Book Review:
Sanford Levinson, Self-Evident Truths in the Declaration of Independence (reviewing Morton White’s The Philosophy of the American Revolution and Garry Wills’s Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence), 57 TEXAS L. REV. 847 (1979).
 

Abstract:
In reviewing White’s and Wills’s books on Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, Professor Levinson underscores the Enlightenment philosophy that informed the Jeffersonian ideals permeating the Declaration. White takes a critical philosophical look at Jeffersonian epistemology, while Wills takes a broader historical look at the intellectual landscape of Jefferson’s time. The conclusion that Professor Levinson reaches is that there is a critical disconnect between the intellectual climate, which produced the Declaration of Independence, and the present. Therefore, it is unclear how this central document, and the self-evident truths proposed by it, can have meaning for us when the epistemological presuppositions, which informed it, are so foreign to our present consciousness. This disconcerting conclusion is especially important, according to Levinson, because of the peculiar tendency of Americans to rely upon tradition and the past.