Thomas Jefferson · Politics
Jefferson trusted ordinary people to govern themselves more than any founder - through an educated citizenry, small self-governing wards, and a vision of a republic of independent farmers.
Among the American founders, Jefferson stands out for the depth of his faith in ordinary people. Where many of his contemporaries feared the masses and designed institutions to restrain them - Hamilton openly distrusted ‘the people’ as a great beast, and even Madison built the Constitution to filter and check popular passions - Jefferson believed that the people, given knowledge and freedom, could be trusted to govern themselves, and that the chief danger to liberty came not from the people but from the few who would rule them. This trust was not naive; Jefferson knew people could be misled and that majorities could oppress. But he held that the cure for the abuses of democracy was more democracy and better-informed citizens, not less democracy and more control from above.
This faith shaped everything in his political vision. He championed broad suffrage and frequent elections; he wanted power kept as close to the people as possible; he insisted that an informed public opinion was the ultimate safeguard of freedom; and he was willing to tolerate a degree of disorder as the price of liberty, famously remarking that a little rebellion now and then was a good thing and that the tree of liberty must occasionally be refreshed. Where others saw the people as a threat to be managed, Jefferson saw them as the rightful and capable sovereigns of their own affairs - and he devoted much of his thought to working out the conditions under which that sovereignty could be made real and safe.
Jefferson’s ideal republic was a nation of independent small farmers - yeomen who owned their own land, worked it with their own hands, and depended on no master for their livelihood. He had a striking reason for this preference, rooted in his theory of what makes a person fit for self-government. The independent farmer, owning his own land and producing his own subsistence, is beholden to no one; he can vote his conscience and judge public affairs freely, because no employer, landlord, or creditor holds power over his bread. Economic independence, Jefferson believed, was the foundation of political independence - and political independence was the foundation of a free republic.
By contrast, Jefferson distrusted the propertyless urban masses and the manufacturing economy that produced them. The wage-laborer in a city, dependent on an employer for his daily bread, was vulnerable to being bought, bullied, or led; great cities, with their concentrations of dependent poor and wealthy manipulators, seemed to him ‘pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.’ He even hoped America might remain agricultural and leave manufacturing to Europe, so as to preserve the broad base of independent landowners on which he thought free government depended. ‘Those who labour in the earth,’ he wrote, ‘are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people.’ This agrarian vision was both an economic preference and a theory of citizenship: a republic could be only as free as its citizens were independent, and only the widespread ownership of productive property could secure that independence for the many rather than the few. History would not preserve Jefferson’s agrarian America, but the insight beneath it - that political freedom rests on a foundation of economic independence, and that a citizenry of dependents is ripe for domination - has never lost its force.
If the people were to govern, they had to be educated - and so Jefferson made the spread of knowledge a lifelong cause and a cornerstone of his political theory. As early as 1779 he proposed for Virginia a comprehensive system of public education: free elementary schooling for all (then a radical idea), with the most talented students advancing by merit to higher levels regardless of wealth, so that what he called a ‘natural aristocracy’ of talent and virtue could be drawn from every rank of society to lead the republic. The aim was twofold: to give every citizen enough knowledge to guard their own liberty and judge their representatives, and to identify and elevate the gifted of every class so that leadership would rest on ability rather than birth or wealth.
Jefferson drew a sharp distinction between two kinds of aristocracy. There was the ‘artificial aristocracy’ of wealth and birth, which he despised as a fraud - the accident of inheritance masquerading as merit. And there was the ‘natural aristocracy’ of virtue and talent, which he regarded as ‘the most precious gift of nature’ for the instruction, trusts, and government of society. The whole point of public education was to find and cultivate this natural aristocracy from among the poor as well as the rich, and to replace rule by the well-born with rule by the genuinely able. Crowning the system, late in life, he founded the University of Virginia - designing its buildings, planning its curriculum, and recruiting its faculty - as a secular institution of free inquiry to train the republic’s leaders. He counted it, with the Declaration and the Statute, among the three achievements of his epitaph. For Jefferson, education was not a luxury or a private good but the indispensable engine of self-government: a free people had to be a knowing people, or it would not stay free for long.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Jefferson grounded democracy in the virtue and independence of ordinary citizens. In your own words, why did he think small farmers made the best republicans, and why education was essential?
Leads to Alexis de Tocqueville.
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