Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood [Paperback]

This book identifies Jefferson as an American nationalist and describes his assessment of American character and democratic promise.This book describes Thomas Jefferson as the essential teller of what he once called the American Story and argues that his confidence about America's greatness was rooted less in his famously cosmic optimism than in his extensive empirical assessment of American character, which he believed made a unique democratic politics possible here. Jefferson's opposition to Hamilton, architect of America's fiscal-military state, was less an opposition to government power than what Jefferson considered Hamilton's effort to administer a central state with its own rationale, largely disconnected from public will or America's unique character.This book describes Thomas Jefferson as the essential teller of what he once called the American Story and argues that his confidence about America's greatness was rooted less in his famously cosmic optimism than in his extensive empirical assessment of American character, which he believed made a unique democratic politics possible here. Jefferson's opposition to Hamilton, architect of America's fiscal-military state, was less an opposition to government power than what Jefferson considered Hamilton's effort to administer a central state with its own rationale, largely disconnected from public will or America's unique character.This book emphasizes the centrality of nationhood to Thomas Jefferson's thought and politics, envisioning Jefferson as a cultural nationalist whose political project sought the alignment of the American state system with the will and character of the nation. Jefferson believed that America was the one nation on earth able to realize in practice universal ideals to which other peoples could only aspire. He appears in the book as the essential narrator of what he once called the American Story: as the historian, the sociologist, and the ethnographer; the political theorist of the natlS)