail Adams, John Dickinson, Richard Bland, and other founders will be valuable to many readers for the ways it illuminates the background of the declaration.

Sarson agrees with the fundamental ideas of equality and liberty in the declaration, but he is harshly critical of what he calls the “creedal” (6) interpretation that imagines the document as the product of a fixed moment in time. The “self-evident truths” of this interpretation, he argues, have “been both a means of perpetuating historical iniquities and an argument for abolishing them” (12). He dedicates his book to showing that the original meanings of the declaration have little to justify them, reminding us that the ideas in the document rationalized and justified the exclusion of Black people, Native Americans, women, and propertyless white men, and “continues to shape the American present . . . to the detriment of many American citizens today” (211). He is not, however, always clear on the distinction between the creedal interpretation and the declaration’s fundamental ideas; which is the baby and which is the bathwater?

In concert with most recent scholars, Sarson holds that John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government” was an important influence on Jefferson and the founding generation. It was widely read and cited in the years before the revolution, and its ideas and even key phrases are nearly identical to those in the declaration.⁴ According to Sarson’s reading, Locke (and subsequently Jefferson and most of the founders) imagined that people in a state of nature enjoyed freedom and equality collectively and not as individuals, and they ceased to enjoy them when people left a state of nature and entered civil society. Neither Locke nor Jefferson, therefore, endorsed  an idea of universal individual rights. The alleged equality espoused in the declaration, Sarson says, only meant equality for white men of property. Furthermore, Locke’s idea that America was a tabula rasa and that Native Americans lived in a state of nature justified the colonists’ right to take their land and put it into productive use.⁵ The land belonged to the colonists who acquired it by “blood and treasure” (46)—that is, through violence and purchase.

Over the course of Sarson’s extensive discussion, he makes a number of curious statements that may raise eyebrows. . . .