Isn’t it Obvious?: Review, Sopia Rosenfeld’s Common Sense

An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot…

Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

I walked into this class the other week, and so into a conversation. A few of my classmates, undergraduates, were enjoying their own bewilderment over the recent Donald Trump phenomenon. One of these bright young people had run into an unapologetic and—weirder still—an equally unironic Trump supporter. “I can’t believe he was serious,” my memory recalls this classmate saying. “How could anyone be so stupid?” was the unvoiced question. It’s common sense to my classmate that Trump is a fraud, a bully, disingenuous, privileged, a sexist, a racist. You’ve only to turn on the television and watch—no spin room necessary. It doesn’t take a Rice University education to figure this out.

   “Why dwell on the obvious?” This is the apparently unobvious question Sophia Rosenfeld takes up in her 2011 study, pragmatically and playfully titled Common Sense. Common sense isn’t really, wouldn’t you know it, just a matter of common sense after all. In proving her point Rosenfeld reaches all the way back to Aristotle, tracing the concept through the Renaissance, into its seventeenth and eighteenth century British, French, and Dutch variations, through revolutionary America (particularly with Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet), revolutionary France, and into modern political discourse. Common sense, Rosenfeld suggests, flourishes in, as they say, interesting times. As Rosenfeld puts it,

…common sense is typically evoked and held up as authoritative only at moments of crisis in other forms of legitimacy. Revolutions, which, by definition, result in divided loyalties and the upending of the rules to multiple domains at once, are a case in point. Otherwise common sense does not need to call attention to itself. (15)

A rhetoric of normalcy to ballast an otherwise listing ship of state—Rosenfeld sees that rather than righting us, that rhetorical bulk will right us right to the ocean floor.

   Rosenfeld’s study comes as in a tradition of complicating common sense (a touchstone study might be Clifford Geertz’s “Common Sense as a Cultural System”). Really the whole of academic endeavor is dedicated to complicating the obvious. No one dreads like the scholar dreads the mild words which could ultimately sound the death knell of one’s work: “Not bad. A bit obvious though, isn’t it?” And so we might see Rosenfeld eyeing rather an easy target. In fact her book turns on itself in a wonderful way: it’s really quite obvious that “the obvious” really isn’t that obvious after all. This is almost common sense, except unfortunately (according to Rosenfeld) it must not be, and so she had to write a book about it published by Harvard University Press.

   Common sense began in the body. It made us human, this super sense, this “koine aesthesis.” For Aristotle, common sense was a yoke for our other sensory faculties “comparing and coordinating the impressions received by [the rest of the senses]…and thus…allowing minimal judgments about sense objects to occur independent of reason” (18). An organizer and adjudicator. Historically its location has moved around: sometimes in the head and sometimes in the heart. But then something changed. Descartes, in fact, happened. Because he needed to get away from the body, Descartes took this super sense out of the body and altogether out of physicality. Rosenfeld writes that Descartes’s “mechanistic account of the body and brain, and his desire to root knowledge firmly in cognition rather than in sensation, rendered unnecessary the common sense as a specific, locatable mental faculty” (21).

   We’re coming closer to common sense as the wisdom of the ordinary. After Descartes, “[t]he watered-down Aristotelian notion of a common sense faculty merged…with the old Roman conception of sensus communis: the shared, though generally tacit, values and beliefs of a community” (22). Politicized common sense becomes a regulatory tool of the state. It could be rhetorically deployed to discourage ideological eccentricity; a tool, then, “in the creation of a noncombative common culture” (30). Common sense as common taste—not merely obvious, but shared, it could help maintain political stability (or political homeostasis). But Descartes would be, in Rosenfeld’s estimation, more a symptom than a problem. The ideological backdrop to her argument seems to be the threatening (and near constant) rise of skepticism. But Descartes’s answer to “How do we know anything?” and, really, “What makes things real?” simply didn’t take; not long after his 1637 settlement with epistemological skepticism, his cogito, his answer to the question of uncertainty, began to wear a bit thin. The problem of the era seemed to be “How do we live without certainty?”

   The drive towards common sense is, then, the flight from uncertainty. Rosenfeld’s history next takes us to Britain and the Scottish Common Sense school. David Hume was a particularly dangerous gadfly for eighteenth century anti-skeptics like James Beattie and Thomas Reid; Reid the founder of a rather self-congratulatory group called “The Wise Club.” These Scots of common sense were creating a new philosophy somewhere between Descartes and Locke. Rosenfeld calls Reid’s common sense “an amorphous set of basic judgments or propositions, evident in the common language in which it is entrenched, to which all sane adult people, anywhere, anytime, must subscribe” (72). Reid might have found a hero in Othello who also needed to know that he could trust his eyes: “Men should be what they seem.” Give me proof! Unfortunately, it is Iago rather than Othello still breathing at the end of that tragedy.

   So there came a taste for doubting in the wake of the Renaissance, and a counter rhetoric rose to combat the resultant epistemological anxiety. This seems obvious. But Rosenfeld is at her best when investigating the “radical” uses of common sense in Holland and France in the late eighteenth century. Eventually important to Holland, the early to mid-seventeenth century French le bon sens was “the very obverse of the kind of reasoning that formed the backdrop to the common sense philosophy of the Scots” (103). Le bon sens, or “good sense,” was the subversive French counterpart to British regulatory common sense. If British common sense loved its doxa, French le bon sens reveled in paradox. As with everything in France, this discourse eventually got classed. Rosenfeld points to the rise of “the philosophe” in this new “war over representation” (134). The other combatant? Common Sense de jour:

The philosophe, in other words, routinely chose unsettling language games over restoring the direct and long-established correspondence between words and things. His love of contradictions, like his refusal to follow either established authorities or the consensus gentium, pushed society in two directions: toward a generalized doubt about all that should be certain and toward the espousal of dangerous new absurdities under the banner of truth. (134)

We still find this formulation in variant forms of what we call “the culture wars,” often categorized by level of education, religion, geography etc. The Overeducated Coastal Snob (who knows quite a lot about very little) and the Ignorant Quasi-Bigoted Midwesterner, to make one generalized colorful example.

   Of course if Tocqueville’s observation in 1835 that “in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States” has any merit, French le bon sens likely never took much hold in America. Rosenfeld goes into great detail about American and French Revolutionary forms of common sense, but her most interesting thesis is that “in the radical Whig rhetoric of revolutionary Pennsylvania, we can locate the apotheosis of a brand-new and decidedly modern form of political legitimation known as populism” (167). Ours is a particularly provocative climate in which to be reading of the inchoate roots of populism. Rosenfeld continues, asserting that in Philadelphia was initiated a “style and form of politics that depended upon wrapping itself in the moral and epistemological notion of the collective common sense of common men more than any economic argument” (167). Her dismissal of the centrality of an “economic argument” is quite provocative and, the reviewer admits, not entirely convincing. She takes this interpretation as evidenced by a one-page pamphlet written by James Cannon in 1776; what he did “in a few short strokes,” Rosenfeld argues, “was turn a concept long associated with a plainspoken, pragmatic, anti-aristocratic, and anti-expert way of seeing the world—that is, common sense—into an ideal foundation for a new, and distinctly American, political order” (167).

   It’s a well formulated argument—smart and neat. If we distill the book down to one sentence it might just be: Ideas matter, and few would argue with that. But there’s something telling about the concluding chapter wherein Rosenfeld claims the common sense playbook, this anti-expert, anti-thinking rhetorical toolbox, as “increasingly the province of the right” (255). Palin, Huckabee, Beck, and The Great Communicator himself Ronald Reagan began “a second American afterlife” to common sense politics. This isn’t to undercut the value of Rosenfeld’s book which I found interesting, intelligent, and clarifying. But the problem connects for me to the conversation I sketched at the beginning of this review essay.

   Rosenfeld betrays, at times, the frustrations of the bewildered, beleaguered intellectual. So anxious about the cult of an American unthinking public, Rosenfeld has had to write a book ripping down the façade of the greatest rhetorical weapon of the “common sense conservative” —a book that will likely only be read by people already interested in why common sense isn’t a matter of common sense at all. Common sense is everywhere. Everyone uses it for divers purposes. Donald Trump has in fact said “I’m a common sense conservative,” but the political Left uses it with “common sense gun solutions” all the time. And most people realize that common sense is a rhetorical weapon of political whimsy; and most people don’t need to read Tristan Tzara and Pierre Bourdieu to figure this out. Thus when Rosenfeld closes with the injunction that “[i]t is vital that some individuals in the modern world consciously position themselves outside of the reigning common sense and keep a close eye on the complex and powerful work that it does” we see Rosenfeld waving at us from her self-regulated commonsense-free zone and we can thank her politely and keep on walking because it doesn’t take a whole lot of common sense to realize that wherever it’s located, and in spite of ourselves, we’re always bound to fall back on it. This doesn’t make us stupid, but it might make us vote for Donald Trump.

Debating Protests, Safe Spaces, Jefferson

May I be forgiven for posting from the National Review. The article was a nice gloss on some of the logic operating...
Posted by Laura Bilhimer on Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Excellent Facebook Debate on Privileged Mourning (15 November 2015) in which I get in some nice Zingers and side with some Right-wingers

Oh boy. a Facebook Debate! What fun.

Full names are withheld--using initials or first names only. The original conversation was on facebook, a somewhat public medium. But I try here to maintain a reasonable level of anonymity, removing all hyperlinks as well. I also did my best to level the field by removing any "likes." Which was hard on my vanity since I did receive a few...I hope you enjoy.

This reaction came from quite a lot of thinking on my part about where I stand politically today, and why I don't feel much solidarity with the Left these days. I've been reading and listening to a lot of Sam Harris and Richard Rorty, as well as David Brooks. Also the recent Yale and Mizzou protests have been in my brain, covered so well recently by The Atlantic. Really weird calls from young academics for "safe spaces" in lieu of calls for intellectual integrity/intellectual freedom. College campuses SHOULD be a place of confrontation. Ideas are difficult, and really powerful ideas can and should be discomforting, even painful. There IS real racism in this country--Halloween costumes just don't merit the kind of hysterics we've been seen the last few weeks. The Paris attacks have given us another opportunity to rethink the relationship between religion and terrorism. The link is real, no doubt about it. Islam doesn't need to disappear, but it does need real reform. The Left continues to deny any real connection between Islam and Islamism--the Left resorts to name-calling and buzz words and charges of racism or Islamophobia. Toxic environment for actual debate. Anyway, lot on the mind lately. The following is a nice demonstration of what I see as a rather irrational, even hysterical reaction to a reasonable feeling of solidarity with France. Even if I change my mind down the road (smart people should continue to continually rethink positions over time) this was a chance for me to test out some opinions, and to have a bit of fun (not everyone here enjoyed themselves as much). I'll give the full conversation:

Original Post:

 · 

KL: Folks, you know why we notice it more when people die in Western countries than in non-western countries? Is it because of prejudice? Is it because of hate?

No.

It's because, like any sane person, we recognize attacks on our "family" more than on those who aren't "family." Also, tragedies of this magnitude are much more common in developing countries than the West, so while they are still tragic, they are more expected and normal. The West is very imperfect, but it gives billions and billions in aid to the rest of the world to help alleviate such things. But the simple fact is that human nature is surprised by the uncommon. Terrorist attacks in Western countries are not common. Unfortunately, such violent episodes are very common in other countries.

Additionally, chances are that more people recognize a horrible incident in Paris than Beruit, et al, because:

1. Most of us are much more likely to have visited Paris than Beruit;
2. Paris is a comparatively far more famous city than Beruit and other places;
3. Most of us are much more likey to visit Paris at some point in the future if we have not visited it already, as it holds a place in the West's (indeed the world's) psyche;
4. France is part of our civilizational "family" of the West.

Is this wrong?

No. Like anything else, it can go too far and become wrong, but no, this is not wrong in and of itself.

Now, if the West hadn't given so much aid, if it wasn't the first to give aid and provide logistical support in developing countries struck by tragedy, if it hadn't provided billions in debt forgiveness to poor nations, etc. if, in fact, it showed that it was only concerned about itself, and not at all for these other places, then there would be a point to all of this.

But alas, the exact opposite has happened.

So enough please. Unless you are prepared to take the tragedies of billions of other human beings as seriously as you take your own family's, state's, or country's tragedies, can we please stop with the really strange and self-defeating narrative of "Well, we can only mourn Paris if we equally mourn every other tragedy that can possibly befall mankind from here on out"? Of course other people dying is a tragedy, but you know, human beings have limits to how much they can take upon themselves, and clearly, with all the money given by the West to the rest of the world, we clearly don't believe that other lives lack value.

Most of this talk is psychological navel-gazing in the extreme.

----------------------------------

Replies follow:

First Comment Thread:

HH This is just a euro-centric and bigoted argument that places more importance on so-called 'civilised' and 'western' countries over what is seen as the 'other'. I would expect more from you Kodi as an ambassador for the ISS office at KU. This sentiment shows a lack of understanding and care for some of the students you are supposed to represent.

• LH He isn't saying he doesn't care or that people from other non-western countries don't have value. He already recognizes the value of non-western people and cultures by living and studying in China. Your response is pretty heavy-handed and without justification.

• HH Not really. I know Kodi from working with him as an international orientation leader. As an ambassador for international students this was a very euro-centric thing to post. By sharing this post it can be perceived by others that he doesn't care which is what I was pointing out.

• JC Hollie, I said it. I love traveling, and I have friends in every portion of the world, including Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Australia. I happen to also appreciate my particularly Western culture, which has produced many good fruits of which myself, you, and many other people who are not Western have benefited from, not because those values are only meant for Western people, but because they are human values: values of human rights, tolerance, an open exchange of ideas, etc. Those do NOT exist in many parts of the globe. That is a fact. I love experiencing other cultures, and have engaged in quite a bit of criticism of our own culture, which is profoundly imperfect. But whenever I come back to America or back to somewhere in the "West," I do feel great gratitude at the many blessings we have, many of which are not matched elsewhere on the globe. Whatever YOU mean by "Euro-centric," what I, as the author of this post mean, is that there are countries with which we share a more common culture and heritage. The United States is one of the most diverse societies on earth, and Europe itself is incredibly diverse. But they all partake of a very similar heritage created by many forces. It's just common sense! Most Americans have more in common with people in Europe than people in Africa. That doesn't mean we think Africans are less human or what not. How absurd (particularly given all the aid we have given to them)! Our culture is simply more similar. That is a FACT.

• Laura Bilhimer This is actually a really fascinating dilemma. Ideally, Hollie's moral figure would be right: all human kind would care for each other equally. But that's not how we think, for better or for worse. I think it's a matter of logistics and psychology and common sense: given the unfortunate habit humans seem to have of harming each other, what would daily life be like if we really, deeply agonized over every global catastrophe, every catastrophic loss of human life? It would be pretty hard to enjoy a cup of coffee over the Sunday New York Times. We really wouldn't have the time or psychological energy to be that empathetic. I think we have to admit we're fundamentally pretty tribal, which in the 21st century translates into nationhood. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be more empathetic. But admitting that we tend to care more about other countries with similar values or countries with which we have cultural-historical ties---this seems to be a very common sense, even very decent thing to admit.

• KC Say what you say, but keep in mind there is a difference between Intent vs Impact

• JC What impact? We're grieving with Parisians for God's sake. Oh yes, and we clearly don't give a damn about Kenyans, who we give billions to! This is extreme sensitivity looking for fights where there shouldn't be any run amok.

• HH ^'giving billions to' is a paternalistic and euro-centric way to view other countries. Educate yourself about the impact of your prose.

• Laura Bilhimer Rem acu tetigisti. I would say the same to the "bigoted argument" remark.

• Laura Bilhimer OH GO BACK TO YOUR CHOMSKY

• Laura Bilhimer LOL

• JC Hollie, you are overly sensitive. Educate yourself about how nonsensical you are being. I don't think the millions of people who benefit from PEPFAR and the state of the art anti-retro viral drugs we provide to fight AIDS and which has saved millions of lives and is preventing the death of millions more would have patience with your babbling about "paternalism." Snap out of it for God's sake!

• Laura Bilhimer Yeah Kodi, educate yourself!!! We all know you hate reading books!! lol

• Laura Bilhimer I haven't had me a good facebook debate in a real long time.

• HH I'm overly sensitive and you're overly ignorant.

• JC I'm not trying to be mean. I'm sure Hollie is a nice person. But this is truly absurd thinking. It's the type of thinking that suburban well-to-do white kids typically are quite comfortable with. Meanwhile, in the real world, no one has time for this nonsense, let alone those whose lives are being saved. Hollie, you should speak this nonsense in the presence of a Kenyan whose life has been saved by PEPFAR. I'd love to see the reaction. It's not paternalism. It's called caring about those who are in a tough position and doing something about it. "I'm overly sensitive and you're overly ignorant." This is the state of intellectual life on college campuses these days. As an alumni of KU I was hoping for better. This amounts to nothing more than "You're wrong because I say you're wrong; oh, and I'll just give you a bad label and hope that alleviates my need to actually make an argument, provide evidenced, and all the normal formalities usually associated with educated discussion."

• Laura Bilhimer Oh god, we shouldn't even begin talking about the Yale protests. Hey I think we won, Josh. I used latin once, and also got in a Noam Chomsky dig.

• Laura Bilhimer But she did get in her buzz words. We must give them that.

Second Comment Thread (also responding to first comment by HH):

Laura Bilhimer And nothing that you do would ever be "euro-centric"? Of course we're culturally closer to France than many places in the world, of course this hits home to us more than a tragedy in Beirut. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's admitting a history. They helped us win a little skirmish with England back in the 18th century, and those blood ties go deep. It doesn't make him a cultural snob to admit that that affects us in a very real way.

Third Comment Thread (or a continuation of the second. Continued response to HH).

Laura Bilhimer And you really did just call Kodi a bigot.

• HN Thanks Laura. Sometimes people just want to call people names...it seems to be the country we live in.
• Laura Bilhimer Hi Hans! Yeah, and I know there was no direct name-calling, but this whole discussion Kodi is pointing to has pissed me off. I still generally consider myself a liberal, but it's getting more and more difficult, since that term automatically alligns one with this easy-button politics of "point to your privilege." Which IS important to do, but it's too often a conversation stopper, as well as a "point me to the next hysterical BS you can think of" move. Kodi was bringing up a valid and commonsensical point, and he automatically gets carded as a white-privileged western imperialist bigot (or a person carrying those ideas...) Bring on the finger pointing from the Left! The Hysterical Left as I've taken to calling it--Sam Harris calls it the Regressive Left. I'm becoming my own political party I guess, which is usually a good thing I suppose. Carry on with the interesting ideas, Kodi.
• JC Laura, I'm more conservative, but I completely agree with you and Sam Harris in this regard. The fact that we have different ideas is not the problem: it is that we can't talk about them in an honest, civil way, and we'd rather label our opponents before we have even given their ideas a fair shake! You are completely right.
• Laura Bilhimer Cheers to that Josh! Wouldn't it be nice to see more of that kind of debate? No more buzz words, more thoughtfulness, more humbleness.

Fourth Comment Thread

KS I would hardly say events such as these are normal. As they happen often, it's hardly normal. At least, in my opinion, they should not be perceived as "normal."

• JC Violence in other parts of the world is far more normal than in the West. That is a fact.
• Laura Bilhimer Yes, indeed.
• KS I understand that violence is more rampant in other parts of the world. But I would hardly call the events that took place Friday "normal." Terrorism, regardless of where it takes place, shouldn't be considered normal. Do we expect it to happen in other parts of the world? Unfortunately, yes. But we shouldn't have to expect it.
• JC Kristen, I think everybody agrees with you, so I'm not sure of your point. Saying something is "normal" doesn't mean we approve: it means we recognize it happens with a good deal of regularity.

Fifth Comment Thread

MS I completely agree although I would've selected my words a little more carefully. You seem to care about international people more than the average Westerner, however you understand that it would be natural for Westerners to react with more shock at the Paris attacks because they feel a closer historical and cultural connection to Paris than Beirut or Kenya. Maybe people care less about Beirut and other locations as a result, but that doesn't make them necessarily bad people. I wish that the media would give more equal coverage though.

• Laura Bilhimer Yeah I agree there. I don't remember a Presidential address after the earthquake in Nepal for example. 9000 people dead! I know it's not terrorism, but more solidarity there would have been nice. Not as sexy to our media as ISIS is though.

[I've omitted a thread making a more bizarre claim that no one cared about the Russian plane bombing. It went nowhere, despite a brave attempt to reason with the person by JC. I did not have to patience to get involved.]

Last Comment Thread

[KL posts photo of Stephen Colbert eating popcorn, seeming to observe this conversation with much amusement.]

JM After any tragedy Facebook just turns into one great big compassion contest.

• SR fully aware that OP is present and engaged, "... the simple fact is that human nature is surprised by the uncommon." is the only sentence worth keeping. (IMO) Completely sufficient on it's own. The rest is just distraction from that truth.
• KL Some good things have already been said, I just have a few things: Hollie, while I welcome critique of anything I say or post, I think that you have unfairly overstepped your bounds. There is a big difference between pointing out something that may be "perceived" wrong by others, and labeling something as bigoted. There is a big difference between calling for caution, and calling into credibility my care for and ability to represent internationals. I have reread the quote, and I have detected no bigoted speech, nor anything that would call for such critique of my credibility. So I can't point out an undeniable and sociologically verified part of human nature without cries of bigotry? My credibility as a representative of internationals is in question if I defend something I see as pure and natural human reaction to world events? You know, "eurocentric" is an overused term. So is "bigoted." Both of these terms are important and have their place, but the way you have used them today I find to be irresponsible. I feel that you have displayed an inability to read into the actual legitimate points in the post, and rather displayed overly reactionary and accusatory behavior that shuts down discussion right from the start.Karen, "intent vs. impact;" actually, I like that. I think this is an important thing to remember, and you have encouraged me to reflect on this (as you always do). At the same time though, I have a concern:Can't a concern for impact before intent lead to certain captivity of intellectual discussion? Don't you think that being overly concerned with people's feelings in our discussions can lead to a strangled ability to express good ideas? At least, if you will, if we take it too far? 
• KL I appreciated Milvi's comment the most of all. Her approach is cautious, yet supportive of the legitimate points made. Thank you Milvi.Karen and Hollie, I don't seek to attack, I seek to engage. I honestly want your thoughts on what I have just said. I always want to learn from others, as I assume you do too.

[the conversation went on, mostly further nit-picking of KL's terms in original post]






So while I do not agree fully with KL's original post, the knee-jerk reaction from HH set me off. Quite a fun evening for me overall.

Bottom of Form

On David Brooks

http://www.cjr.org/the_profile/the_transformation_of_david_brooks.php


"People who believe Brooks beats up on the poor often point to ethical spinelessness of politicians or corruption on Wall Street as evidence that immorality is multicultural, maybe even skewed toward the elite. Yet, this underscores why a popular journalist with conservative dispositions but liberal open-mindedness might be valuable to morally stimulate the “upper-middle class” and “upscale establishment.” In today’s America, a middle-aged, privileged, urban white man is needed at the table of moral dialogue. He represents a morally beleaguered constituency, which is why, to borrow from one forceful column, the proper course is not to banish people like Brooks from making such commitments to moral reflection. It is to expect that they make such commitments."

Moral Psychology of Liberals and Conservatives

Reflections on Jefferson's First Inaugural Address

Principles, Opinions, and Promise in Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address

Today the new political year commences—The new order of things begins.

-John Marshall, morning of March 4, 1801

    Writing to America’s freshly inaugurated third president in March 1801, Benjamin Rush congratulated a very dear, old friend on a different kind of inauguration—that of “a new era” in American political life:

You have opened a new era by your speech on the 4^th of March in the history of the United States….Old friends who had been separated by party names, and a supposed difference of principle in politics for many years, shook hands with each other, immediately after reading it, and discovered for the first time, that they had differed in opinion only, about the best means of promoting the interests of their common country. (Cunningham 40)

“It would require a page,” Rush continued indulgently, “to contain the names of all the citizens (formerly called Federalists) who have spoken in the highest terms of your speech” (40). Not everyone, of course, was so optimistic. Thomas Rodney, a Continental Congressman from Delaware, admitted in his diary that although Jefferson “pours out oil on the Pot that has been boiling over so long….where parties are so inveterated…as in America, perhaps he will fail, and by Endeavouring to gain his adversaries, loose his friends” (Cummingham 40). He would lose some.

    But to Jefferson the possibility of healing political wounds was, he confided to Elbridge Gerry, “almost the first object of my heart” (WTJ 1089). “It will be a great blessing to our country if we can once more restore harmony and social love among its citizens,”; for such a reconciliation Jefferson would “sacrifice everything but principle” (1089).  Jefferson refers, of course, to the widening political division between Federalists and Republicans: between those who believed the Tenuously United States required above all an authoritative central government for which the people should and would put up with a certain degree of necessary tyranny; and those who remembered, and felt still the fetters of monarchy, of tyranny, of authoritarianism, of civic enslavement. For the latter, anything would be pledged to keep the experiment of democracy alive; anything, says Jefferson, but the abandonment of principles, principles Jefferson would claim as common-ground with Federalists. And yet he also knew that the fate of the American experiment depended on who would next sit in the hot seat in 1801: which vision of America would win? The surety of centralized power, or the risks of a more delicate democracy?

    So we dance between tyranny and liberty. The stakes couldn’t have been higher for Jefferson, and for the country. The tang of tyranny was still in the mouths of most Americans, a taste left over after the monarchial flirtations of the Adams and Washington administrations. If not exactly elated to have been elected to the highest office of his country, I think he was relieved. “[T]his Government,” Jefferson softly spoke out on that March morning, is “the world’s best hope” (WTJ 493). Its strength comes not from an overbearing central authority, but from the physically dispersed yet culturally—principally—united hearts and minds of its citizens. America’s government was “the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern”: here would be found the well of our enduring strength (493). Jefferson speaks here of a general sense of civic duty, but he speaks also of his own call to office (we might remember Kant’s remarks on duty: “Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating, but requirest submission” (Kant 92)). Jefferson felt this all-encompassing call to serve his country, to do what would be asked of him. The country needed, he knew, a Republican in the (brand new) White House.

    From among the stated “invasions of the public order” came a most serious breach of civil liberties enacted by his own friend John Adams. Adams had taken a hard line during his own presidency in quelling activities he saw as unpatriotic, and, so, dangerous: radicalism, disloyalty, insurrection, protests and slurs on the government (and, worse, on himself). He retaliated with The Sedition Act of 1798, which Jefferson happily allowed to expire at the end of Adams’ presidency. Jefferson cites “freedom of the press” as an “essential principle[] of our Government”: this difference of opinion would sever his friendship with John and Abagail for about a decade. “I cannot agree,” writes a bitter Abagail to Jefferson in 1804 (in what would be the last Adams-Jefferson letter mailed until 1812), “in opinion, that the constitution ever meant to withhold from the National Government the power of self defense, or that it could be considered an infringement of the Liberty of the press, to punish the licentiousness of it” (Cappon 281-82). In particular, Jefferson’s pardoning of James Callendar, the rather outrageous political writer jailed until the Sedition Act, was to the Adams’ “a personal injury” (Cappon 274).

    The Adams-Jefferson falling-out gives us, I think, a taste of the political climate Jefferson was stepping into: it must have been toxic.  Thus on that March morning in 1801, Thomas Jefferson knew he had to do something impossible: in a single speech he had to mend, he had to have a vision; and he had to, in a couple thousand words, articulate the “creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust” (WTJ 495). For the Republican sensibility finding “the voice of the nation” would be tricky. How do you privilege national unity without minimizing the Republican virtues of liberty and difference? On this day, insists Jefferson, “[w]e are all Republicans, we are all Federalists” (WTJ 493). Jefferson turned differences of party principles into differences of party opinions: “every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle” (493). We may differ in opinions, but Americans must share common, essential principles. The primary circle of allegiance must be expanded from Republican or Federalist to a wider identity: American.

    We find this kind of patriotism today in rhetorical form in the mouths of many, and yet often we find it ringing a bit hollow: either too cheap or just insincere. The stakes were so much higher in 1801: the experiment had just begun, and no one, including Jefferson, knew where it would lead. In 2004 on a Tuesday night in Boston, a relatively unknown Senatorial candidate from Illinois looked back in order to look forward. He was giving us permission, I think, to feel a kind of qualified pride. Although he wasn’t yet running for president, Obama told an audience that “our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago….we are called to reaffirm our values and our commitments, to hold them against a hard reality and see how we are measuring up to the legacy of our forbearers and the promise of future generations” (Obama 2). Obama was echoing Jefferson that night: “[T]here are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers….Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America” (4). Delegates at the Democratic National Convention that night must have wondered, waving their blue and red Kerry-Edwards signs, whether they had just nominated the wrong man for the job.

    “The task is above my talents,” admits Jefferson. The man had a penchant for hyperbole and a sometimes misleading exaggeration of sentiment. But even if we’ll never know whether the admission is largely rhetorical or else deeply serious, the approach must have been incredible: he wore no ceremonial sword, and asked “indulgence for [his] own errors” in executing “the post you have assigned me” (WTJ 495).  He spoke of a “political faith” of which it’s hard not to be cynical. Two hundred years later Barack Obama invoked “the audacity of hope…the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead” (Obama 5). Jefferson’s political reconciling did not endure long, and—like any politician—he soon got his hands necessarily dirty; the nation would be at war with itself in sixty years. But after two hundred or so, a black man, a “skinny kid with a funny name,” would take the same oath as did Jefferson that day in 1801 (5). Jefferson’s “essential principles,” and the promises held within his Declaration would come to fruition in a concrete way, even as the vogue of opinion continues to check and question the validity of such principles and such promises.   

Works Cited

Cappon, Lester J. The Adams-Jefferson Letters. New York: Clarion Books, 1971.

Cunningham, Noble E. The Inaugural Addresses of President Thomas Jefferson, 1801        And 1805. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.

Jefferson, Thomas. Writings ed. Merrill Peterson. New York: The Library of America,       1984.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason trans. Abbott. New York: Dover      Philosophical Classics, 2004.

Meacham, Jon. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. New York: Randon House, 2012.

Obama, Barack. “Transcript: Illinois Senate Candidate Barack Obama.” The Washington   Post, 27 July 2004. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19751- 2004July27.html>