The Limits of Jefferson Scholarship

Abstract

The Limits of Jefferson Scholarship Garrett Ward Sheldon (bio) Maurizio Valsania . The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson's Dualistic Enlightenment. University of Virginia Press, 2011. vii + 207 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). This new book on Jefferson's political thought is written by a professor at the University of Torino, Italy, and published by "Mr. Jefferson's University" Press. Professor Valsania was a Visiting Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies in Charlottesville, and this volume is published in a series entitled "Jeffersonian America" edited by Jan Ellen Lewis, Peter Onuf, and Andrew O'Shaughnessy. The book's thesis is that Jefferson's political thought deviated from the commonly believed Enlightenment optimism, rationalism, faith in progress, etc. This is an important subject and a potentially great contribution to our understanding of Jefferson, Early American political thought, and modern Western philosophy and history. Such an interesting and important thesis deserves a thorough, careful, and thoughtful study. Unfortunately, this book does not provide that. Instead, Professor Valsania presents, in increasingly florid language and wildly extravagant (and often incomprehensible) style, a simple statement of his thesis, requiring about five pages, and then proceeds to repeat it with ever more effusive, exaggerated idiolect to almost 200 pages. It is as if the author thinks an ever more excessive, extreme, and "poetical" expression of his theme, without the attending scholarly rigor and depth, will convince us of its validity and "dialectical" genius. Michael Zuckerman, a leading scholar of the Founding, describes this perhaps too tactfully in his prepublication blurb as "a distinctive point of view . . . and striking turns of phrase." Let's look at one of those striking turns of phrase: "Although the Enlightenment was a culture of performance, it was not an easy task to perform. Some compensatory beliefs were needed, and I suspect Jefferson harnessed his unabated version of optimism to this purpose. Was this just a trick? Was Jefferson sincere in his quite precritical optimism? Why did he boast this way? These are very difficult problems to sort out." [p. 54] [End Page 50] Yes. And the purpose of scholarship is—with thorough, careful research and reasoned thought—to "sort them out" and present them to the intellectual community in clear, coherent, and persuasive prose. Professor Valsania's book does not do this minimal requirement of a scholarly work. Instead, he presents a confused, rambling, at times frenetic outpouring of incoherent, emotional meditations that are disjointed, fragmented, and self-indulgent. If the book had been entitled "A European Historian's Stream of Consciousness on Life, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Hegelian Dialectics, and, By The Way, A Little on Jefferson" it would have been a more accurate description of the book. As it is, this is a sad example of the decline of academic scholarship, writing, and publishing in our own time. Even the syntax fails to come up to normal academic standards. "Wood's story is an excellent story on the whole" (p. 117). "Let me start with the old Jefferson" (p. 116). The author also frequently employs the first-person diction fitting for a memoir, but inappropriate to an academic work ("I am quite convinced that Jefferson was not unique as a traveler, but his travel certainly was," p. 15); and he seems addicted to putting often inconsequential words in quotes, perhaps to denote irony, a hidden philosophy, or some secret knowledge. For example on page 34: "The success of the Revolution demonstrated to Jefferson that the past was somehow always 'wrong' when compared to the new present." Or "even today, the 'appalling ocean' lying beyond the verdant land has many facets and elicits different answers" (p. 7) One struggles to comprehend this and many similarly flamboyant sentences in this curious book. Professor Valsania, one imagines, is a charismatic and entertaining speaker, but such jocularity does not always translate easily to written scholarship. Balancing sober judgment with artistic flourishes has always been difficult, as evinced by Marx (Groucho, not Karl). Some might try to explain and excuse these stylistic infelicities to a non-primary-English-speaking scholar; but other European Jefferson scholars write clearly and cogently, and with genuine brilliance and insight (one thinks of...