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.