Jeffersonians in Power: The Rhetoric of Opposition Meets the Realities of Governing ed. by Joanne B. Freeman and Johann N. Neem

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jeffersonians in Power: The Rhetoric of Opposition Meets the Realities of Governing ed. by Joanne B. Freeman and Johann N. Neem Matthew Crow (bio) Keywords Thomas Jefferson, Peter Onuf, Jeffersonians Jeffersonians in Power: The Rhetoric of Opposition Meets the Realities of Governing. Edited by Joanne B. Freeman and Johann N. Neem. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. 324. Cloth, $39.50.) Jeffersonians in Power is a volume of essays submitted and dedicated to Peter Onuf, written and edited by former students of the retired Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. Because the volume is something of a festschrift, and because many if not most of the essays in it are by and large distillations of their authors' books or other published work, it seems useful to think more broadly here about the argument of the volume taken as a whole. That there is an argument to the volume as a whole is beyond dispute; indeed, it is in the title, and it will hardly be unfamiliar to any student of the early republic's political history. Jefferson and the coalition he represented, so the argument goes, developed a rhetoric of opposition to Federalist political culture that swept him and his allies to power but proved challenging to translate into statecraft and governance, into the actual wielding of power. Theory and practice, rhetoric and reality, campaigning in poetry and governing in prose: Very little of this rhetoric, as it were, comes in for serious questioning here. That framing colors the way Onuf and his students get situated, or situate themselves, in historiographical time. The introduction by the editors, Joanne Freeman and Johann Neem, distinguishes Onuf's work and that of the subsequent essays in the volume from Drew McCoy's Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980), in so far as the latter lacked attention, they argue, to "the shaping impact of government institutions" (3). That does not seem quite right to me, and indeed one will find at least as much attention to government policies and institutions there as one will find in the volume under review here. Certainly, one would find more attention in McCoy's work (and Onuf's for that matter) to Atlantic political theory and intellectual history, but the apparent assumption that this is by definition inattentive to real politics and governance is revealing. [End Page 138] Andrew Burstein's afterword continues the theme. The "Onuffian approach," he argues, is to "distinguish visionary principles from the actual conduct of politics" (283). But politics, Jefferson wrote, "is a game where principles are the stake."1 Onuf's work is more attuned to Jefferson's observation than seems to be appreciated here. Indeed, while Burstein suggests Onuf "clarifies how history unfolds from a ground-level perspective," and that too seems not quite right to me, one of the things I admire most about Peter Onuf's work is the way he clarified how languages and ideologies had and have their life in political activity and institutions. These disparate discourses of natural rights and political economy and republicanism, in Onuf's treatment, were shaping forces of what was going on in the political field, and in point of fact, they were the very building blocks of the game, not just the written rules. To recognize that, one hopes, is in no way to minimize the shift to the constitutional architecture of the early federal union that Onuf's work led the way in developing. It is, however, to suggest that one of the many lessons worth taking from that work is that ideas of race and memory and language and belonging and nation and sovereignty and history, and while we are at it, architecture, are part of how political thought and action work, and indeed are part of what makes the rhetoric of political thinking an activity of its own. Burstein no doubt knows that, his own considerable work and the appreciation he expresses is a testament to it, but that only serves to highlight for this reviewer the disconnect between the framing of the volume and the work of its contributors, and of the historian...