Tuesday, September 4, 2018

The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson


A review of The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson by David N. Mayer (University of Virginia Press, 1994).

Thomas Jefferson’s reputation is that of a great thinker. He is popularly (and I believe wrongly, but that is a different matter) believed to have been the greatest thinker among American’s Revolutionaries. It is as a writer and as an unofficial pontifex rei publici that Jefferson is remembered, as the man who sat on Monticello and defined American liberalism. Yet, despite the perennial attention to the thought of the Revolutionary generation, generations elapsed between the last book-length study of Jefferson’s constitutional thought and David N. Mayer’s The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson.

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