IN Thomas Jefferson, there is at once something and nothing for everyone. Conservatives share his fondness for a republic of yeoman farmers, but recoil at his contempt for religion and unseemly appetite for revolution, both born of an often doctrinaire Enlightenment rationalism. Liberals, who stand to find the most in Jefferson, nonetheless grimace at his belief in limited government, to say nothing of his hypocrisy (the seal of the vices, in their estimation). Michael Knox Beran all but ignores these easy oppositions in Jefferson’s Demons—and grasps, instead, the genuine philosophical complexity of his subject.
We all know the Jefferson of “The Jefferson Bible”: the cheerful empiricist, the sworn enemy of “every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Beran endeavors in this book to show a different Jefferson: the one who, almost in spite of himself, would harness the un-enlightened and un-rational to develop his enlightened, rationalist project.
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