Becoming Tolstoy's People

Clay S. Jenkinson's Becoming Jefferson's People: Reinventing the American Republic in the Twenty-First Century (2004) is a wonderful read--despite the fact that it is destined for an undeserved obscurity that it probably acquired as soon as it left the press.

Jenkinson's desire to "reinvent" the American Republic is as heartfelt and righteous as it is quixotic. Readers of this blog (both of you) will no doubt recognize that the Mazeppist sees no shame in quixotic projects; in his view, they are the only avenues of individual liberty left us in the interstices of manufactured consent.

As a Tolstoyan, there is much to commend in Jefferson's worldview: indeed, Jefferson's Enlightenment-inflected Left agrarianism was, in many respects, a Tolstoyanism avant la lettre.

At the same time, however, there are significant differences to be observed--even beyond the fact that Tolstoy manumitted his slaves during his lifetime, whereas Jefferson did not. Jenkinson himself acknowledges a key issue: "By believing or pretending that the irrational was not fundamental to human experience, Jefferson effectively abandoned it to its own libidinal energies, when he ought to have attempted to channel and discipline it, in the manner of Carl Jung [!]. It seems clear to many that we are now a runaway materialist empire and that the most important work of the soul has been neglected in western civilization, and particularly in American civilization" [Jenkinson, 108].

This point appears to locate the worm in the Jeffersonian apple, and helps to account for Jefferson's unconscionably nonchalant attitude towards revolutionary violence and the sexual exploitation of slaves.

Tolstoy is criticized as a Puritan for his straightforward approach to such issues--which is to be expected in a country that operates routinely on hypocrisy and bad faith. To dignify such criticisms with a response seems to me to be counter-productive, if not a complete waste of time and mental energy.

In the end, I support Jenkinson's desire to "re-invent" our long lost republic in a Jeffersonian vein; I think such re-invention would be an inevitable way-station on the road to becoming Tolstoy's people. And becoming Tolstoy's people is a more worthy goal than to become Jefferson's. Of course, I suffer no illusions: neither dream has the slightest chance of becoming a reality.