The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy: Republicanism, the Class Struggle, and the Virtuous Farmer PDF
Preview The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy: Republicanism, the Class Struggle, and the Virtuous Farmer
The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy Republicanism, the Class Struggle, and the Virtuous Farmer Douglass G. Adair Edited by Mark E. Yellin With a foreword by Joyce Appleby LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham· Boulder· New York· Oxford LEXINGTON BOOKS Published in the United States of America by Lexington Books 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706 12 Hid's Copse Road Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ, England Introductory material copyright © 2000 by Lexington Books Dissertation copyright © 1964 by Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture "The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy: Republicanism, the Class Struggle, and the Virtuous Farmer," by Douglass Greybill Adair, Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1964 (1943). Reprinted with permission from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Frontispiece photo courtesy of the Adair family collection. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adair, Douglass. The intellectual origins of Jeffersonian democracy: republicanism, the class struggle, and the virtuous farmer / Douglass G. Adair; edited by Mark E. Yellin; foreword by Joyce Appleby. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-0125-4· ISBN 0-7391-0125-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Political science-United States-History-18th century. 2. Political science-History. I. Yellin, Mark E. II. Title. JA84.U5 A6I7 2000 320'.01-dc21 00-032264 Printed in the United States of America en. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992. F or the students of Douglass Adair Contents Foreword by Joyce Appleby IX Introduction XIll Editor's Note XXV TheIntellectual Origins ofJeffersonian Democracy Summary 1 Chapter 1 A Polemical Prologue 3 Chapter 2 The Constant and Universal Principles ofHuman Nature 17 Chapter 3 According to Aristotle 39 Chapter 4 The Desperate Debtor and the Hall of Mirrors 57 Chapter 5 The High Toned Government 89 Chapter 6 The Extended Republic 109 Chapter 7 The Virtuous Farmer 153 Epilogue 165 Appendix Bibliographic Essay 169 Bibliography 175 Index 181 About the Author 187 Foreword by Joyce Appleby I entered graduate studies planning to work on the Progressive Era, met Douglass Adair my first visit to Claremont Graduate School, and became a colonial historian forthwith. What was there about the man to cause such an immediate change of plans? Unprepossessing physically, by no means a spellbinding speaker, Adair drew people to him because he quickened the imagination of all those around him. You left his presence with images and ideas buzzing, feeling yourself more alive just for sharing a few minutes with him. Adair was also a man of successive enthusiasms that captured his own attention completely. When I visited him that summer day in 1961, he had been reading Ishi: Last of His Tribe, by Theodora Kroeber, the fascinating story of the last of the Yana Indians who somehow wandered onto the Berkeley campus in 1911. Before that he had been rereading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. I remember the titles to this day, because he strongly recommended that I read both of them as soon as possible and, of course, I did with great enjoyment to be sure but with some puzzlement as to how they instructed me as an historian. Adair was not as grimly profes sional as his new student. Douglass had a very intimate relationship with the past. He confined his attention to a few of the greats in the Revolutionary generation and spent his scholarly life pondering them, their temperaments, preoccupations, and foundational ideas. From these ruminations, he conveyed an ardent love not of the past abstractly -but of the people he had chosen to study, even more precisely, of the people in the past that he had gotten to know quite well. Adair clearly identified with the (mostly) men he studied in his "Age of Jefferson," but his was not a presentist approach in which the concerns of the past were collapsed into contemporary issues. Instead, the hours that he spent reenacting in his mind the choices, decisions, and commitments made by Jefferson, James (always Jemme) Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and their friends and
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