>>>>Dr. Kyle Harper: Thomas Jefferson: the
author of the Declaration of Independence,
one of the most important of the founding
fathers, and simply one of the most interesting
philosophically and intellectually men at
the late 18th century. The influences that
made up his political thought drew from various
strands of the Enlightenment. Through and
through, Jefferson, more than perhaps any
of the other founding fathers with the possible
exception of Benjamin Franklin, is truly a
figure of the Enlightenment, a European-and-Atlantic-wide
intellectual movement. Jefferson knew the
French Enlightenment. Jefferson knew the Scottish
Enlightenment, and Jefferson's ideas are deeply
influenced by these various strands of Enlightenment.
He knew and absorbed the thought of the Scottish
Enlightenment, Francis Hutcheson whom we've
explored. David Hume and eventually Adam Smith.
Jefferson knew the French philosophes of the
late 18th century. He was profoundly interested
in the latest scientific thought of the day,
and indeed his thought was as scientific as
it was philosophical and political. So Jefferson
is through and through a man of the Enlightenment.
He's also the representative figure of a particularly
American synthesis of republicanism, and we
went to consider Jefferson as a Republican
theorist. Jefferson's republicanism represents
a particularly American synthesis of republicanism.
An ancient political ideology reaching back
into the world of Greece and Rome, but one
that finds a new form of expression in the
context of the 18th century, and one that
is to be challenged almost immediately by
the social transformations that will engulf
the modern world. Jefferson's view of republicanism
is deeply imbued with a sense of English history,
and Jefferson believes that the colonists
are the heirs of an ancient tradition of freedom
that goes back to the Saxons. Jefferson believes
that American freedom is in some way the heir
of the Saxon legacy, the Angles and the Saxons,
Germanic tribes that he believed moved out
of the woods of northern Europe and settled
as freemen on the soil of the British Isles.
And Jefferson believes in particular, that
when they did so the Saxons had a kind of
set of free institutions: trial by jury, equality
and especially, free ownership of land. And
for Jefferson this is very important, because
he believes that the Saxons held their lands
in complete freedom, that it was not held
with obligations to a king. Jefferson believes
that the Saxons hold their land a under certain
specific kind of tenure, fee simple or allodial
tenure, which simply means that they hold
their land with complete ownership rights
over it without any kind of encumbrance, without
any kind of obligation to the king. That it
is their property. Now this is very different
from the feudal way of landholding, and we'll
talk over the next several lessons about feudalism.
Feudalism is a medieval concept, in fact,
it can mean very many different things. It
can mean a system of society which is strictly
hierarchical: with the king and his lords
and their knights, underneath them free men,
underneath them serfs, all with different
obligations to their superiors. Feudalism
can mean a system of landholding in which
particular estates, particular properties
are held by individuals, but only on certain
conditions, that the land is encumbered with
certain kinds of obligations. For instance,
service to the king or service to a lord.
That it's held hereditarily, that in other
words that there are rules, for instance,
of primogeniture, or of entail, which say
that a property an estate can't pass out of
a certain bloodline. That it's encumbered
with certain obligations and it must remain
within a family that holds those obligations.
Jefferson believes that there is a feudal
order of landholding in which land can have
all sorts of encumbrances and obligations
to higher powers and he believes that this
feudal order only came into Britain with the
Norman invasion, William the Conqueror in
the 11th century. And he believes that underneath
this there survives a tradition of Saxon landholding,
in fee simple, in this unencumbered land.
And that this kind of freedom, this kind of
ownership is different from any kind of feudal
ownership because it means that the person
who owns this land doesn't owe it to a superior,
to a lord, or above all to the king. And so
Jefferson's republicanism is rooted in this
vision of English history, that sees a kind
of freedom that goes back to the Saxons and
that embodies a certain kind of property ownership.
Jefferson's republicanism further, is a deeply
agrarian republicanism and here Jefferson
draws on the ancient tradition, but particularly
the Roman tradition that says that virtue
is essential for freedom and self-governance,
and we've seen this ideology in the Roman
writers, in Cicero for instance. And it's
very different from a Greek tradition that
goes back to Aristotle and which devalues
the farmer. For the Romans, the ideal republican
citizen is a virtuous and independent farmer
who serves his state, who serves in the army,
and who is also a property owner. And we see
how the crisis of the Republic the late Republic
in Roman is a crisis of the small farmer;
a crisis of citizenship and Jefferson knows
these texts. He knows these ideas and Jefferson
comes to embody a particularly agrarian vision
of American republicanism. Jefferson believes
in farmers. He believes that for America to
be a free state it must be a society of farmers,
a society of agriculturalists. Jefferson says
very famously in his notes on the state of
Virginia that those who labor on the land
are the chosen people of God. For Jefferson
there's something about the way of life, of
living on the land that nurtures an independent
spirit that nurtures self-reliance that wasn't
to be found in other ways of life. Jefferson
didn't believe in cities. He believed that
they were so many cankers on the body politic.
Jefferson didn't believe in manufacturers,
he thought that people who worked for wages
were necessarily servile, that they had to
obey those upon whom they depended. Jefferson
had a vision that the agricultural life offered
independence. That it nurtured virtue in a
way that was essential for the American Republic
to survive. And so Jefferson's political thought
is a complex body of ideas but at its core
is this vision a social vision of virtuous,
independent, landowning free men, who will
be the foundation of a republic.
