The Virtues of a Radical Experiment
On August 2, 1776, there were no fireworks in Philadelphia. No bells, no bonfires, no toasts drunk to the honest whigs of America. The delegates of the Continental Congress simply filed forward, one by one, to set their names to an engrossed parchment, the Declaration of Independence most of them had voted for nearly a month before. The moment we imagine as a single thunderclap of July 4 was quieter and more demanding: a commitment, renewed signature by signature, by men who knew they were pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to an uncertain cause.
That gap between the celebration and the commitment is, the subject of this week’s episode of Acton Line. My friend and mentor Bradley J. Birzer, the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College, and I talked about his new book, The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty. It arrives in this semiquincentennial year as a welcome invitation to read our founding document again in the company of the people who wrote it.
We are accustomed to reading the Declaration as a lawyer’s brief against George III or a philosopher’s argument for natural rights. Birzer does not deny it is both. But he insists it is something more: a moral document that embodies a people capable of virtue with a robust traditions of self-government.
They inherited these traditions above all from Cicero. They knew his writings intimately. His Roman republic haunted their imaginations as model and warning. Republics are fragile things. Rights alone do not sustain them. It takes citizens formed in prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude to keep a republic once you have one. In our conversation, Birzer traces how these classical virtues are not merely background to the Declaration but woven into its very structure and argument.
Birzer’s boldest claim is that what Christianity accomplished theologically in proclaiming human dignity, the Declaration accomplished, or would eventually accomplish, politically.
Our conversation also takes up the dramatic narrative at the heart of the book—the crowded months from 1774 through 1776, the debates in Congress, Jefferson’s drafting and the revisions that followed, and the controversy the Declaration attracted from the moment the ink dried. The document we now treat as self-evident was anything but self-evident to its first readers.
That, perhaps, is the most useful lesson of the semiquincentennial. Two hundred fifty years on, we are tempted to treat the Declaration as a finished monument, something to be admired and then returned to its case. The signers knew better. The Declaration they signed was not a conclusion but a beginning, a radical experiment that would demand of them, and of every generation after them, the republican virtues it presupposed. The fireworks belong to July 4. The work belongs to every day after.
Listen to my full conversation with Brad Birzer on Acton Line: