In high school, kids spend time reviewing the Declaration of Independence and learning its meaning. This book goes well beyond that to inspect the thoughts and ideas that were prevalent in the late 18th century and how they influenced the document. Becker goes into great detail about natural rights theory according to John Locke and explores the ins and outs of its implications. This to me was the strongest and most enjoyable part of the book. He also explores the thoughts and ideas that were circulating Britain at the time.

Building on this foundation, he weaves a tale as to why certain things were worded as they were (like Britain being run as a ruthless tyrant), and why certain things were left out altogether (like slavery). He also closely examines the changes that took place in the drafts and attributes them to individuals who proofread Jefferson's draft. I really could have done without his granularity in this area.

In all, this was a fascinating read. For those of you who want to extend your knowledge beyond the simple presentation of the document you received in high school, I highly recommend buying this book!

I have read this book, off and on, several times. It never ceases to amaze me. I tend to be a controversialist and rely upon this book often to help those who seem convinced that the Founding Fathers were of a particular religious persuasion. While foundationally on a personal level this may be true, in general they bowed down to a higher power: Reason. Yet this was not new to them nor were their political theories. Their roots came from somewhere else and that somewhere else was from the European soil they had left.

Becker does an awesome job dissecting the Declaration and its influences primarily from Jefferson through Locke. The natural rights philosophy chapter is awesome. This book is over seventy five years old and its arguments have been revisited and even countered but the book is still foundationally necessary for anyone who seeks to study the Declaration of Independence. In terms of studying the Declaration, there is before Becker's book and there is after.

There are many revealing insights and oddities that appear when Becker displays the lines that have been cut from the original draft (e.g. notice there is no mention of slavery in the final version; the reasons for its excision are included in the book). These little tidbits opened my eyes a bit to the relatively benign history of this document that I had been taught. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing so have a little fun and check this book out.

Carl L. Becker's book on the Declaration of Independence first appeared nearly eighty years ago, and yet it is still a valuable and stimulating study of its subject. It is dated now, for two large reasons:

First, Becker wrote before the revolution in studying the history of ideas, and thus unavoidably predates the close-focus examination of the controversy between Great Britain and her American colonies in the years from 1765 to 1776. Two recent books should be read alongside Becker's monograph -- Pauline Maier's AMERICAN SCRIPTURE: MAKING THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (New York: Knopf, 1997; Vintage paperback, 1998), and John Phillip Reid, CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, abridged ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

Second, Becker focuses on Jefferson as *the* author of the Declaration, neglecting that he was actually the draftsman selected by the Continental Congress and his colleagues within the drafting committee. Thus, the Declaration -- no matter what Jefferson said about it in later life -- was not primarily a window into his own thinking about natural rights and democracy, but rather the final statement by Congress as to the reasons for breaking ties with Britain. To be sure, later generations have read it as an expression of Jefferson's mind -- rather than of "the American mind," as he put it. But, as Maier shows in AMERICAN SCRIPTURE, Jefferson's thinking was nowhere near as unique or advanced on these subjects as later hero-worshipping biographers have suggested.

In particular, as Maier has shown, the age-old dispute about whether Jefferson was or was not influenced by Locke is somewhat beside the point. Even so, Becker's fine book is indispensable for deciding whether we should read the Declaration through Lockean or Jeffersonian lenses, and whether we should regard it as a codification of American aspirations or as a hypocritical catalogue of principles we cannot live up to.

R. B. Bernstein, adjunct professor of law, New York Law School

Carl Becker once unknown to me became the bane of an entire class of students as we explored in horrifying depth how Becker writes about the 18th and 19th centuries. In this book you are subjected to a historian who tries to catalogue philosophy and the philosophers of the 18th century in a poor blend of factual history and intepreted philosophy. The book is laced with so much cynicism that it becomes hard to scry which sections Becker stands behind and which he pokes fun at. After the unfortunate ordeal of reading this book you will see that Becker had a loss of faith at some point in his life and feels that everything around him is now meaningless, therefore he turns to the past to seek new meaning and redemption of his now useless life. What we find instead is a convoluted text which seems to be hailed as wonderful by religious zealots for its admonishments of science, philosophy, and history as empty in the grand scheme of the world. He contradicts himself so often that only after you pore over his text can you even decide what he supports. My opinion: skip the book and bash your head into the wall. You will get about as much satisfaction.

Carl Becker's work is a classic in the field whether or not one agrees with his thesis. He contends that the French Enlightenment thinkers tried unsuccessfully to distance themselves from the religious mileaux from which they came. Looking back from a vantage point nearly 150 years later, it is clear that while their ideas were advanced, the "utopia" they sought to establish was closer to the thinkers of the Reformation period 300 years earlier than to thinkers of the latter 19th and early 20th centuries. Any serious student of this period should at least scan this author's work as all subsequent scholarship has had to stake a stand for or against his position - thus to understand scholarship in the past 20 years - read this book.

I was prompted to write this review to give some balance to what a previous review stated. I encountered this book, for the first time, as an undergraduate in a history course. I was forever grateful to the professor for requiring its reading, and grateful to the author for his insightful and important work. I think this book should be mandatory reading in any history course emcompassing the period, and any course that looks to understand the genesis of the ideologies that permeate our period. I think the previous reviewer was very incorrect in her understanding of the issues and facts brought out by the book. I think the professor was serving his class, and profession, well by requiring the book. The book gives indispensable insights into the mind, and characters of the period. The thinking of that period still heavily influences contemporary American, European, and now global, political and social thought. Most readers will be very gratified having read the book, to see where their own thinking has been influenced and formed. The book is both scholarly and readable. There are great insights made that should not me be missed.