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.
The core of the American Declaration of Independence
circled around some ideas of great thinkers from the Explanation Era. One of
these ideas suggested that all men are created equal by the Lord Almighty and every single
person had the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. those slaves
were denied their rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness while being
torn away from their homelands and brought to a whole different place where
they were not familiar to any of the aspects of the society. Moreover they were
tortured by their white masters and were treated like objects and not human
beings. Considering all these facts about slavery, the American Declaration of
Independence sounded like a ridiculous irony that they kept making fun of which
doesn’t represent the real comprehension of equality. It was quite an ironic declaration if one
cared to relate these words by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg address
(November 1864) ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ to
the social and political mechanism of the American
colonies.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
"Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains" That was the first sentence of Rousseau's "The Social Contract."
This was the concept of ‘the noble savage’.
Thomas Hobbes:
"In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
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