Jefferson, the Impossible

In "Jefferson and Democracy," Michael Hardt asks scholars of American studies to do something that is nearly impossible for us. He requests that we consider Jefferson solely as a political thinker, and that we examine Jefferson's thought abstracted from his life as a statesman, a plantation owner, and a slave master. To consider anyone's thought in such a decontextualized fashion gives most American studies scholars the willies. If there is one methodological rule that holds together our eccentric field, it is precisely the refusal to make anything like such an idealist move. The foundational critical imperative of our field is to insist on the deep contextualization of all cultural production. Indeed, innovations in American studies are often mobilized through new concepts of the relevant and often overlapping contexts.¹ As a consequence, scholars of American studies tend to distrust statements such as: "The core of Thomas Jefferson's political thought is the articulation of a powerful concept of democracy." We tend to ask, how could such a core be identified apart from an interrogation of the material and practical conditions of possibility within which Jefferson wrote? But against my own scholarly instincts, I want to ask the readers of American Quarterly not to dismiss Hardt's request just yet. Although I happen to believe that there is much more Michael Hardt than Thomas Jefferson in the project of democracy that is outlined in this essay, I agree with Hardt that, at this moment of profound crisis, critical scholars of the United States could use a powerful progressive concept of democracy. We need to counter the perversions of this term that are being used to support the global destruction of human lifeways in the pursuit of profit. We need compelling rhetorical tools and images—myths and symbols, perhaps—with which to communicate this concept and to construct persuasive arguments for the possibilities of actual democracy. If this project could benefit from the supposition of an impossible Jefferson—not the historical Jefferson, not the slave master nor the constantly indebted plantation owner, nor the violator of almost every political principle he ever articulated—then perhaps it might be worth holding our own methodological principles in abeyance for just a moment.

Hardt outlines a fourfold concept of democracy that he draws from Jefferson's writings: social equality + economic equality + freedom + republicanism equals democracy. This equation is promising. The keywords are sufficiently abstract and general to invite our consent. But the derivation of these concepts from Jefferson's thought requires a selective reading of Jefferson's formal and informal writings. Indeed, it would simply be incorrect to claim that Jefferson was anything like a systematic thinker (which raises questions about any singular concept of Jefferson's "thought"). Hardt, therefore, reads "Jefferson against Jefferson," insisting that "the gaps and contradictions" of Jefferson's thought show us precisely where we might take Jefferson beyond his own limitations. It is certainly plausible to argue that the limitations of Jefferson's thought were the limitations of his historical context. The vision of democracy that Hardt argues for here is not totally foreign to Jefferson's thought, therefore, but it is not inherent in it either. This concept of democracy devolves from a creative reading of Jefferson's writings that attempts to link the aura of Jefferson's status in the pantheon of U.S. history to a project of ongoing democratic revitalization and revolution in our own time. The project is worthy; whether or not Jefferson forwards that project is another question.

Hardt's version of Jefferson's thought relies heavily on key concepts that are formulated in Hardt's work with Antonio Negri.² By the end of the paper, the democracy that Hardt draws from Jefferson consists of "singularity + autonomy + resistance + constituent power." Democracy for Hardt, if not for Jefferson, can be summed up as the political expression of the constituent power of the multitude. Unfortunately, this effort to link Hardt's and Negri's conception of democracy with that of Jefferson founders on Jefferson's inability to conceptualize the multiplicity of the multitude, his failure to realize the full autonomy of constituent power, and...