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September 03, 2007
Monticello is Thomas Jefferson's house just outside of Charlottesville. On Saturday it was teeming with visitors. Lines for the tour of the house were long despite the humid late summer heat and shuttle buses regularly dumped off twenty new visitors at a time for $15 a pop. This is not my first time at Monticello however like the other tourists I dutifully walked around the house, soaked in the environment and taking photos of Monticello's architecture and garden.
Yet of Jefferson's achievements; bricks and mortar, flora and fauna; were not what was drawing people to Monticello.
One of the things I really enjoy when visiting these historical sites is that their bookshops stock rare, odd and niche interest material. I came out of Monticello with David N. Mayer's The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson. When I bought the book the lady wrapping it said, "That looks like some tough reading!"
I replied, "I think the author had me in mind when he wrote it."
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Cam,
Interesting that the US has solid intellectual books at a tourist site. Well, it is Jefferson, after all.
I was trying to find something similar with my tourist look at Andrew Inglis Clarke when in Hobart a few weeks ago.
I've crudely understood Jefferson's vision of republican government as emphasizing the need for citizens to be constantly vigilant – to be ever on their guard against government and all uses of political power – because power was inherently threatening to individual freedom. So his commitment to liberty is deeply intertwined with his distrust of government.
Jefferson is a champion of individual liberty (rights?) and the limited, constitutional, and republican system of government that best safeguarded that essential right. Jefferson stands for an agrarian democracy in the new Republic.
That political philosophy of the natural right to liberty was undercut by Jefferson’s greatest weakness: his failure to oppose slavery. He tacitly supported slavery as he was a slave owner. However, I see him opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist party, which was wedded to traditionally paternalistic European notions of order and authority in political economy and politics.
Though both Inglis Clarke and Jefferson declared the independence of their respective colonies from Enlgland Jefferson, unlike Clarke, used natural right ideas to justify America's independence from England. Natural right does not feature strongly in Australia around the time of federation.
Have you been to the University of Virgina as a tourist?