Carl Lotus Becker, Materialism and Idealism in the Declaration of Independence

Found in: The Declaration of Independence: A Study on the History of Political Ideas

This quote, from the eminent American historian Carl Becker from his famous 1922 book The Declaration of Independence: A Study on the History of Political Ideas, is an example of his nuanced and provocative approach to the history of the Revolution and the Founding Era.

Revolution

To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question. When honest men are impelled to withdraw their allegiance to the established law or custom of the community, still more when they are persuaded that such law or custom is too iniquitous to be longer tolerated, they seek for some principle more generally valid, some ‘law’ of higher authority, than the established law or custom of the community. To this higher law or more generally valid principle they then appeal in justification of actions which the community condemns as immoral or criminal. They formulate the law or principle in such a way that it is, or seems to them to be, rationally defensible. To them it is ‘true’ because it brings their actions into harmony with a rightly ordered universe, and enables them to think of themselves as having chosen the nobler part, as having withdrawn from a corrupt world in [278] order to serve God or Humanity or a force that makes for the highest good. (FROM: CHAPTER VI: THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE DECLARATION IN THE NINTEENTH CENTURY)

Thoughts

Becker was an important historian of the Founding Period and of Enlightenment thought. A student of the famous historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), Becker went on to a long and auspicious career, including a professorship at Cornell University and the Presidency of the American Historical Association. His approach to History, especially Intellectual History, represented an interesting combination of the Materialist and Idealist approaches. As this quotation illustrates, while far from discounting the importance of ideas, he saw them in general as epiphenomenological. That is to say, people, especially people confronted with great moments of world historical significance, often search for intellectual or ideological reasons to justify their decisions after the fact. To put this in the framework of the Revolutionary Era, the American Patriots might have been motivated by Materialist concerns (e.g., the taxes and Mercantilist policies of the British Empire) while they chafed under other restrictions and laws. They were therefore drawn to the Enlightenment ideas of Montesquieu and the philosophy of John Locke to provide an Idealist framework for their goal of independence.

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