SOURCE: “Liberalism and Classicism in Jefferson's Political Philosophy,” in The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, pp. 1-18.

[In the following essay, Sheldon examines Jefferson's political philosophy within the context of Western political thought and concludes that Jefferson drew from several theoretical traditions in formulating his own philosophy.]

Great men are obliged to suffer many indignities, not the least of which is the tendency of lesser men continually to write books about them. Thomas Jefferson has suffered in this regard perhaps more than any other famous American. Volumes have been written on Jefferson as a lawyer, architect, educator, musician, scientist, social scientist, artist, military strategist, party leader, bibliophile, agriculturist, and even as a tourist. In addition to books affirming Jefferson's character as a Renaissance man, several studies have addressed his political thought, either by itself or within the context of early American political theory generally.

This book studies the historical development of Thomas Jefferson's political philosophy within the context of the major themes of Western political theory and the contemporary historiographic debates over early American political thought. An article by historian J. G. A. Pocock, in which he effectively launched the “classical republican” paradigm, described three approaches to the study of past political ideas: (1) the historical approach, which examines the language used by a society to discuss political problems; (2) the political science approach, which studies the role of political language in political activity; and (3) the approach of political philosophy, which, more abstractly, examines the concepts in past political ideas and their relation to other theories found throughout the history of Western political thought.¹ While most works on Jefferson's political thought use one of the first two approaches as a point of departure, this book employs the third approach, examining the conceptual qualities of Thomas Jefferson's political ideas and relating them to concepts found in the classics of political theory.²

This approach reveals that Jefferson's political philosophy was a rich constellation of theoretical qualities from several traditions (British liberalism, classical republicanism, Scottish moral sense philosophy, Christian ethics, and modern economic theory) that changed and evolved as his life passed through the historical periods of America as a colony, revolutionary America, and America as a new republic. Predominantly Lockean in his early, revolutionary writings (especially in the Declaration of Independence), albeit a liberalism adapted to the contingencies of revolutionary colonies seeking independence from a federated empire constructed ideologically from the venerable Ancient Constitution of England, after the Revolution, Jefferson's philosophy assumed a more classical republican quality, complemented by concepts found in Scottish moral sense psychology and basic Christian ethics, and modified by certain aspects of modern economic theory. Later in Jefferson's life, even while expressing a classically “Country” attack on Hamilton and the federal government's “Court” corruption, the Lockean language of rights and independence used during the Revolution against Parliament was again invoked against another remote, centralized regime threatening the sovereign autonomy of small democratic republics—Washington rather than London.

As Gordon Wood has found all early American political thought to be a skein of many strands,³ so this study finds Jefferson blending many philosophical concepts into a comprehensive and coherent political philosophy, the essence of which may be closer to classical republicanism than to Lockean liberalism. Still, Jefferson saw no contradiction between the protection of individual natural rights and popular participation in classical democratic republics; rather, he saw the ongoing and informed participation of democratic citizens as guaranteeing the preservation of basic civil rights. Unlike his colleague, James Madison, who perceived a threat to individual rights from local participatory democracy, Jefferson was sanguine over the possibility of qualified republican deliberation protecting fundamental liberties and therefore was able to blend classical republican and Lockean liberal ideas in his political theory.

Historical scholarship has struggled over the true sources and qualities of American revolutionary and early republican political thought, debating for the last two decades whether the Revolution and founding were premised in Lockean concepts of individualism, natural rights, and limited government, or in the classical republican concepts of Country virtue versus Court corruption, social man, and public participation. (An appendix at the end of the book provides a detailed critique of the past thirty years of historical scholarship.) Jefferson's political philosophy was illuminated by all of these contentions. He was able to accommodate seemingly disparate elements within an original and remarkably coherent worldview to provide a more sophisticated understanding of the ideological foundations of our republic. A summary of the main currents of the last twenty years of historical scholarship on the American Revolution and founding, as well as an examination of the liberal and republican components of Jefferson's conceptions of human nature, political society, and social ethics, follows.

LOCKEAN ORTHODOXY

Until very recently, the American Revolution and founding have been understood solely in terms of the British liberalism of John Locke and related French Enlightenment ideas. Locke's Second Treatise, especially, with its conceptions of an isolated, materialist individual in a “state of nature” possessing “natural rights” to life, liberty, and property, establishing a government through a rational “social contract” in order to preserve those private rights and interests through the protection of a strictly limited state, has been seen as the key to prevailing attitudes in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States Constitution.⁴ Louis Hartz captured this traditional sense when he wrote in The Liberal Tradition in America that “Locke dominates American political thought as no thinker anywhere dominates the political thought of a nation.”⁵ This Lockean orthodoxy has profoundly affected our appreciation of Thomas Jefferson's political philosophy. Carl Becker's major work on the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “Jefferson copied Locke.”⁶ Jefferson's principal biographers, Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, also subscribed to this Lockean perspective.⁷ Several works devoted to Jefferson's political ideas, including Daniel Boorstin's The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, Gilbert Chinard's Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism, and Adrienne Koch's The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, emphasize the liberal and modern Enlightenment ideas in Jefferson's political thought.⁸ These books give us the characteristic “Jeffersonian tradition” found in public school textbooks of liberal democracy, individual rights, philosophical materialism and naturalism, religious and economic liberty, and personal freedom.

The Lockean orthodoxy which dominated early American scholarship for over one hundred years was also congenial with the progressive school of American history found in the works of Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner. Locke's emphasis on private property and conflicting material interests led quite easily into the progressive (and later Marxist) school of historical interpretation that focused upon economic, social, and institutional factors in explaining political ideas and actions in America.

But this Lockean view of American and Jeffersonian thought, which comfortably placed us within a simple, safe, and uniform philosophy of natural rights and limited liberal government, was shattered by a new development in American historiography.

CLASSICAL REPUBLICANISM

Beginning in the 1960s, the classical republican paradigm became what historian Joyce Appleby called “the most protean concept” in early American scholarship.⁹ It did this by challenging the Lockean orthodoxy with an alternative ideology that conceived of man as naturally social, with a need to participate in political life and display a capacity for public virtue.¹⁰ This classical republican school of political ideology, largely developed by historian J. G. A. Pocock, is a complex and intricate theoretical formulation drawn from the writings of several nonliberal philosophers, including Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, and James Harrington.¹¹ It constitutes a body of ideas about man's political nature and the just society that moved from Ancient Greece to Rome to Renaissance Italy to eighteenth-century England and finally to America. The primary components of this paradigm are that man's nature is essentially political, requiring an economically independent citizenry that participates directly in common rule, thereby developing and expressing its unique human nature and establishing and maintaining a virtuous republic.¹² Virtue is a decidedly non-Lockean concept because it requires the individual to sacrifice self-interest for the good of the whole society.¹³ In its most recent incarnation, classical republicanism appears in eighteenth-century England, where a virtuous Country gentry holds back the decay of the republic that is rapidly being corrupted by a wealthy, decadent Court faction concentrating power and undermining the economic independence of the citizenry with paper money, public credit and debt, stock-jobbing, financial imperialism, and standing armies. Such a concentration of wealth, power, and vice, threatening sturdy, frugal republican virtue, can only be resisted by returning to the original principles of the English Ancient Constitution, which respect the virtue and independence of the common citizen and the traditional balance of the mixed English Constitution.¹⁴

This ideology came to America when the colonists perceived the acts of Parliament in the 1760s to be a reassertion of Court corruption and the Revolution as preserving the republican virtues of honest civil government.¹⁵ So, the American Revolution was not a struggle for Lockean rights and limited liberal government, but a nostalgic battle for the preservation of original republican principles threatened by a corrupt, financial empire. Thus, for J. G. A. Pocock, the Revolution is not the first act in a modern liberal age, but “the last act of the civic Renaissance.”¹⁶ Well, not quite the last act. According to the classical republican paradigm, Court corruption raised its ugly head once again when Alexander Hamilton and other Federalists tried to centralize power in the national capitol around a National Bank, manufacturers, financial imperialism, and all the rest, attempting to crush the native agrarian virtue that Jefferson and his party struggled to protect—and ultimately preserve.¹⁷

The gist of all this is that the American Revolution and founding were not Lockean, but republican; Americans' philosophical roots are not modern, liberal individualism, materialism, progress, freedom, and rights, but rather, ancient, social, spiritual, nostalgic public virtue. But, republican ideology remains a diverse and somewhat vague paradigm, within which scholars disagree over the specific components and extent of its influence.¹⁸

ASPECTS OF LIBERALISM AND CLASSICISM IN JEFFERSON'S POLITICAL THOUGHT

Thomas Jefferson's political philosophy contains both British liberal and classical republican qualities.¹⁹ Given their widely divergent conceptions of human nature, politics, and ethics, the presence of both schools of thought in Jefferson's philosophy has led to difficulties in understanding the nature of Jeffersonian democratic theory. Scholars have argued persuasively that Jefferson's political ideas were purely Lockean or purely Aristotelean, citing convincing evidence from Jefferson's own writings. By distinguishing between classical and liberal conceptions of human nature, political society, and social ethics, and by showing how Jefferson's thought at different times reflected each, one can establish the basis for a detailed historical analysis of the development of Jefferson's political philosophy in which those differences dissolve into a consistent and comprehensive worldview.

HUMAN NATURE

Classical Greek political thought conceived of man as a naturally social and political being. Aristotle declared that “man is by nature a political animal. … Men have a natural desire for life in society.”²⁰ Aristotle distinguished man, who is political, from merely gregarious social creatures (such as bees or ants) by mankind's capacity for “reasoned speech.”²¹ But he also insisted that “the real difference between men and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust.”²² These unique faculties of reasoned speech and moral choice render humans naturally social and political, as neither can be either developed or exercised in isolation; they make political society at once possible and necessary. And, as classical political philosophy regards these distinctive human faculties as the highest qualities in man, the political deliberation that develops and refines those faculties becomes man's noblest pursuit—cultivating his distinctive telos and creating a virtuous polity. As J. G. A. Pocock has shown, such development, for Aristotle, involved both moral and material preconditions. Aristotle's citizen must possess the economic independence enabling him to freely enter the public realm on an equal basis with his fellow citizens.²³

Modern, liberal political philosophy conceives of man as naturally individual and independent. John Locke declared that man in his natural state is “free, equal, and independent.”²⁴ This free and separate condition derives from liberalism's conception of man as essentially a material being, ruled by the private senses which he shares with no one, guided by the pleasures and pains of this world, and motivated primarily by a desire for continued life, or “self-preservation.” And such material existence gives the natural right to those things (“life, liberty, and property”) which insure that continued existence. The power of reason is employed by man to best secure those individual rights and that self-preservation. Man's rational faculties do not form an inevitable social bond, as much as the means to create a government that secures his individual freedom and independence.

Thomas Jefferson's conception of man's nature appears quite liberal in his most famous document, the Declaration of Independence “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”²⁵ Yet elsewhere, Jefferson's view of the human psyche seems decidedly classical. He declared in various letters that man is “an animal destined to live in society,” because “the Creator … intended man for a social animal.”²⁶ He specifically criticized Hobbes's psychology (calling it a “humiliation to human nature”)²⁷ and offered an alternative syllogism echoing Aristotle's conception of a naturally social and ethical humanity: “Man was created for social intercourse; but social intercourse cannot be maintained without a sense of justice; then man must have been created with a sense of justice.”²⁸ Indeed, on several occasions Jefferson seemed more inclined to ascribe some error on God's part than to admit that man is not naturally a social and ethical being: “The Creator would have been a bungling artist, had he intended man for a social animal, without planting in him social dispositions.”²⁹

POLITICAL SOCIETY

Corresponding to its vision of human nature as consisting of free, equal and independent individuals possessing natural rights to life, liberty and property, modern liberalism conceives of politics as consisting of a limited state of delegated authority charged with preserving those individual rights. For Locke, if all men were rationally self-interested and capable of respecting others' rights, no state would be necessary at all. But because some men violate the rights of others by threatening their lives or property, a government is instituted, by the consent of the governed, to secure the natural rights of individuals from invasion by others:

To avoid, and remedy these inconveniences of the State of Nature … Men join and unite into a community, for their comfortable, safe and peaceful living one amongst another, in a secure Enjoyment of their Properties, and a greater Security against any that are not of it. … The great and chief end of Mens uniting into Commonwealths and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.³⁰

And because this government is established by free individuals and limited to preserving their natural rights, if it ever ceases to perform its function (or worse, invades the peoples' rights itself), those individuals that formed it may dissolve the government and establish one that will properly serve their interests. Such dissolution of government constitutes Locke's famous right to revolution: “When the Arbitrary Power of the Prince, the Electors, or ways of Election are altered, without the Consent, and contrary to the common Interest of the People, there … the Legislative is altered [and] the People are at Liberty to provide for themselves by erecting a new Legislative.”³¹

In contrast to Locke's conception of the state as limited to preserving individual rights, the ancients conceived of politics as cultivating man's highest faculties and establishing a polity of virtue and purpose. Aristotle maintained that man is naturally a social being, born with the capacity for reasoned speech and moral choice, but he also insisted that those attributes be cultivated and refined: “virtues are implanted in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature: we are by nature equipped with the ability to receive them, and habit brings this ability to completion and fulfillment … we are provided with the capacity [dynamis: potential] first, and display the activity [energia: actuality] afterward.”³² And the best way in which to develop man's social faculties is through direct participation in the politics of a small democratic society: “the state cannot be defined merely as a community dwelling in the same place and preventing its members from wrongdoing and promoting the exchange of goods and services … [rather, politics should] engender a certain character in the citizens and make them good and disposed to perform noble actions.”³³

Thus, Aristotle's notion of citizenship implies the direct participation in local politics, which cultivates man's social and ethical faculties: “A citizen is in general one who has a share both in ruling and in being ruled with a view of life that is in accordance with goodness.”³⁴ Such direct citizen participation in political affairs necessitates a small democracy, like the Greek polis, where everyone knows his fellow citizens: “In order to give decisions on matters of justice and for the purpose of distributing offices in accordance with the work of the applicants, it is necessary that the citizens should know each other and know what kind of people they are.”³⁵ A liberal state limited to protecting private rights may easily be a vast representative democracy; but a classical republic that seeks to cultivate man's social faculties, which conceives of a “public” realm apart from private interest, requires small participatory democracy, and an economically independent citizenry.³⁶

Thomas Jefferson's conception of politics seems at times to reflect the liberal, social contract view of a limited government devoted to preserving private rights. Again, this perspective appears in the Declaration of Independence “to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, [and] whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government.”³⁷ This liberal view is also found in Jefferson's writings respecting the federal government, as evidenced in his first inaugural address: “[America requires] a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.”³⁸

Yet much of Jefferson's writings concerning American democracy seem to advocate small participatory republics, cultivating man's innate social faculties and establishing a virtuous polity. Jefferson's extensive efforts in dividing the Virginia counties into wards of five to six square miles and one hundred citizens for educational, economic, and political purposes reveal strongly classical sympathies: “Each ward would thus be a small republic within itself, and every man in the state would thus become an acting member of the common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties … entirely within his competence. The wit of man cannot devise a more solid basis for a free, durable and well-administered republic.”³⁹ Elsewhere, Jefferson indicated that without such citizen participation in the virtuous republic, leaders would turn into “wolves” and the people would be reduced to “mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities but for sinning and suffering.”⁴⁰ Thus, with respect to his efforts to amend Virginia's constitution dividing the counties into small ward republics, Jefferson wrote: “Could I once see this I should consider it as the dawn of the salvation of the republic, and say with old Simeon, ‘nunc dimittis Domine.’”⁴¹

SOCIAL ETHICS

Lockean social ethics are essentially negative by virtue of their moral imperative to not harm others, to refrain from infringing upon others' rights and freedom, allowing them to pursue their own interests in ways that they see fit. Individuals, society, and the state are obliged to respect the rights of individuals, especially as they relate to the individual's pursuit of his own self-interest (or self-preservation) and the life, liberty, and property necessary to that pursuit. Conservative, laissez-faire economics, with its emphasis on leaving the market forces free to regulate themselves, without political interference, corresponds nicely with these negative liberal ethics.⁴² Their political ascension is usually marked by the formal separation of ethics and politics, or church and state.

The origins of such ethics reside in the epistemology emerging from modern empiricism, which relies on individual sensory perception as the sole source of knowledge. For, if no unified truth can emerge from the diversity of perceptions, no one is justified in prescribing moral lessons to others; the autonomous perception and judgment of the individual must be respected. No objective standards can exist above subjective choice, given such epistemological relativism. The one area where liberal psychology can legislate is with regard to material harm and loss, or violations of individuals' rights and freedom. Therefore, liberal social ethics are confined to restraining and punishing violence and theft (the state qua police), but otherwise leave individuals free to their own devices.

Classical social ethics are positive in the sense that they insist that it is not enough to merely refrain from injuring others; moral action requires an effort to improve others, encouraging the perfection of their souls. As Aristotle maintains that happiness comes from possessing a virtuous character, individuals are obliged to cultivate the highest goodness in others.⁴³ Socrates's rebuttal of Meletus's charge of corrupting the Athenean youth (that one is made better or worse by the quality of one's associates, making deliberate corruption of others harmful to oneself) commends an ethics which ties one's own goodness and happiness to those around one, and obliges one to cultivate others' goodness.⁴⁴ But such ethics imply an objective standard—revealed by God or determined collectively—that transcends individual perception and interest. Perhaps the best statement of these classical social ethics (which re-emerge in Christian ethics) is that made by Socrates at his trial after receiving the sentence of death:

When my sons grow up, gentlemen, if you think they are putting money or anything else before goodness, take your revenge by plaguing them as I plagued you; and if they fancy themselves for no reason, you must scold them just as I have scolded you, for neglecting the important things and thinking that they are good for something when they are good for nothing. If you do this, I shall have had justice at your hands.⁴⁵

Thomas Jefferson's social ethics reveal a liberal inclination in his attack on the established Church of England and in his advocacy of the separation of church and state and the corollary right to religious freedom.⁴⁶ Yet, as we shall see, Jefferson's advocacy of religious freedom did not derive so much from an epistemological skepticism as from the hope that through the free expression of all religious denominations, the people might distill those simple teachings of Jesus that Jefferson considered the one true religion. His preference for Christian ethics also derived from his belief that they were the most advanced social ethics or morals governing human relations, and so most suited to a naturally social being and the most social of regimes—participatory democracy.

Jefferson's personal ethics also revealed a liberal reluctance to force his moral views on others, as he expressed in a letter to his grandson: “I never saw an instance of one or two disputants convincing the other by argument. [But] I have seen many, on their getting warm, becoming rude, and shooting one another.”⁴⁷ Instead of preaching to others, Jefferson encouraged “asking questions, as if for information, or suggesting doubts.”⁴⁸ This seems mild, indeed, but it was also the method of Socrates and Jesus.⁴⁹

JEFFERSON'S EVOLVING POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Jefferson was Lockean during the revolutionary period, especially in the Declaration of Independence, albeit a Lockean modified by the contingencies of a revolutionary colonist, within a federated empire constructed out of ideas in the Ancient Constitution. It is in this way that the free, equal, and independent men of Locke's state of nature become the free, equal and independent legislatures of Jefferson's British Empire. Such modified liberalism reappears in Jefferson's later writings against Hamilton's Federalists and Marshall's Court, again defending the autonomy of independent democratic communities against oppression from a distant, centralized, and corrupt regime. Jefferson's republican Country ideology is clearly expressed here as his conception of the mixed constitution is of the national (one), states (few), and the counties and wards (many), unbalanced by the Court shifting all power to the central government.

Looking at the kind of democratic community that Jefferson so assiduously defended with Lockean concepts, we find a more classical republican vision of economically independent, educated citizens participating directly in the common rule of local ward republics. This classical political order is premised on a naturally social human nature emanating from a moral sense and refined with Christian ethics. And yet, we find that this classical republic in Jefferson's mind is not incompatible with individual freedom and certain kinds of economic developments, but could actually benefit in an Aristotelean self-sufficiency through such freedom and development.

Jefferson actually combines liberalism and republicanism in his political philosophy in two ways. Although each predominates at different historical periods (the Lockean during the revolutionary and the anti-Federalist periods and the republican during the postrevolutionary construction period), both are present at all times. Lockean liberalism predominates against the Parliament and the Federalists to defend autonomous republic legislatures in the colonies and the states; and the classical republics in ward, county, state, and national governments, protect, in Jefferson's view, individual rights and liberties from tyrannical government.

Finally, we find that Jefferson embodied certain traditional landed values through his participation in the culture of the Virginia gentry, although this “Tory” character affected his personal manners and style more than his political beliefs. As Rhys Isaac has shown, Jefferson sought to replace the traditional hierarchical society and hereditary aristocracy with a hierarchy of republican regimes and an aristocracy of merit and virtue.⁵⁰

This study examines the ideological context of the British Empire into which Jefferson was born, an imperial realm settling colonies in America under an absolute monarch bound by feudal traditions and charters, yet later expanded by a commercially-minded Parliament, while retaining ideological elements of the Crown. It shows how Jefferson's legal studies imbued him with principles generated by the English political turmoils of 1660 to 1688, especially the Ancient Constitution and Locke's natural rights philosophy, which he adapted in his ideological struggles for colonial independence; and analyzes his postrevolutionary political philosophy, in his conceptions of human nature, political society, and social ethics, along with related views on education, economics, religion, federalism, and aristocracy. It considers the culture of the Virginia gentry, which affected Jefferson's personal tastes and style, and the shadow which the slavery of that culture cast over his political ideals. It concludes with a reexamination of theoretical concepts often associated with Jefferson (freedom, rights, equality, and democracy) from the perspective of the development of his political philosophy, and with a brief discussion of Jefferson as a political philosopher, the effects of the varied historical, social, and philosophical influences on his thought and how they combined to produce his unique perspective.

Notes

1. J. G. A. Pocock, “Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 22 (October 1965): 549-83.

2. For a more detailed discussion of this methodology, see the introduction to Garrett Ward Sheldon, The History of Political Theory: Ancient Greece to Modern America (New York: Peter Lang, 1988).

3. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 7-29.

4. See Sheldon, The History of Political Theory, ch. 9.

5. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955), p. 140. See also Isaac Kramnick, “Republican Revisionism Revisited,” American Historical Review 87 (June 1982): 629-64, at p. 629; and Richard Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984), pp. 2-5.

6. Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Random House, 1958), p. 79.

7. Dumas Malone, Jefferson in His Time, 6 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948-1981); Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

8. Daniel Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Henry Holt, 1948); Gilbert Chinard, Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929); Adrienne Koch, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964).

9. Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism and Ideology,” American Quarterly 37 (Fall 1985): 461-73, at p. 461. Most scholars trace this paradigm back to Z. S. Fink, The Classical Republicans (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1949); and Carolyn Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthsmen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959).

10. Robert E. Shalhope, “Republicanism and Early American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (April 1982): 334-56; John Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 10.

11. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969); Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980); Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Pocock, “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies.”

12. See esp. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 66-68.

13. J. G. A. Pocock, “Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers,” in Wealth and Virtue, eds. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 235-37.

14. Fink, The Classical Republicans; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 407-552; Pocock, Three British Revolutions, pp. 5-14; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 74-87; Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (January 1986): 20-34; Appleby, “Republicanism and Ideology”; Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, ch. 2.

15. Pocock, Three British Revolutions, pp. 13-14; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 48-50; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History.

16. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 462.

17. Ibid., pp. 525-33.

18. Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts,” p. 21; Shalhope, “Republicanism and Early American Historiography,” p. 335.

19. By British liberal I mean primarily the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke; by classical republican I mean the political philosophies of Aristotle, Cicero, Montesquieu, and James Harrington. While significant differences exist among thinkers within each tradition, for purposes of this analysis I will concentrate on the major distinctions between liberalism and classicism. See appendix for further explanation.

20. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), book 1, ch. 2, p. 28, book 3, ch. 6, p. 114.

21. Ibid., book 1, ch. 2, p. 28.

22. Ibid., p. 29. Aristotle included the human affections as another source of man's natural propensity for society: “for it is our love of others that causes us to prefer life in a society, and they all contribute toward that good life which is the purpose of the state” (book 3, ch. 9, p. 121).

23. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 66-68; Aristotle, Politics, book 3, ch. 9.

24. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: New American Library, 1965).

25. From Jefferson's “original Rough draught,” prior to Committee revisions, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 60 vols., ed. Julian Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950), 1: 423-27, hereafter Papers. Much has been made of Jefferson's substitution of “pursuit of happiness” for Locke's “prosperity,” or “estate.” My argument that Jefferson's use of “happiness” reflects his Aristotelean bent, as seen as the ultimate end of human life in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, book 1, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1962), is elaborated in ch. 3.

26. Jefferson to John Adams, October 14, 1816, The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2 vols., ed. Lester J. Cappon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 2: 492, hereafter A-JL; to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 vols., ed. Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904-1905), 6: 257, hereafter WTJ; also see to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814, The Complete Jefferson, ed. Saul K. Padover (New York: Tudor, 1943), p. 1033, hereafter CJ.

27. Jefferson to Francis Gilmer, June 7, 1816, WTJ, 15: 24.

28. Ibid., p. 25.

29. Jefferson to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814, CJ, p. 1033. See also Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787, WTJ, 6: 257 (“He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler …”); and to John Adams, October 14, 1816, in A-JL, 2: 492 (“as a wise creator must have seen to be necessary in an animal destined to live in society”).

30. Locke, Two Treatises, ch. 7, p. 369, ch. 8, p. 375, ch. 9, p. 395.

31. Ibid., ch. 19, pp. 457, 459.

32. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 2, 1103a, p. 33; see also book 2, 1103a-1103b, p. 33-34 (“virtues … we acquire by first having to put them into action … we learn by doing … we become just by the practice of just actions”).

33. Aristotle, Politics, book 3, ch. 9, p. 120; and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 1, 1099b, p. 23.

34. Aristotle, Politics, book 3, ch. 13, pp. 131-32; see also book 3, ch. 1, p. 102 (“What effectively distinguishes the citizen from all others is his participation in Judgement and Authority, that is, holding office, legal, political, administrative”); and book 3, ch. 4, p. 112 (“There are different kinds of citizens, but … a citizen in the fullest sense is one who has a share in the privileges of rule”).

35. Ibid., book 7, ch. 4, p. 266.

36. Ibid., book 1, ch. 8, book 3, chs. 4, 9; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 66-68.

37. Jefferson, Papers, 1: 423-27.

38. Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” CJ, p. 386.

39. Jefferson to Major John Cartwright, June 5, 1824, WTJ, 16: 46. Note also Jefferson's last remark to Monsieur Coray that “Greece was the first of civilized nations which presented examples of what man should be” (WTJ, 15: 480-90).

40. Jefferson to Col. Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787, ibid., 5: 58, and to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, 15: 40.

41. Jefferson to Gov. John Tyler, May 26, 1810, ibid., 12: 394.

42. For this reason, along with Locke's justification for the unlimited accumulation of property, C. B. Macpherson considers them the ethics of bourgeois individualism and capitalist social relations, see The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Democratic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 228-33; and The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 22.

43. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, books 9, 10.

44. Plato's Apology, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Baltimore: Penguin, 1954), pp. 70-74.

45. Ibid., p. 76.

46. Thomas Jefferson, The Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (1779), CJ, p. 946.

47. Jefferson to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, November 24, 1808, WTJ, 12: 196-202.

48. Ibid., p. 199.

49. See Plato's Socratic Dialogues, esp. Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Protagoras, Meno, book 1 of The Republic; and The Gospels, esp. Matthew 22:41-45; Mark 7:1-24; Luke 20:1-9; and John 18:33-39.

50. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 294-95. See also Melvin Yazawa, From Colonies to Commonwealth: Familial Ideology and the Beginnings of the American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 35-36, 131-32, 168; and A. G. Roeber, Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 163-68, 239.