Political Theories of Thomas Jeffeson

This study will examine the political theories of Thomas Jefferson. Specifically, the study will investigate Jefferson's arguments for constitutionalism (although he was in some senses skeptical even of that form of government) and his arguments against competing forms of government and types of state. The study will also include consideration of Jefferson's views on liberty and citizen rights as normative political concepts in his political theory.

Jefferson's political theory was notable for its flexibility, for the ability and willingness of the theorist to change his political philosophy according to new experience and wisdom. There is much data in the sources consulted for this study which refer to the contrast between Jefferson's ideas and those of George Mason.

Jefferson himself noted the shortcomings in both his own and in Mason's proposals. As we read in Mapp (1987):

The constitution drafted by Mason poured the heady brew of revolution into the old bottles of established oligarchy. But there was no great loss to democratic government because Jefferson's draft was not adopted. His work did not differ radically from Mason's nor, for that matter, from constitutions adopted shortly afterwards in other states. As Jefferson later explained: "In truth, the abuses of monarchy had so much filled all the space of political contemplation that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy. We had not yet penetrated to the mother principle, that 'governm

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). Becker (1970) focuses on the major differences between the form of government--Jefferson favors and the form of government which he rejects in his paper "A Summary View of the Rights of British America." At the heart of Jefferson's protests against British domination was his argument that the "natural rights" of man were being ignored by British interference. In that document, Jefferson first acknowledges a certain amount of required obedience to British law on the part of the colonists, but he reminds the British leaders that the arrangement was merely for the convenience of the colonists and was not irrevocable. As Becker (1970) goes on to say, Unhappily the British Parliament . . . usurped a power of legislating for the colonies; among other things, restricting the exercise of a free trade with all parts of the world, possessed by the American colonists, as of natural right'; and these unjust encroachments, once established, were followed by others, which in late years had so multiplied as no longer to be tolerable. Having thus by implication set forth the theory of the constitution of the empire, Jefferson goes on to specify the several acts of the British Parliament which are obviously, from the point of view of

Category: Government - P