Historian Carl Becker once said that every generation rewrites history to suit its needs and according to its perspectives. This twenty-first-century collection of essays on the Declaration partly validates his claim and partly does not. Probably the chief way in which this collection differs from earlier efforts is in its broadened horizons. There is a systematic effort to consider the Declaration in relation to groups and concerns that received little attention in the past – women, labor, Native Americans, the international resonances of the document. But there are familiar themes as well, though these are mostly treated differently from the past. The intellectual roots of the Declaration is indeed a familiar topic, but the century or so since Becker’s book has enriched and deepened our grasp of the intellectual sources and, perhaps even more deeply, of their meaning. Not often emphasized in previous treatments are the religious and theological influences. Themes like the relation of the Declaration to the political context from which it emerged, the legal basis of the document, its main ideas, the Declaration and slavery – these are all topics that have a long history but which receive new treatment here based on new scholarship.

As part of the major premise of the Declaration’s syllogism and of a general theory of rightful government, it is unlikely that the main ideas in the Declaration’s second paragraph exist as separate, free-floating nuggets of indeterminate meaning. My task in this essay is to reconstruct the theory of rightful government contained in that paragraph in order to progress toward fixing meaning for those ideas – equality, rights, liberty, and others – that have been so important to the self-understanding and political aspirations of Americans from 1776 on.

Judging from the title that Publius gave his collection of essays, the label that defenders of the proposed Constitution took for themselves, and the label that became attached to their opponents, federalism seems to have been the central issue in the debate over the proposed Constitution. Yet the labels themselves are often the source of confusion when speaking of the debate over its ratification. One form the confusion takes is the puzzlement that derives from the fact that the Constitution’s opponents, the Anti-Federalists, are usually characterized as a group who sought a more federal constitution than the nationalist-leaning document the so-called Federalists were sponsoring. It might seem that the parties were strangely mislabeled, a feeling shared not only by many modern readers, but by some of the participants in the debate themselves. So Melancton Smith, a leading Anti-Federalist, was reported to have said in the New York Ratifying Convention, in reply to a speech by a leading Federalist: “He hoped the gentleman would be complaisant enough to exchange names with those who disliked the Constitution, as it appeared … that they were Federalists, and those who advocated it Anti-Federalists.” The confusion over names was certainly a natural one, but the names that have stuck were not so inappropriate or so much a usurpation as critics like Smith averred. All the parties to the debate, even Anti-Federalists like the Federal Farmer, thought by many to be Smith, agreed that a federal system had two major components: member states and a “federal head” or general government for the whole. Since a federal system was normally contrasted with a unitary or consolidated system like France, the federal system was thought to be the one with decentralized authority, that is, with more authority in the member states relative to the greater authority in the general or central government of a unitary system. Thus, one could plausibly be labeled a federalist if one were in favor of greater authority in the member units relative to the federal head (as the Anti-Federalists were). But one could just as well be a federalist for favoring the strengthening of the federal head or central government (as the Federalists did). Given the circumstances of the debate over the Constitution, its advocates even had a somewhat stronger claim to the label, despite the understandable ambiguities. The pro-Constitution forces came before the country with a proposal to strengthen the federal head and thus were in this sense Federalists.

Leo Strauss was one of the German émigrés who brought twentieth-century Continental philosophy to America when they fled Hitler in the 1930s. He spent most of his American career at two universities: the New School for Social Research and the University of Chicago. Although he had written several books in Europe prior to his arrival in America, his American writings brought him the most notice. His best-known book was Natural Right and History (1953), but he wrote many other notable works, including Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958) and The City and Man (1964). All of his works fit under the broad rubric of political philosophy.