The Declaration Of Natural Rights, By John Locke

The Declaration is rooted in natural law. Natural rights were part of natural law that in turn was part of God’s law. John Locke summarized God given rights as, “life liberty and property.”X In the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson would later extend Locke’s paraphrasing to “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Declaration states in the course of human events when it becomes necessary to dissolve political bands and assume “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” The Founders believed that man did not create nature’s, but rather discovered natural law . These discovered laws were inalienable liberties such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. John Locke made sociological application of Newton and concluded just as Copernicus and Newton had discovered the laws of nature governing the heavens, man could discover the laws of nature governing human relationships by the exercise of proper reasoning.
This would require the use of John Locke’s theory of social contract. Locke saw the formation of a civil society based on a dual agreement: a unanimous agreement to form a society bound by majority collective decisions and a majority agreement on the form of government. The genius of applying Locke’s contract theory to the Declaration and Constitution is the theoretical ease of dissolution. Jefferson drew from George Mason’s declaration of rights where Mason suggested when a government betrays the trust of the people, the people have an “indefensible right to reform, alter or abolish it.” The genius of the Declaration and Constitution is upon a government’s dissolution, the Declaration of Independence remains immutable. This is possible because the Declaration is rooted in the natural rights of the creator discovered, not created, by