The Declaration of Independence and Freedom

The Nature of Freedom in the 18th and 19th Centuries
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The evidence shows that the nature of freedom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was considered a natural right in some cases and a divine right in others. For example, when it was useful, people appealed to the idea of a Creator endowing people with certain “unalienable rights” and when nature was viewed as the source of life, the rights of man were considered something that just was.
Three passages from the different primary source texts that provide evidence for my claim are:
1. “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights… hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights”—from the Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen
2. “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 are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—from the U.S. Declaration of Independence
3. “The freedom of every member of the state as a human being. The equality of each with every other as a subject. The independence of every member of a commonwealth as a citizen.”—from “Theory and Practice” by Immanuel Kant
2
The idea of freedom in the 18th and 19th century was divorced from the centuries that preceded them—centuries in which the concept of freedom was attached to the concept of “free will” and thought of primarily in a spiritual sense—i.e., a religious sense. With the Protestant Reformation, a break from the religious doctrines of the Middle Ages, and the rise of the Enlightenment and Romantic Eras came a new approach to freedom. Freedom was thought of not as a choice one had between doing good and evil but rather as the liberty to do as one desired. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the only constraint on freedom was the state and the laws of the state—which is why socio-economic and political philosophy became so important. What gave people their “freedom,” however, was still debated. The nature of freedom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was considered a natural right in some cases and a divine right in others. For example, when it was useful, people appealed to the idea of a Creator endowing people with certain “unalienable rights” and when nature was viewed as the source of life, the rights of man were considered something that just was.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen shows how individuals conceived freedom during the Age of Enlightenment: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights… hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.” Freedom was viewed as stemming from nature: it was a natural “right” and had nothing to do with free will or religious associations or making a choice between good and evil. For “enlightened” man, freedom was synonymous with nature: whatever felt natural was thus something man had a “right” to pursue.
This idea was also promoted by the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “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 are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” However, here, the Founding Fathers, conscious that many Americans still cherished religious ideas, had the tenacity to establish the belief that freedom came from the Creator rather than from “nature.”
With Kant, the idea was similar: freedom was something to be determined by society—i.e., what one should or should not do, could or could not do, was not determined by the moral law dictated by the God of the Middle Ages but rather by the Enlightened socio-political thought processes of people of the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, Kant recognized: “The freedom of every member of the state as a human being. The equality of each with every other as a subject. The independence of every member of a commonwealth as a citizen.” Freedom for Kant was something to be determined by the state, since the Church, which associated freedom with the choice of the will to obey or disobey God’s law, had been thrown off by the state. Freedom was, by Kant’s time, something for the State to decide.