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The power of every state ultimately depends on a
statist ideology that glorifies the state and its functionaries while denigrating
and attacking the civil society, private property, and private enterprise.
This is as true of democracy as it is of totalitarian socialism. For as
Murray Rothbard pointed out, every state is managed
by a relatively few individuals who are greatly outnumbered by the masses,
who can overthrow the rulers at any time. The state can use violence and
terror to keep the masses in line, as was the case with socialism all
throughout the twentieth century, but propaganda and brainwashing can be more
cost-effective. Thus, the state and its army of court historians endlessly
glorify its "heroes" such as Abe Lincoln and Teddy and Franklin
Roosevelt, while attacking, smearing, distorting, vilifying, or ignoring the
more effective champions of a free society.
For more than two hundred years, Thomas Jefferson
has been considered to be America’s prophet of liberty. He was the
author of the Declaration of Independence; of the Kentucky Resolve of 1798;
the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty; and countless speeches and letters
that articulated his view that that government is best which governs least.
He opposed central banking, corporate welfare, protectionist tariffs, and the
Hamiltonian subversion of the Constitution with its theories of "implied
powers" and its expansive interpretations of the plain language of the
General Welfare and Commerce Clauses.
All of this is why, for decades, leftist academics
have grossly misrepresented Jefferson’s views in their writings, so much
so that entire books have been written arguing that he was a precursor of
Marx and Engels! If they are not distorting Jefferson’s libertarian
philosophy they are blowing the reputations of his critics, such as Hamilton,
way out of proportion. If that doesn’t work, then they resort to
personal, ad hominem attacks in hopes that such attacks will encourage
younger Americans who have not yet educated themselves in the ideas of the
founders will ignore Jefferson completely. He was a Southerner and a slave owner,
after all (as opposed to the benighted Hamilton, the Northern slave owner).
Thankfully for the advocates of a free society,
Luigi Marco Bassani has just published a wonderful
new book on Jefferson entitled Liberty, State, & Union: The
Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson, that sets the record straight. Bassani
names names and documents how certain leftist
academics have ridiculously portrayed Jefferson as "a nonindividualistic, antiproperty
Jefferson, with possible communitarian if not even protosocialist
overtones." There are even some, Bassani
writes, "who have presented the third president as a forerunner of Karl
Marx and Fredrich Engels."
Because of his well-known affinity for French
culture, Jefferson’s enemies, during his time and ours, have accused
him of having favored the violent, revolutionary ideology of the French
Jacobins, based on the ideas of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
But as Bassani, an American-born professor of
political philosophy at the University of Milan,
proves: "In fact, there is no reference at all to the political thought
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau" in Jefferson’s voluminous writings,
"not even during Thomas Jefferson’s French years" when he was
the American Minister to France.
It is well known that Jefferson thought very highly
of the philosopher John Locke, an important figure in the history of
classical liberal thought. He famously stated that, during his time, the
three greatest men that civilization had produced were Locke, Francis Bacon,
and Isaac Newton. (Hamilton responded by saying Julius Caesar would be his
pick for "greatest human"). Despite the well-documented fact of Locke’s
influence on Jefferson, especially on the issue of private property, leftist
academics such as Garry Wills "have devoted much time and effort trying
to prove that Jefferson was not a Lockean." Bassani explains why Wills’ book on the subject
should have been entitled "Inventing Jefferson."
Another way in which leftist academics have
perverted Jefferson’s writings is to banish Christianity from them. The
purpose here is to attack the idea that human rights are natural rights
granted to us by God, and not by any government. According to this view, as Bassani explains, "[M]an is
a brute beast bereft of individual rights who can only be saved by the state
. . . " Believing otherwise (i.e., agreeing with Jefferson) is like
believing in witches and unicorns according to one Alasdair MacIntyre.
In his third chapter, which contains 156 footnotes, Bassani destroys the nutty idea that Jefferson was some
kind of communistic opponent of private property rights, as some of the more
absurd leftist academics have argued. In his chapter on Jefferson’s
constitutionalism Bassani expertly presents
Jefferson’s states’ rights vision of the federal government
serving as the agent of the free, independent, and sovereign states, almost
exclusively for foreign policy purposes. As Jefferson stated during his 1800
presidential campaign, "The true theory of our constitution is surely
the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within
themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. " Twenty-four years later, Jefferson reiterated
this view in a letter in which he said, "the best general key for the
solution of questions of power between our governments,
is the fact that every foreign and federal power is given to the federal
government, and to the States every power purely domestic . . . . The federal
is, in truth, our foreign government, which department alone is taken from
the sovereignty of the separate States."
Another myth about Jefferson that Bassani disproves is the myth that he had an antipathy
toward trade, banks, and commerce. "There is in Jefferson no political
bias against trade and commerce or finance," he writes. What Jefferson
opposed was the oppressive policy of government in taxing American farmers in
order to subsidize politically-connected businesses. He opposed Hamiltonian
mercantilism, in other words, while championing Smithian
capitalism. "He who is against domestic manufacture," Jefferson
once said, "must be for reducing us either to dependence on that foreign
nation [England], or to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild beasts in
dens and caverns. I am not
one of these."
Bassani also does an admirable job of explaining how
Jefferson smoked out the true intentions of his nemesis, Alexander Hamilton,
who essentially wanted to import the corrupt system of British Mercantilism
to America. This is the very system that the Revolution was fought in
opposition to. Jefferson and his followers believed it would be an outrage
and destructive of liberty and prosperity to adopt such a system. Jefferson
formed this opinion because he was well educated in the economics of his day,
especially the writings of Adam Smith and the French physiocrats.
Hamilton, by contrast, was somewhat of an economic ignoramus who articulated all
of the propagandistic superstitions that had been employed to prop up British
mercantilism.
The most important chapter of Liberty, State,
& Union is Chapter 6, "The Nature of the American Union:
Jefferson and States’ Rights." The core of Jefferson’s idea
here is what Jefferson wrote in the Kentucky Resolve of 1798, which explained
why the state of Kentucky was nullifying the federal Sedition Act, which
effectively outlawed free political speech in America. Jefferson defined
political tyranny as "the consolidation of power in a single
center" and, consequently, he believed that under the American system of
government, it was essential that the citizens of the states be acknowledged
as the true sovereigns, and as having such rights as nullification and secession
as means of asserting that sovereignty and defending themselves against a
consolidated tyranny. As Bassani writes,
"Jefferson asserted that the states, inasmuch as they were sovereign
parties entering into the constitutional compact, had created the federal
government simply as their agent, subordinate to their own power, and
designed to carry our limited and well-defined functions. As a result, the
federal government had no right to expand its own sphere of authority without
the agreement of the contracting parties."
Unlike Lincoln, who espoused a totally false theory
of the American founding (that the federal union created the states, not the
other way around), "the author of the Declaration of Independence no more
valued union for its own sake than he did government. He judged it . . . by
the ends it served. For Jefferson, as for many political thinkers of the
period prior to the Civil War, the union was an experiment in liberty and in
no way constituted an end in its own right."
This, and other parts of Liberty, State, &
Union, gives the lie to another bizarre reinvention of American history
– the false notion peddled by Harry Jaffa and his fellow Straussians that Lincoln was a Jeffersonian. Nothing
could be further from the truth. As Bassani shows,
it was power-hungry nationalist politicians like Daniel Webster, Joseph
Story, and Abraham Lincoln who created and perpetuated the ridiculous myth
that the "whole people" of America somehow created the federal
union in some kind of national plebiscite, and that the union therefore had
some sort of "mystical" value (Lincoln’s word). These men did
this as part of their political crusade for consolidated and monopolistic
political power vested in the central government. The purveyors of this myth
today are the Straussian Lincoln cultists on the
"right," who favor a powerful central government than act as the
world’s policeman militarily, along with leftist Lincoln cultists such
as Garry Wills and most other "Lincoln scholars" who favor a
powerful central government that can enlarge the welfare state if not adopt
full-blown socialism.
The Jeffersonian view of the Constitution was all
but whitewashed out of existence after the conclusion of the War to Prevent
Southern Independence. It was a hundred years before another book would be
written about the Kentucky and Virginia Resolves of 1798, for example
(William J. Watkins, Reclaiming the American Revolution). The Kentucky Resolve is the best illustration of
Jefferson’s thinking about constitutionalism.
American history was rewritten by the victorious and
newly-dominant New England Yankees, just as Russian history was rewritten by
the Soviets after their revolution. That is why public schools, which
had primarily existed only in the North prior to the war, were imposed on the
Southern states during Reconstruction and in the succeeding decades. Liberty,
State, & Union is the best book on Jefferson’s political
thought to be published in the past half century. It is essential reading for
anyone who wants to understand why it is that Americans continue to be
enslaved by a monstrously bloated, monopolistic government that plunders
every productive person in the society mostly for the benefit of the
state’s corporate benefactors and its supportive welfare state
parasites.
Thomas DiLorenzo
Thomas J. DiLorenzo is
professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re
Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How
Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What
It Means for America Today.
Article originally published on www.LewRockwell.com. By authorization
of the author
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