Recently in class, we have been learning about and discussing influential Enlightenment philosophers including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, and Jean- Jacques Rousseau. We then looked at how their philosophies and written works influenced the American Revolution, namely Locke’s words that are present in the Declaration of Independence.

One of the main topics we looked at in class was whether the Declaration of Independence was radical or conservative in terms of its motives. We saw arguments for both perspectives, and I noticed that both arguments only looked at a specific part of the document. The argument for radical motives focuses on the opening of the Declaration of Independence and the Lockean principles that were relatively new and had yet to be instituted in government. The argument for conservative motives points to the list of grievances where numerous offenses by the king of England are listed, showing that the colonists wanted to regain their rights from the English monarchy. Both of the arguments have strong evidence to support them, but there does not seem to be one argument that fits the whole document perfectly. I could see both perspectives, and we noted that there were both radical and conservative parts to the Declaration of Independence.

That caused me to think about motives versus effects for a bit. If the Declaration of Independence was written with conservative motives, but it caused new ideas to be implemented, then it could easily be considered radical because of the new society it helped to form. The opposite could also be true if there were radical motives that caused conservative effects in the real world. This shows that the motives as well as the actual events that occurred from the Declaration of Independence can both be interpreted one way or another. Just from the week or so we spent learning about this in class, I can see why it is a debated topic among historians. Why do historians want to find out the motives for writing the Declaration of Independence? How would discovering those motives benefit the United States in the present day? Did the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence expect their work to be analyzed and discussed in such detail?

Something else that came to mind was about how during the time when documents from the Enlightenment were circulating, people read essays for pleasure reading. Without an education, the essays were likely extremely difficult to read and understand. When thinking about the pamphlet “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine, this may be one of the main reasons why it is written in common language. If new ideas are truly going to cause change in a society, the presented ideas need to be understood by more than just the educated people in that society. The whole society needs to be more or less on the same page, and using language that takes this into account may result in more widely accepted ideas and more efficient spreading of ideas among all members of the society.