s On the Social Contract famously begins with the statement that "man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." George Mason, a contemporary of Jefferson's, was to write in the Virginia Declaration of Rights that all men
are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring an possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
From Rousseau through Mason to Jefferson, the line of discourse is as clear as the assertion of legitimacy for the American claims against the British Crown is famous:
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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
This interpretation of Enlightenment political thought, of course, is at variance with some of the very thinkers upon which it relies. Consider Locke's intention in the Second Treatise of Government to argue the legitimacy of revolution in context of the so-called Glorious Revolution in England in 1688, entailing abdication of the divine-right Catholic James II and the accession of another (Protestant) king, William of Orange, who agreed to the parliament's disposition of the English succession and to the institution and supremacy of Parliament. The lesson that the Americans took from Locke was the notion of the state in dramatic political transition and reform as a consequence of the people's just claim to legitimate judgment on the shape of governance. The Declaration can be viewed as a document that merged the language, content, and intensity of Rousseau with the rhetorical...