Troubling, The U.S. Declaration of Independence
- - on 07/04/2015
Modern, recent, European, the concept of the human being as a rights bearing subject dates only from around the seventeenth century. This in itself isn’t troubling. (Europe has given us good things: cricket, paan and kokis from the countries that colonized us alone.) But the celebrated texts of its earliest articulations, like John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government(1689), produce the human not uniformly, homogeneously, but in heterogeneous, dissymmetrical categories. The U.S. Declaration of Independence (DOI, 1776) resonates with Locke; despite famously asserting that “all men are created equal,” it qualifies that statement, distinguishes between those gifted rights, subject, and the unequal, those without, other.
