The Declaration Of Independence, By Edmund Burke, John...

The Declaration of Independence, arguably the most important document to have been written in the history of the United States, testified to the sovereignty given by the Founding Fathers to King George III and the whole of Great Britain which ultimately established the Thirteen Colonies as autonomous and free. The ideas perpetuated in the pages of this great document are compelling and genuine. However, they did not appear out of thin air. Therefore, it is appropriate to assert that these concepts did not come directly from the minds of the Founding Fathers themselves, but from philosophers like Edmund Burke, John Locke, and Alexis de Tocqueville. While it is a fact that Edmund Burke’s thoughts on rebellion had not been known at the time of the American Revolution, his ideology is actually mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, which was written fourteen years before his Reflections On the Revolution In France. (Perhaps the American Framers were ahead of their time.) In the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers lightly touch upon the ideas of Burke and are surprisingly quick to dismiss them, which is reasonable given their grave circumstances. The Declaration of Independence states: â€Å"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes . . . But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absoluteShow MoreRelatedLiberal Perspective of a State7979 Words   |  32 Pagesof Enlightenment, rejecting several foundational assumptions that dominated most of the earlier theories of government, such as hereditary status, established religion, absolute monarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings. The early liberal thinker John Locke, who is often credited for the creation of liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition, employed the concept of natural rights and the social contract to argue that the rule of law should replace absolutism in government, that rulers were subject