Thomas Jefferson and the Politics of Nature. Edited by Thomas S. Engeman. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. 232p. $17.00 paper.

Abstract

This volume offers, as its blurb asserts, "substantive discus- sions of the key issues facing Jeffersonian scholars." Begin- ning with Michael Zuckert's by now familiar argument that Jefferson's thought is best understood as resting in a Lockean natural rights framework, other able scholars more or less take issue with this analysis by appealing both to Jefferson's own writings and to the works of major interpreters of the political thought of the founding era. The result is a serious reconsideration of Jefferson's thought that takes up most of the key themes raised by Louis Hartz and Bernard Bailyn forty or more years ago over the place of the liberal tradition in American thought. Veteran expositors of Jefferson's thought in a more civic republican and Christian way, Jean Yarbrough and Garrett Ward Sheldon, take issue with Zuck- ert's Lockean, natural rights emphasis, upholding instead the influences of Aristotelian, Kamesian, and Christian thought on Jefferson. Though one cannot deny the strong Lockean strand in Jefferson's thought, Yarbrough and Sheldon argue persuasively for the strong presence of the other dimensions as well. Zuckert's effort in his "Response" to claim that this mixes without resolving conflicting philosophies, and thus, if Yarbrough and Sheldon are right, leaves Jefferson hopelessly inconsistent, misses Jefferson's brilliant blending of these outlooks, all obviously present in his writings, into what might be called a Jeffersonian republicanism.