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As America hurtles toward its 250th birthday, we’re hearing a familiar chorus: that the Founding is either a marble monument to be worshiped uncritically or a cynical fraud to be debunked relentlessly. Timothy Sandefur’s Proclaiming Liberty refuses both temptations. It’s an excellent, even brilliant book: learned without being dusty, principled without being preachy, and (best of all) written with the confidence of someone who actually believes ideas move history.
Sandefur opens with a scene that captures the spirit of the whole project. In 1826, as the semicentennial approaches, a young clergyman asks the ninety-year-old John Adams for a toast to deliver at an Independence Day banquet. Adams obliges: “Independence forever!” When the visitor presses for more, Adams replies: “Not a word.” That’s vintage Adams—pugnacious, blunt, all sinew and spine. Thomas Jefferson, invited to a different celebration but too frail to attend, sends a longer valedictory meditation on the choice made in 1776 and on the moral awakening the Declaration helped catalyze.
Those two temperaments—Adams’s flinty insistence on lawful liberty and Jefferson’s soaring confidence in human freedom—form the book’s narrative engine. Sandefur’s core move is as smart as it is intuitive: he treats the Declaration of Independence not as a museum piece, nor as a mere throat-clearing on the way to the “real law” of 1787, but as the foundational statement that continues to animate our constitutional order and political culture. And he does so by letting Adams and Jefferson—future rivals in the election of 1800, but co-laborers in the summer of independence—guide the reader through the intellectual and legal world that produced the Declaration and, in no small part, produced “America” as a coherent idea.
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute.
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