The Sound of Silence

On the Silence of the Declaration of Independence By Paul Eidelberg University of Massachusetts Press, 127 pp., $7 Here is a calm and tidily reasoned essay on the Declaration of Independence, with the good sense not only to treat that document as a whole but also to treat it as part of a larger whole. The “silence” of the Declaration is its taciturnity with respect to truths which it presupposed but didn’t have to utter because the Signers either shared them with the “candid world” they addressed, or chose to emphasize complementary truths, which, however, depended for their validity and meaning on the “silent” truths. Thus, for instance, Professor Eidelberg argues that “all men are created equal” is a proposition that it was circumstantially necessary to play up, since everybody knew that men aren’t, in many respects, created equal. Thus “all men are created equal” means, then and there, “all men are, in the sense here and now relevant, created equal.”

What Eidelberg wants to correct is the general ignorance which, not knowing itself as ignorance, thinks the Declaration, or that fraction of it liberals and radicals are always quoting at us, means just what it sounds like it means, or just what the general reader armed with a dictionary thinks it means, or even (to go a little beyond his explicit scope) just what the scholar, armed with parallel texts from Jefferson, can demonstrate it to mean. Least of all does it mean what the ideologue, importing an eccentric and modern cluster of presuppositions, wants it to mean.

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Joseph Sobran

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Declaration of Independence

On the Silence of the Declaration of Independence By Paul Eidelberg University of Massachusetts Press, 127 pp., $7 Here is a calm and tidily reasoned essay on the Declaration of Independence, with the good sense not only to treat that document as a whole but also to treat it as part of a larger whole. The “silence” of the Declaration is its taciturnity with respect to truths which it presupposed but didn’t have to utter because the Signers either shared them with the “candid world” they addressed, or chose to emphasize complementary truths, which, however, depended for their validity and meaning on the “silent” truths. Thus, for instance, Professor Eidelberg argues that “all men are created equal” is a proposition that it was circumstantially necessary to play up, since everybody knew that men aren’t, in many respects, created equal. Thus “all men are created equal” means, then and there, “all men are, in the sense here and now relevant, created equal.”

What Eidelberg wants to correct is the general ignorance which, not knowing itself as ignorance, thinks the Declaration, or that fraction of it liberals and radicals are always quoting at us, means just what it sounds like it means, or just what the general reader armed with a dictionary thinks it means, or even (to go a little beyond his explicit scope) just what the scholar, armed with parallel texts from Jefferson, can demonstrate it to mean. Least of all does it mean what the ideologue, importing an eccentric and modern cluster of presuppositions, wants it to mean.