Thomas Jefferson In Paris The Ministry Of A Virginian Looker On
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Thomas Jefferson in Paris: The Ministry of a Virginian “Looker-on”
Jefferson’s years in France as minister plenipotentiary were a time of large edification. He approached his ministry as a “looker on”: Jefferson, while in France, always kept a critical distance from events, so that he could measure and critically examine them from the perspective of a dispassionate natural philosopher. Being dispassionate, Jefferson was pulled into events only insofar as circumstances required him to do so. Yet his “adventures” from his critical distance (e.g., his trip to London to meet the king, his ventures in the salons of Paris, and his travels through Southern France, Northern Italy, the Rhineland, and the Netherlands) were many, and varied. He even, at times, lost his critical, looker-on perspective from distance as he allowed himself to become immersed in events, as in the case of his relationship with lovely Italian artist and musician Maria Cosway.... > This book is a portal into the mind of Thomas Jefferson, as looker-on, during his tenure in Paris. Why was Jefferson so eager to accept the ministry to Paris? What was his impression of the great city and its people while he stayed? What lessons, while in Paris, did he learn which he could transport to Virginia and his country? Those and other questions Holowchak aims to answer in this book.
Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway: A Gordian Love Affair
This is the only book to offer the complete correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway, a talented artist for whom Jefferson fell while in France. There is agreement in the secondary literature that Jefferson’s affection for Hemings was reciprocated. This book shows that that cannot be believed. Holowchak also shows that Hemings, through letters late in life, much longs for Jefferson’s company, suggestive of regret for not having earlier in life reciprocated Jefferson’s feelings—hence, the importance of a book with the complete correspondence. Holowchak also offers in the introduction a short psychobiography of Cosway that shows the significance of key early-life events—e.g., her childhood in a tavern, her removal to a convent, her introduction to art, and two singular dreams. Cosway would ever be tugged antipodally by the lure of earthy living as well as the asceticism of Catholic piety.
The Disease of Liberty
Liberty for Jefferson was 'the' driving force of human history and a realizable state of the human organism and of a society of men. Study of history and anthropology showed that humans were moving from the barbaric independence suffered in primal hordes, which lived inefficiently on lands, to a more economical, human-friendly use of land in social settings, demanding laws for order. Those laws, historically, favored the powerful few to the detriment of the hoi polloi. As a pupil of the Enlightenment, Jefferson argued that all humans were by nature equal, and thus, deserving of as much civic liberty as a reason-oriented and sciences-loving society, a Jeffersonian republic, could guarantee them. This book, philosophical, explains how such a society was possible, given Jefferson’s conception of the nature of man, and how the realization of one such society could lead, through contagion, to a global community of such societies. There are a large number of books that cover Jefferson’s political ideology (e.g., Gordon Wood’s 'Empire of Liberty' and Adrienne Koch’s 'The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson')—too many to limn—but none that gets at the philosophical implications of TJ’s views on liberty. This book, examining TJ as a natural scientist and philosophy, examines and situates him in the manner of other great political ideologists of his day—e.g., Hume and Kant.