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The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson
Richard Matthews argues that despite scores of books and hundreds of articles, Thomas Jefferson remains the most seriously misrepresented and misunderstood Founding Father. Matthews's Jefferson emerges as America's first and foremost advocate of permanent revolution, a democratic communitarian, and an anti-market theorist. This interpretation has been suggested in the past, but seldom has it been argued so persuasively or so intensely.
It is Matthews's intent to "extricate Jefferson from the myths that surround, envelop, and ultimately distort him." The interpretation of Jefferson's idea of democracy presented here could spark new thinking about contemporary democracy.
It is Matthews's intent to "extricate Jefferson from the myths that surround, envelop, and ultimately distort him." The interpretation of Jefferson's idea of democracy presented here could spark new thinking about contemporary democracy.
184 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1984
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 3, 2017
Matthews argues that Thomas Jefferson represents a road not taken in American history, an alternative to the "liberal-capitalist" ethos of Madison and Hamilton. In Matthews' account, Jefferson is not a liberal individualist in the Lockean tradition, but a "humanist," "communitarian anarchist," and "radical democrat" who dissented from the emerging ethos of the market society, atomistic individualism, and the leviathan state. This isn't just an effort at historical reconstruction; Matthews thinks this Jeffersonian philosophy still has much to say to 20th (and 21st) century America. As the book's subtitle suggests, Matthews is engaged in a self-consciously revisionist interpretation, taking issue with both "liberal" and "civic republican" portraits of Jefferson. On Matthews' account, Jefferson is a veritable proto-socialist and apostle of "permanent revolution" in laws and property relations.
I'm not really qualified to assess the accuracy of Matthews' reconstruction of Jefferson's political philosophy (though aspects of it are corroborated by Joseph Ellis's Jefferson biography American Sphinx); but it's a stimulating alternative to what is often assumed to be Jefferson's quasi-libertarianism or nostalgic agrarianism. One does suspect, however, that in contrasting Jefferson with Madison and Hamilton, Matthews isn't being quite fair to the other two gentlemen, and his view of Jefferson tends toward the overly sunny (slavery gets fairly short shrift in the discussion, for example).
I also would've liked to see Matthews' Jeffersonian philosophy brought into conversation with that of John Adams, the other "pole" of the American revolution (to use Benjamin Rush's expression). In fairness, Matthews' book came out in the 80s, before the mini-Adams renaissance of recent years, but Adams provides a contrasting example of someone who rejected Jefferson's optimism (naiveté?) about human nature without embracing the philosophy of "acquisitive individualism" ascribed to the other founders.
Still, an altogether worthwhile read!
I'm not really qualified to assess the accuracy of Matthews' reconstruction of Jefferson's political philosophy (though aspects of it are corroborated by Joseph Ellis's Jefferson biography American Sphinx); but it's a stimulating alternative to what is often assumed to be Jefferson's quasi-libertarianism or nostalgic agrarianism. One does suspect, however, that in contrasting Jefferson with Madison and Hamilton, Matthews isn't being quite fair to the other two gentlemen, and his view of Jefferson tends toward the overly sunny (slavery gets fairly short shrift in the discussion, for example).
I also would've liked to see Matthews' Jeffersonian philosophy brought into conversation with that of John Adams, the other "pole" of the American revolution (to use Benjamin Rush's expression). In fairness, Matthews' book came out in the 80s, before the mini-Adams renaissance of recent years, but Adams provides a contrasting example of someone who rejected Jefferson's optimism (naiveté?) about human nature without embracing the philosophy of "acquisitive individualism" ascribed to the other founders.
Still, an altogether worthwhile read!
February 4, 2012
The first chapter is a little slow, but oh my god is it worth it. Thomas Jefferson had a completely different idea of how America should have been, anyone who wants to know the real Jefferson should read this.
October 31, 2021
“Friendship is precious not only in the shade but in the sunshine of life: and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.” - Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786
For all the lip service Americans pay to the principle of self-government, foreign observers are often surprised to find how little time and attention we devote to its practice. For most ordinary people, “democracy” entails voting in biennial elections between two viable candidates who have been pre-selected by party apparatchiks, corporate lobbyists, interest groups, and mass media, before returning to their real lives as commercial consumers and wage workers; and this arrangement is breathily proclaimed by politicians and talk show hosts as the envy of the world’s huddled masses. While the petty despotisms pocking the earth afford no choice to their people as to who governs them, Americans are periodically presented with two options—two shadows on the cave wall—that are in fact dual appendages of one sovereign: the liberal Constitution and the private commercial enterprises, now condensed into oligopoly, whose pre-social property rights are enshrined by it. Mysteriously, it is typical for one-third to one-half of eligible voters to forego this ritual; and the poorer one is, the less likely one is to participate in it.
Americans venerate the Declaration of Independence, says Richard Matthews, but they live The Federalist. The Jeffersonian brand is often deployed in the service of buttressing the revolutionary bona fides of the Constitution—a democratic patina for a regime that makes plutocracy inevitable—but sharper observers, like Charles Beard in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), have noted a fundamental antagonism between the rights of property as enumerated by the Constitution and the rights of man as articulated by the Declaration. Those who subscribe to the traditional consensus, according to which Madison and Hamilton simply codified the Jeffersonian Revolution instead of countering it, are often led to confusion about the proper definition of democracy, conflating it with liberalism and viewing the two concepts as coessential when they more often prove mutually exclusive. This confusion is manifest when The Washington Post, Amazon’s subsidiary tabloid, whose slogan reads “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” publishes an op-ed titled, “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” Parents don’t get a say in how their children are educated at public schools, to which, if they can’t afford private school, they are legally obligated to send them on pain of imprisonment. This is a democracy, for God’s sake.
Though today we associate liberalism primarily with “behavioral” freedoms, like those of speech and religion, it originated in the seventeenth century as an ideology of private property. Liberal contractarian theorists, most notably John Locke, framed private property rights as something pre-political or pre-social, thus putting them beyond the reach of social consensus and democratic politics. Additional rights were added to this extrapolitical sphere as they were identified as unalienable “properties” of the individual, making possessive individualism the all-governing ideal and necessitating the establishment of a powerful and coercive state, a Leviathan, to protect private property from democratic appropriation and to restrain the acquisitive and antisocial proclivities of liberalism’s “market man”.
Jefferson, for his part, rejected this fundamental premise, denying liberalism’s atomistic anthropology and advancing a political theory that was classically humanistic, democratic, and communitarian. Whereas the Lockean formulation identified life, liberty, and property as the essential rights of man, Jefferson famously replaced the latter with the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. Happiness, not private property or a more generalized individualist self-possession, is the Jeffersonian telos. Property rights, insofar as they exist, are but a means to the democratic distribution of the positive freedom to pursue individual and collective happiness, which is the supreme social good. Property rights must therefore be socially contingent, and indeed may be curtailed to promote widespread ownership as well as the economic independence and the freedom from exploitation and coercion that it affords:
“I am conscious that an equal division of property is impractable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind . . . Wherever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.” - Letter to the Reverend James Madison, October 28, 1785
Jefferson’s most radical mechanism for ensuring the continuing democratization of virtue, freedom, and felicity was his idea of perpetual revolution. In a letter to James Madison, written from France during the fateful year of 1789, Jefferson begins with the “self-evident” premise “‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it,” and argues on this basis that any socio-political order can only be legitimate if it is consciously established and ratified by those currently living within it. To this end, Jefferson proposes that every nineteen years all established laws should become void in a great revolutionary jubilee, at which point 1776 will commence again.
The right to overthrow old modes and orders and to take an active role in instituting new ones, the experience of “begin[ning] the world over again,” is for Jefferson essential for a fully-realized human life, as it will ensure the active participation of the people at large, and not just an elite of elected representatives, in the “expressing, discussing, and deciding” that are the practice, the positive content, of political freedom. Though the notion of having regularly-scheduled revolutions seems a bit naïve, and would in practice probably look like Woodstock ’99 on a national scale, it is nonetheless compelling as an expression of Jefferson’s radical democratism, according to which all people may govern themselves in all things, never being ruled by dead letters.
The substantive political participation of the people, from whom all authority is derived, must be established not only “horizontally”, through time, by the practice of perpetual revolution, but also “vertically” among all social classes from the bottom up. An oft-neglected Jeffersonian proposal, which Matthews argues to be crucial to Jefferson’s entire system of thought, is the subdivision of counties into “ward-republics”, or “hundreds”: autonomous political entities that were to be small and local enough that all of their constituent members could know one another on a personal basis, and every person could participate in performing the functions of government. These ward-republics would do most of the business of the state, only delegating to the counties—and from the counties, to the states and to the Union—those operations that could not be autonomously fulfilled.
Jefferson’s egalitarianism, expressed in the five most famous words he ever wrote—“all men are created equal,”—was based not on man’s faculties of reason, but on his universally-endowed moral sense; an innate ability to distinguish moral right from wrong. Jeffersonian humanity is not defined by cold, individuated rational calculation, but rather by its prosocial instincts; its moral awareness and its capacity for friendship and bonhomie:
“He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality therefore was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this.” Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787
In a beautiful letter to Maria Cosway, Jefferson presented a dialogue between the Head and the Heart. The Head wants to retreat from society, living a private and exclusive life that focuses on the certainties afforded by the study of material things while avoiding the precariousness of human relationships:
“The making an acquaintance is not a matter of indifference. When a new one is proposed to you, view it all round. Consider what advantages it presents, and to what inconveniencies it may expose you. Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it . . . The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness. Those, which depend on ourselves, are the only pleasures a wise man will count on: for nothing is ours which another may deprive us of.”
The Heart responds—and wins the argument—by proclaiming that the pleasure to be derived from our more primitive, undifferentiated, and sentimental instinct for true friendship and elemental human connection surpasses anything to be hoped for from abstract, cloistered speculations:
“Let the gloomy Monk, sequestered from the world, seek unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell! Let the sublimated philosopher grasp visionary happiness while pursuing phantoms dressed in the garb of truth! Their supreme wisdom is supreme folly: and they mistake for happiness the mere absence of pain. Had they ever felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart, they would exchange for it all the frigid speculations of their lives, which you have been vaunting in such elevated terms. Believe me then, my friend, that that is a miserable arithmetic which would estimate friendship at nothing, or at less than nothing.”
“Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the incertain combinations of the head. [Nature] laid their foundation therefore in sentiment, not in science. That she gave to all, as necessary to all: this to a few only, as sufficing with a few.” - Letter to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786
It is for this reason, and in this sense, that all men are created equal. Jefferson believed in the (temporary) intellectual inferiority of black slaves to whites:
“I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman. I have supposed the blackman, in his present state, might not be so. But it would be hazardous to affirm that, equally cultivated for a few generations, he would not become so.” Letter to Marquis de Chastellux, 1785
But not in the inferiority of their—or anyone else’s—God-given moral sentiments, which are the foundation of society itself—obviating the necessity for any kind of coercive governmental power, according to Jefferson’s communitarian anarchism—as well as of the fundamental equality of each one of its members. For Jefferson, it is neither the state nor the market, neither the self-possessing individual nor the Leviathan, but the organic, tangible bonds of humanizing friendship, that sustain a free society in which the fulfillment of human life will be realized in happiness.
For all the lip service Americans pay to the principle of self-government, foreign observers are often surprised to find how little time and attention we devote to its practice. For most ordinary people, “democracy” entails voting in biennial elections between two viable candidates who have been pre-selected by party apparatchiks, corporate lobbyists, interest groups, and mass media, before returning to their real lives as commercial consumers and wage workers; and this arrangement is breathily proclaimed by politicians and talk show hosts as the envy of the world’s huddled masses. While the petty despotisms pocking the earth afford no choice to their people as to who governs them, Americans are periodically presented with two options—two shadows on the cave wall—that are in fact dual appendages of one sovereign: the liberal Constitution and the private commercial enterprises, now condensed into oligopoly, whose pre-social property rights are enshrined by it. Mysteriously, it is typical for one-third to one-half of eligible voters to forego this ritual; and the poorer one is, the less likely one is to participate in it.
Americans venerate the Declaration of Independence, says Richard Matthews, but they live The Federalist. The Jeffersonian brand is often deployed in the service of buttressing the revolutionary bona fides of the Constitution—a democratic patina for a regime that makes plutocracy inevitable—but sharper observers, like Charles Beard in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), have noted a fundamental antagonism between the rights of property as enumerated by the Constitution and the rights of man as articulated by the Declaration. Those who subscribe to the traditional consensus, according to which Madison and Hamilton simply codified the Jeffersonian Revolution instead of countering it, are often led to confusion about the proper definition of democracy, conflating it with liberalism and viewing the two concepts as coessential when they more often prove mutually exclusive. This confusion is manifest when The Washington Post, Amazon’s subsidiary tabloid, whose slogan reads “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” publishes an op-ed titled, “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” Parents don’t get a say in how their children are educated at public schools, to which, if they can’t afford private school, they are legally obligated to send them on pain of imprisonment. This is a democracy, for God’s sake.
Though today we associate liberalism primarily with “behavioral” freedoms, like those of speech and religion, it originated in the seventeenth century as an ideology of private property. Liberal contractarian theorists, most notably John Locke, framed private property rights as something pre-political or pre-social, thus putting them beyond the reach of social consensus and democratic politics. Additional rights were added to this extrapolitical sphere as they were identified as unalienable “properties” of the individual, making possessive individualism the all-governing ideal and necessitating the establishment of a powerful and coercive state, a Leviathan, to protect private property from democratic appropriation and to restrain the acquisitive and antisocial proclivities of liberalism’s “market man”.
Jefferson, for his part, rejected this fundamental premise, denying liberalism’s atomistic anthropology and advancing a political theory that was classically humanistic, democratic, and communitarian. Whereas the Lockean formulation identified life, liberty, and property as the essential rights of man, Jefferson famously replaced the latter with the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. Happiness, not private property or a more generalized individualist self-possession, is the Jeffersonian telos. Property rights, insofar as they exist, are but a means to the democratic distribution of the positive freedom to pursue individual and collective happiness, which is the supreme social good. Property rights must therefore be socially contingent, and indeed may be curtailed to promote widespread ownership as well as the economic independence and the freedom from exploitation and coercion that it affords:
“I am conscious that an equal division of property is impractable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind . . . Wherever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.” - Letter to the Reverend James Madison, October 28, 1785
Jefferson’s most radical mechanism for ensuring the continuing democratization of virtue, freedom, and felicity was his idea of perpetual revolution. In a letter to James Madison, written from France during the fateful year of 1789, Jefferson begins with the “self-evident” premise “‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it,” and argues on this basis that any socio-political order can only be legitimate if it is consciously established and ratified by those currently living within it. To this end, Jefferson proposes that every nineteen years all established laws should become void in a great revolutionary jubilee, at which point 1776 will commence again.
The right to overthrow old modes and orders and to take an active role in instituting new ones, the experience of “begin[ning] the world over again,” is for Jefferson essential for a fully-realized human life, as it will ensure the active participation of the people at large, and not just an elite of elected representatives, in the “expressing, discussing, and deciding” that are the practice, the positive content, of political freedom. Though the notion of having regularly-scheduled revolutions seems a bit naïve, and would in practice probably look like Woodstock ’99 on a national scale, it is nonetheless compelling as an expression of Jefferson’s radical democratism, according to which all people may govern themselves in all things, never being ruled by dead letters.
The substantive political participation of the people, from whom all authority is derived, must be established not only “horizontally”, through time, by the practice of perpetual revolution, but also “vertically” among all social classes from the bottom up. An oft-neglected Jeffersonian proposal, which Matthews argues to be crucial to Jefferson’s entire system of thought, is the subdivision of counties into “ward-republics”, or “hundreds”: autonomous political entities that were to be small and local enough that all of their constituent members could know one another on a personal basis, and every person could participate in performing the functions of government. These ward-republics would do most of the business of the state, only delegating to the counties—and from the counties, to the states and to the Union—those operations that could not be autonomously fulfilled.
Jefferson’s egalitarianism, expressed in the five most famous words he ever wrote—“all men are created equal,”—was based not on man’s faculties of reason, but on his universally-endowed moral sense; an innate ability to distinguish moral right from wrong. Jeffersonian humanity is not defined by cold, individuated rational calculation, but rather by its prosocial instincts; its moral awareness and its capacity for friendship and bonhomie:
“He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality therefore was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this.” Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787
In a beautiful letter to Maria Cosway, Jefferson presented a dialogue between the Head and the Heart. The Head wants to retreat from society, living a private and exclusive life that focuses on the certainties afforded by the study of material things while avoiding the precariousness of human relationships:
“The making an acquaintance is not a matter of indifference. When a new one is proposed to you, view it all round. Consider what advantages it presents, and to what inconveniencies it may expose you. Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it . . . The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness. Those, which depend on ourselves, are the only pleasures a wise man will count on: for nothing is ours which another may deprive us of.”
The Heart responds—and wins the argument—by proclaiming that the pleasure to be derived from our more primitive, undifferentiated, and sentimental instinct for true friendship and elemental human connection surpasses anything to be hoped for from abstract, cloistered speculations:
“Let the gloomy Monk, sequestered from the world, seek unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell! Let the sublimated philosopher grasp visionary happiness while pursuing phantoms dressed in the garb of truth! Their supreme wisdom is supreme folly: and they mistake for happiness the mere absence of pain. Had they ever felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart, they would exchange for it all the frigid speculations of their lives, which you have been vaunting in such elevated terms. Believe me then, my friend, that that is a miserable arithmetic which would estimate friendship at nothing, or at less than nothing.”
“Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the incertain combinations of the head. [Nature] laid their foundation therefore in sentiment, not in science. That she gave to all, as necessary to all: this to a few only, as sufficing with a few.” - Letter to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786
It is for this reason, and in this sense, that all men are created equal. Jefferson believed in the (temporary) intellectual inferiority of black slaves to whites:
“I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman. I have supposed the blackman, in his present state, might not be so. But it would be hazardous to affirm that, equally cultivated for a few generations, he would not become so.” Letter to Marquis de Chastellux, 1785
But not in the inferiority of their—or anyone else’s—God-given moral sentiments, which are the foundation of society itself—obviating the necessity for any kind of coercive governmental power, according to Jefferson’s communitarian anarchism—as well as of the fundamental equality of each one of its members. For Jefferson, it is neither the state nor the market, neither the self-possessing individual nor the Leviathan, but the organic, tangible bonds of humanizing friendship, that sustain a free society in which the fulfillment of human life will be realized in happiness.
December 26, 2020
Introduced me to Jefferson’s idea of “ward-republics.” Thomas Jefferson was a visionary for radical democracy in America.
It is too bad Jefferson was away in France during the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. It is too bad his ideas didn’t win out.
Luckily he wrote his revolutionary ideals into the Declaration of Independence. These ideals are just waiting for people to dust them off and use them.
It is too bad Jefferson was away in France during the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. It is too bad his ideas didn’t win out.
Luckily he wrote his revolutionary ideals into the Declaration of Independence. These ideals are just waiting for people to dust them off and use them.
March 1, 2009
A complex man. Inconsistent or brilliant?
September 25, 2015
very interesting but incredibly repetitive
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews