Principles of the American Revolution | Constitution 101

Jeffrey Rosen: [MUSIC] Today we're going to talk about the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It contains the entire American idea in one inspiring sentence and we're going to talk about three principles of the core of that sentence. First, natural rights, second popular sovereignty, and third, the rule of law. Let's read the preamble together and I know, you know it well. Here we go. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these rights are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Well, what's an unalienable right? To understand that we've got to go back to natural rights theory, which inspire the founders. Thomas Jefferson said that in writing the declaration, he wasn't producing anything original, but was channeling classical and enlightenment moral and political philosophers like Aristotle, Cicero, John Locke, and Algernon Sidney. The basic idea of natural rights theory is that we're all born in a state of nature with certain fundamental rights that come from God or nature, not from government. We possess them by virtue of being human beings. In other words, there are inherent in who we are. When we form governments, we surrender certain rights in order to get greater security and safety of the rights we've retained. Take the example of punishing crime. In a state of nature. Everyone engages in self-defense, and we don't have a lot of security. When you give government the power to punish crimes through due process of law, then everyone is more safe and secure as a result but there are certain unalienable rights that we can't surrender to government even if we want to. What are they? Well, the quintessential example is what the founders called the rights of conscience. Those include the right to think as we will and to speak as we think, as Thomas Jefferson and Louis Brandeis said, without having our thoughts controlled by government or by anyone else, why are the rights of conscience unalienable? James Madison explain why in his memorial and remonstrance against religious assessments in 1785, here's what he said. This right is in its nature an unalienable right, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds, cannot follow the dictates of other men. In other words, I can't surrender to you the power to control or command my thoughts and beliefs. Because my thoughts and beliefs are the product of my own reason when I contemplate and evaluate evidence received by my own mind so even if I wanted to give you or the government or a friend the power to control my thoughts. I can't do that because freedom of thought is inherent in who I am as a reasoning human being and we all have not only a right but also a duty to think for ourselves. What happens when the government threatens my retain natural rights rather than protecting them? That leads to our second big idea, popular sovereignty and now I've got to go back and read the next clause of that beautiful sentence from the declaration so we can understand how it's based on the idea that all governments are founded on the consent of the people. Here's what the declaration says, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter and abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. The basic idea is that since everyone has equal liberty to enter into the social contract in the first place, we all come together and by consent, authorize the government to exercise temporary control over some of our natural rights. But as soon as the government breaks the bargain, we can withdraw. We can change the government and find another government that's more likely to affect our safety and happiness. That's what popular sovereignty is. The idea that all government is based on the consent to the people and the people can't be governed by laws to which they haven't given their consent. Now, the idea of popular sovereignty is also found in the Constitution by the very first words of the preamble, we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union. In other words, we're forming a social contract and we're exercising our equal liberty to consent to government, but only on the condition that it keeps its end of the bargain and increases our security and safety rather than threatening it. All this is a wonderful combination of natural rights theory and popular sovereignty, which go hand in hand. There's a third idea, which is expressed in that sterling sentence, and that's the rule of law. The rule of law means freedom from arbitrary rule. It includes factors like predictability, transparency, accountability, and equal and impartial enforcement. The government has to operate according to prospective rules that we've all agreed to in advance, rather than changing the rules to punish individuals according to the whim of a president or king, or tyrant. In America, the president can't throw you in jail because he doesn't like you. No one is above the law. Blackstone's commentaries, which the framers read, notes that the Roman Emperor Caligula use to post laws so high on a wall in the city that citizens couldn't read them. That's the opposite of the rule of law. People can't conform their behavior to laws they can't read or don't know in advance and rulers can't be bound by laws that they don't promise to follow in advance and publicize in a transparent and accountable way. There's an idea related to the rule of law, and that's constitutionalism. Constitutionalism means limited government. That is a government whose powers are defined and limited in advance. The government's given certain powers and clear limitations and it has to observe those limits. The related ideas of constitutionalism and the rule of law are contained in that inspiring sentence of the Declaration of Independence, which says that people establish government to secure our rights, but always retain the ultimate power to alter and abolish it when it threatens our rights. In America, the bedrock idea is that all authority is derived from the consent of the people. [MUSIC]