The real Jefferson
Dr Thomas DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked, published an excellent article about Thomas Jefferson some time ago, but it continues to be relevant, particularly in light of recent conversations.
Below is an excerpt:
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.
My favorite story about Rousseau is about the reaction of Voltaire to his book, published in 1765, “Social Contract”.
Voltaire said, “I’ve read the copy of your book that you sent me, it made me want to crawl around on all fours.”
Voltaire is not one of my favorites either, but that is a funny story.