Nature's Man: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophical Anthropology

2. Jefferson’s Communitarianism: In Search of the Affiliated Man

d Jefferson’s idea that “men” should listen to nature entailed the notion of communitarianism. Unlike the experience of many other animals, for human beings, the voice of nature always spoke through the community. Stated otherwise, natural “men” needed the mediation offered by the social setting in which they live. Individuals had to be measured against a larger whole at once natural and social. Simple individuals, stripped of their membership in a community and relegated either to their solitary imagination or to their animal appetite, were not sufficiently and appropriately “natural.” Jefferson envisioned a “man” whose identity entailed an unequivocal bond to specific roles and functions. Community, for Jefferson, was thus the realization of human naturalness, almost a precondition for one to become actually human . Jefferson had his own, particular version of communitarianism. As Garry Wills maintained in his controversial Inventing America, historians should read all of Jefferson’s intellectual productions, starting with the Declaration , as an effort to devise an antidote to unbridled animal appetite and as an attempt to set forth a communitarian anthropological vision. Jefferson ’s communitarianism, Wills insisted, was intended to buttress an organic, naturalistic vision of the human being and rejected the abstract atomism implicit in classical Lockean liberalism. An excessive complaisance in human acquisitiveness would push classical liberalism in the direction of a peculiar atomistic representation of society. Those who took part in the social game, according to this liberal vision, would have no other object than to increase 2 jefferson’s communitarianism in search of the affiliated man 46 nature’s man their power and property in order to acquire an advantage and eventually overcome like-minded acquisitors.1 Wills was undeniably right to stress Jefferson’s allegiance to communitarianism . The limitation of his argument was that he did not tailor the notion of communitarianism to Jefferson’s unique specifications. He did not ask what seems to be the crucial question: what kind of communitarianism did Jefferson uphold? Wills was wrong in maintaining that the good things Jefferson had to say about communitarianism were taken directly and exclusively from the Scottish Enlightenment. Similarly, he was wrong in using that type of communitarianism to counter the caricature of liberalism that Inventing America accepted as true. To begin with, Wills’s recognition of atomistic individualism as the essence of Lockean liberalism has over the years proved to be a myth. Historians have persuasively argued that Lockean liberalism had strong affinities with the communitarianism of the Scottish school, but also with republicanism , and with the eighteenth-century discourses on virtue. We do not have to believe that where a call to virtue exists, liberalism is absent and, vice versa, that when rights and interests are discussed, liberalism is predominant . A less prejudiced assessment of liberalism should compel us to dismiss once and for all C. B. Macpherson’s thesis that liberalism was the intellectual foundation of every “possessive” individualism.2 Needless to say, we could focus on selected examples from Jefferson’s writings that would allow us to demonstrate that Jefferson did indeed uphold a “Lockean” political conception of the liberal state as limited to protecting private rights. There is little doubt that Jefferson supported the thesis that the “state” or “government” was a necessary evil. The Virginian defended the view that they were but an external apparatus, that they were made for individuals and not the other way around. It is easy to show that the endorsement of Locke’s right to revolution was essential to Jefferson’s political vision. Similarly, we could easily back up the hypothesis of Jefferson’s indebtedness to a “Lockean” social ethics: a negative vision of social relationships as centered on the moral command not to harm others, to refrain from violating others’ rights and freedom, and to abstain from those activities that impede other individuals from pursuing their own interests. But such a strategy, to deploy a caricature and a simplification of Lockean liberalism as a weapon against Wills, is hardly a confutation of Jefferson as a communitarian .3 It is important not to be tricked by words. The “state” against which citizens, according to Jefferson (and Locke), should always be watchful meant the government or, better, their functionaries—some functionaries. jefferson’s communitarianism 47 It meant, for a certain period of Jefferson’s life, the Parliament and those Federalist monocrats, from Massachusetts and Connecticut, who found there a stronghold. When earlier in his life Jefferson drafted...