Few presidents embody the American spirit as fully as Thomas Jefferson. He was possessed
of an unrivaled political imagination, and his vision accounts for the almost utopian zeal of
his two administrations. Jefferson alone among his American peers anticipated the age of
democracy and bent every effort toward hastening its peaceful, consensual arrival. He
realized that the spirit of democracy required not only a political revolution, but also a social
one. Jefferson, of upper-class birth and upbringing, spent much of his presidency laying out …

S HORTLY after leaving the presidency, Thomas Jefferson undertook the translation of a
manuscript by the French philosopher Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy. At the same
time he prevailed on his friend William Duane to publish it anonymously, and in due course
Tracy's Commentary and Review of Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws appeared in Philadelphia.
1 For Tracy this American imprint offered his ideas safe conduct into the hostile territory of
Napoleonic France. For Jefferson the Review of Montesquieu became a new weapon in his …