Jefferson and Democratic Education. A Response to Thomas Jefferson and the Ideology of Democratic Schooling

This essay is a reply to James Carpenter\u27s “Thomas Jefferson and the Ideology of Democratic Schooling.” In it, I argue that there is an apophatic strain in the essay that calls into question the motivation for the undertaking

“The Diffusion of Light”: Jefferson’s Philosophy of Education

Jefferson\u27s republicanism—a people-first, mostly bottom-up political vision with a moral underpinning—was critically dependent on general education for the citizenry and higher education for those who would govern. This paper contains an analysis of Jefferson’s general philosophy of pedagogy by enumerating some of its most fundamental principles, applicable to both elementary and higher education

Differences of Circumstance, Differences of Fact: Jefferson’s Medialist View of History

It is often assumed that Jefferson—acquainted with the writings of Scottish thinkers such as Adam Ferguson, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Lord Kames, Adam Smith, and John Millar—was a stadialist of some persuasion, as several of his writings are at least consistent with stadialism. If so, was he a cyclicalist, committed to a society having a life-cycle, or a linearist, committed to the possibility of continued convergence toward some ideal of perfection? An important letter to William Ludlow and several writings where Jefferson writes of human progress as imprescriptible suggest linear stadialism. Numerous other writings, point to urbanization as a stage of social decay, and suggest cyclicalism. The correct answer, I argue, is that Jefferson was neither a linearist nor a cyclicalist, but a medialist. He viewed movement toward increased urbanization as symptomatic of social decline, but always believed any society, by rooting itself in an agrestic manner—a normative mean between the excesses of subsistence living and urbanization—could avert decline and even work toward continued advance

Eudemonism or Survivalism? Jefferson and the Unwritten Laws of Self-Preservation

Jefferson states that in certain dire circumstances—e.g., when a person’s life is at stake or when a belligerent nation threatens the existence of another—the legal pacts between those persons or nations, and even the laws of morality, are left in abeyancy. Survival of the threatened person or nation is the only thing that matters, and any actions that conduce to survival are justifiable. Self-preservation in such cases trumps all considerations—even moral considerations. The right to existence then, seems to be the first axiom of morality, lex suprema, for Jefferson in such scenarios. Virtuous living is ancillary. Jefferson seems to be advocating a sort of moral or egoistic “survivalism.” For ancient eudemonists like Aristotle and the Stoics, happiness is the end of living, and a life without the prospect of happiness, of which virtue is the key or sole ingredient, is not worth living. All the goods or conveniences of life, without virtue, cannot make a person anything but miserable. In sum, virtuous living, not living, is the human telos (the Stoics), or the chief part of it (Aristotle). And so, survival without the prospect of virtue is valueless. Is Jefferson a eudemonist or a moral survivalist? Are the two positions reconcilable? In this essay, I argue that the difficult passages, mostly of a political sort, do not lead to moral survivalism, but are instead consistent with the unique eudemonism Jefferson embraced