Harmonizing Sentiments: the Declaration of Independence and the Jeffersonian Idea of Self-Government.

• Author: McDonald, Robert M.S.
• Position: Book Review

By Hans L. Eicholz New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Pp. ix, 245. $25.95 paper.

Thomas Jefferson may well be the only president who promised to do less than his predecessors. What America needed, he said at his inauguration, was "a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned" (Thomas Jefferson: Writings, edited by Merrill D. Peterson [New York: Library of America, 1984], p. 494). The third president's statement raised few eyebrows, in part because by 1801 he had earned fame as author of the Declaration of Independence--a document that, after all, focused on dispensing with an old regime rather than constructing a new one. In addition, the bulk of Jefferson's audience agreed with him. The revolution that had unfolded a quarter-century earlier had aimed to establish self-government not only for the colonies but also for individual Americans.

So contends Hans L. Eicholz in this compelling new book, Harmonizing Sentiments. Whereas other recent scholars of the Declaration have examined it as rhetoric (Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993]) or questioned its originality in order to depreciate its importance (Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997]), Eicholz shifts the debate from issues of political culture back to more traditional questions of political theory. The Declaration mattered a great deal, he maintains, because its words expressed widely accepted beliefs that originated with seventeenth-century English "Old Whigs who were opposed to the abuse of power and in favor of limited government" (p. 4). Unlike scholars who argue for the primacy of one intellectual tradition, however, Eicholz is quick to note that the ideas of the Declaration represent "a synthesis" of "rational self-interest" with "moral sense" philosophy and "the received wisdom of the common law"--all of which contributed to the revolutionary belief that "human order was not fundamentally the product of political mediation" (p. 72). Jefferson's task was to express these harmonizing sentiments, and Eicholz believes he accomplished that task well.

After a brief introduction, Eicholz develops his argument in four...