Robert A. Ferguson

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Robert A. Ferguson | Reviews of Books: "A Global History" Brought Down to Size | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.2 | The History Cooperative

"A Global History" Brought Down to Size

IN his book on the impact of the Declaration of Independence beyond the United States, David Armitage writes that "every generation gets the Declaration of Independence it deserves" (11), but for scholars one might just as easily claim that every generation gets the Declaration that it wants to find. In the first modern book-length interpretation of the document, published just after the First World War and revisited at the start of the Second, Carl Becker concentrated on the fragility of the values declared therein for a troubled world.¹ Since then, as the nation has continued to evolve from a Republic defined by the right of revolution into a nation-state where the test of membership has become loyalty, emphasis has been on the "changing" and sometimes the "lost" Declaration.	1
Thus in 1978, in the wake of the Nixon years, Garry Wills argued for the Scottish influences and other seminal values that Americans had apparently forgotten. In 1993 Jay Fliegelman, against growing divisions in political discourse, recovered the original rhetorical basis of sincerity that guided Thomas Jefferson in his writing of the instrument. In 1997, amid normative acrimony over the Clinton presidency, Pauline Maier described a living document that was at once a legacy and a new conception marking the moral standards of the nation.² Now, under the current mantra of globalization and at a time when American prestige abroad has fallen dramatically, we have Armitage's celebration of far-flung influence.	2
It is easy to see how all of this happens. Jefferson famously claimed, in a May 1825 letter noted by Armitage, that he wrote for everyone "not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent" (21). This spirit of comprehensiveness welcomes many initiatives precisely because Jefferson sought to strike a chord in every reader, and his success encourages Armitage to find a text "highlighting the outward-looking rather than the inward-looking face of the state" (19).	. . .

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