The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy: Republicanism, the Class Struggle, and the Virtuous Farmer

214 Pages·2000·8.55 MB·English

by  Douglass G. Adair

The Intellectual Origins
of Jeffersonian Democracy

The Intellectual Origins
of Jeffersonian Democracy
Republicanism, the Class Struggle,
and the Virtuous Farmer
Douglass G. Adair
Edited by Mark E. Yellin
With a foreword by Joyce Appleby
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham· Boulder· New York· Oxford
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Published in the United States of America
by Lexington Books
4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706
12 Hid's Copse Road
Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ, England
Introductory material copyright © 2000 by Lexington Books
Dissertation copyright © 1964 by Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
"The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy: Republicanism, the Class Struggle, and the
Virtuous Farmer," by Douglass Greybill Adair, Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1964 (1943). Reprinted
with permission from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.
Frontispiece photo courtesy of the Adair family collection.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Adair, Douglass.
The intellectual origins of Jeffersonian democracy: republicanism, the class struggle, and the
virtuous farmer / Douglass G. Adair; edited by Mark E. Yellin; foreword by Joyce Appleby.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-0125-4· ISBN 0-7391-0125-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Political science-United States-History-18th century. 2. Political science-History.
I. Yellin, Mark E. II. Title.
JA84.U5 A6I7 2000
320'.01-dc21 00-032264
Printed in the United States of America
en.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992.
F or the students of Douglass Adair

Contents
Foreword by Joyce Appleby IX
Introduction XIll
Editor's Note XXV
TheIntellectual Origins ofJeffersonian Democracy
Summary 1
Chapter 1 A Polemical Prologue 3
Chapter 2 The Constant and Universal Principles
ofHuman Nature 17
Chapter 3 According to Aristotle 39
Chapter 4 The Desperate Debtor and the Hall of
Mirrors 57
Chapter 5 The High Toned Government 89
Chapter 6 The Extended Republic 109
Chapter 7 The Virtuous Farmer 153
Epilogue 165
Appendix Bibliographic Essay 169
Bibliography 175
Index 181
About the Author 187

Foreword by Joyce Appleby
I entered graduate studies planning to work on the Progressive Era,
met Douglass Adair my first visit to Claremont Graduate School, and
became a colonial historian forthwith. What was there about the man
to cause such an immediate change of plans? Unprepossessing
physically, by no means a spellbinding speaker, Adair drew people to
him because he quickened the imagination of all those around him.
You left his presence with images and ideas buzzing, feeling yourself
more alive just for sharing a few minutes with him. Adair was also a
man of successive enthusiasms that captured his own attention
completely. When I visited him that summer day in 1961, he had
been reading Ishi: Last of His Tribe, by Theodora Kroeber, the
fascinating story of the last of the Yana Indians who somehow
wandered onto the Berkeley campus in 1911. Before that he had been
rereading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. I
remember the titles to this day, because he strongly recommended
that I read both of them as soon as possible and, of course, I did
with great enjoyment to be sure but with some puzzlement as to how
they instructed me as an historian. Adair was not as grimly profes
sional as his new student.
Douglass had a very intimate relationship with the past. He
confined his attention to a few of the greats in the Revolutionary
generation and spent his scholarly life pondering them, their
temperaments, preoccupations, and foundational ideas. From these
ruminations, he conveyed an ardent love not of the past abstractly
-but of the people he had chosen to study, even more precisely, of
the people in the past that he had gotten to know quite well. Adair
clearly identified with the (mostly) men he studied in his "Age of
Jefferson," but his was not a presentist approach in which the
concerns of the past were collapsed into contemporary issues. Instead,
the hours that he spent reenacting in his mind the choices, decisions,
and commitments made by Jefferson, James (always Jemme) Madison,
Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and their friends and