Can you rewrite the endowment clause without using the Creator, a suspicious concept, like Jefferson would have written it today as a critical postmodernist philosopher.
Summary of content (GPT-5.5 Thinking):
Yes. The rewrite has to remove “Creator” without collapsing into “society grants rights.” Horkheimer’s warning is exactly that once rights depend only on majority, tradition, utility, or interest, they lose their rational authority and become negotiable. He says the founders did not treat majority will as a substitute for reason, and that deprived of rational foundation democratic principles become vulnerable to tyranny.
A — The Analyst
Here is the clean postmodern-critical Jefferson version:
We hold this truth against every regime of power: that all persons, prior to every law that names them, every market that prices them, every state that governs them, and every discourse that classifies them, possess an equal and inalienable claim not to be reduced to instruments, property, data, caste, laboring bodies, disposable populations, or objects of another’s will; and that among the political forms of this claim are life, liberty, and the pursuit of a flourishing that no authority may define in advance or monopolize as its own.
That is the best version.
It keeps the force of “endowed” by replacing Creator with prior claim. Not “God gave you rights,” but “no human system is authorized to be the origin of your worth.”
B — The Trickster
Of course, Jefferson as a critical postmodernist would write one elegant sentence and then immediately footnote himself into paralysis.
He would distrust “self-evident,” distrust “men,” distrust “created,” distrust “equal,” distrust “rights,” distrust “nature,” and then still need the sentence to function. That is the comedy of postmodern politics: it knows every foundation is contaminated, then asks the bridge to hold anyway.
So the sentence has to be a performative limit, not a metaphysical boast.
It does not say, “Here is the pure foundation.”
It says, “No institution gets to pretend it is the foundation.”
Gavel-line: Postmodern rights are not grounded in purity; they are grounded in the refusal of every power that claims purity.
C — The Archivist
A sharper, more declaration-like version:
We hold these truths as binding upon every power that would deny them: that all persons stand equal in dignity before any law, institution, economy, nation, identity, or doctrine that seeks to define their worth; that this dignity is not conferred by government and therefore cannot be revoked by it; and that life, liberty, and the pursuit of human flourishing are political names for the limit beyond which no legitimate authority may pass.
That one is more usable. Less theory, more constitutional thunder.
A more explicitly critical-theory version:
We hold that no order of power may be treated as the author of human worth. All persons, though historically situated and differently marked by language, class, race, sex, labor, and power, are equal in this: none may be finally possessed, priced, silenced, classified, or sacrificed by another. From this irreducibility follow claims no state creates and no state may rightfully annul: life, liberty, and the pursuit of forms of flourishing not dictated by domination.
That version admits situatedness without letting situatedness devour universality.
A2 — The Analyst
The philosophical move is this:
Replace theological endowment with anti-sovereign irreducibility.
The old clause says:
“Rights come from the Creator; therefore government cannot revoke them.”
The postmodern-critical version says:
“Rights mark the failure of every human system to become the final author of human worth; therefore government cannot revoke them.”
This fits Horkheimer better than a lazy secularization. He warns that “dignity of man” becomes a slogan unless it preserves and transcends the older idea of divine right; mere tradition or consensus is not enough. He also says the eighteenth-century conviction that man was endowed with rights was not dead repetition, but a critique of conditions demanding change, translated into philosophy and historical action.
So the new clause must not say, “We inherited these values.”
It must say, “These values judge the systems that would reduce us.”
B2 — The Trickster
Do not write:
“We believe everyone has rights because diversity, empathy, and shared values.”
That is not Jefferson. That is HR after a hostile takeover.
Write instead:
“You did not make us. You do not own us.”
There. The whole Declaration in eight words.
C2 — The Archivist
Final distilled version:
We hold this truth as binding upon every power: that all persons possess a dignity no human order authors and no human order may annul; that, whatever their differences, none may be reduced to property, instrument, statistic, caste, or disposable life; and that life, liberty, and the pursuit of flourishing are not permissions granted by government, but limits that define whether government is legitimate at all.
That is the one I would use.
Gavel-line: The Creator disappears, but the accusation remains: power arrived late and is not sovereign over the person.
D — Silent Witness
[META] The rewrite avoids “Creator” while preserving the metaphysical function the word performed: a limit on power. The danger is that “dignity” and “irreducibility” become the same emptied slogans Horkheimer feared unless tied to material resistance against domination. The clause works only if it wounds institutions, not if it decorates them. Critique persists; closure remains suspect.