Appleby's critics respond, as John Ashworth does (#183), by suggesting that her categories do not always discriminate clearly between Jeffersonians and Federalists or, as the Tory M.P. Hiram Caton (#403) does, by simply dismissing the idea of important change centering on the Jeffersonian accession to the presidency as "national mythology" and an aspect of "Jeffersonian electoral flapdoodle." A thoughtful respondent like Lance Banning, however, himself a target of Appleby's critique, points out that the claims of the "republican" and "liberal" hypotheses are not necessarily mutually exclusive (#300). John M. Murrin suggests (#345), somewhat problematically, that Jefferson's three major lines of influence are Lockean liberalism, country ideology, and moral sense theory, with the latter's "heart" having priority in the public sphere over the former's "head." The argument that the question of Jefferson's antecedents as a public intellectual is more complex than deciding which of two contending traditions to assign him to is also picked up in Ralph Ketcham's estimation (#209) of the power of Augustanism on Jefferson. Pope, Swift, and Bolingbroke shared their opposition to Walpole with Trenchard, Gordon, and the "True Whigs," but their positions and implications were by no means identical. Ketcham's recognition of the relevance of Bolingbroke's idea of a patriot king as a model for the early presidency is perceptive. Appleby, Banning, Murrin, and Ketcham, each in their own way, share recognition of the central importance of ideology, but Ralph Lerner, a University of Chicago student of political philosophy, rejects the claims of historians of republican ideology as deterministic (#426); as his book title suggests, he wants to present Jefferson as The Thinking Revolutionary with an emphasis on his power to order and critique ideas consciously and rationally in order to shape a larger vision of a libertarian society. Lerner's caution against assigning a merely limiting power to ideology is well-taken, but his argument does not finally counter the explanatory power of the historians of ideology, be they proponents of a liberal, proto-capitalistic Jefferson or a whig, country party Jefferson.

The receding shock waves of Garry Wills's earlier attempt to find a communitarian ethic in the Declaration by linking it to Francis Hutcheson's moral sense philosophy continued to make themselves felt. A number of worthwhile essays examine the philosophical background and the consequences of the Declaration, often in response to Wills's claims. Gary J. Schmitt takes Wills head on (#104) and asserts that he fails to make his case because he argues from inadequate evidence. Harry V. Jaffa sees Wills's Inventing America as part of the "Pathology of Ideological Scholarship" (#34), but he also insists (#328) against the arguments of Russell Kirk and other scholars of conservative bent that it is a fundamental statement of American principle. Ronald Hamowy, one of Wills's earliest critics, argues that the Declaration has sometimes been misinterpreted by failing to see that Jefferson understood rights as negatively conceived restrictions on men's actions toward one another (#202). Gene R. Nichols (#268) shares Harry Jaffa's sense of the central importance of the Declaration, but he sees it, through the gloss on it by the Bill of Rights' ninth amendment, as the foundation for a constitutional protection of personal privacy. Robert Ginsberg asks us to "Suppose That Jefferson's Rough Draft of the Declaration Is a Work of Political Philosophy" (#199) and claims that it is a fundamentally egalitarian document. Michael Zuckert looks suggestively at the philosophical and political status of Jefferson's appeal to "self-evident truths" (#458) and claims that, contra Wills, the traditional view of a Lockean role in the Declaration still makes sense. As part of a larger argument for the strategic importance of Locke in the American vision, Thomas L. Pangle (#509) asserts his importance for a Jefferson whose ultimate belief in "an ever more prosperous, growth-oriented economy" aligns him with some of the more conservative forces of the 1980s.

A. J. Beitzinger offers a thoughtful overview of Jefferson as political theorist (#305) that suggests he was in fact apparently more interested in theorizing about society than about politics. Richard K. Matthews's The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson (#176) is not strictly about Jefferson's political thought, but it does try to read his actions against a radical democratic philosophy in order to rescue him from the consensus historians' liberal configuration as well as from the ideological historians' conservative and nostalgic model. J. Ann Tickener's essay in comparative political science (#455) describes Jefferson's shift from concerns before 1800 for individual self-reliance to support for policies promoting national integration and self-reliance. One of the most challenging essays on Jefferson as a political and social thinker, in part because it is part of a larger, major critique of contemporary philosophical practice, is Richard Rorty's "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy" (#515). It does not focus directly or in detail on Jefferson, but it is a powerfully suggestive meditation on his participation in a fundamentally liberal American experiment aimed at "the disenchantment of the world."

Rorty's essay appears in Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan's important collection of essays, The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom (#469), celebrating the bicentennial of the enactment of the Statute. Jefferson's understanding of the proper relationship between church and state received considerable attention in the 1980s, partly because of this bicentennial but also because of efforts by the Reagan and Bush administration to advance various schemes for support of private and parochial education. In the Peterson and Vaughan volume, essays by Thomas E. Buckley, David Little, Martin Marty, J. G. A. Pocock, and Cushing Strout are notable for their examinations of the philosophical and historical foregrounds as well as of the consequences of Jefferson's Statute. Pocock examines an historical process of secularization that is perhaps analogous to Rorty's understanding of a "disenchantment of the world," and Strout connects the Statute to a recognition of a progressively greater American pluralism. A disenchanted world is not necessarily more pluralistic, however, and Kent R. Hill (#416) applauds the Statute's underwriting of pluralism which he sees as threatened both by religious and secular parties. His concern is to preserve the public schools as a common ground for a pluralistic society, but a number of critics of the common school system argue that a commitment to pluralism in fact necessitates support for religious schools as well as the public schools. This position is perhaps most notably argued by James W. Skillen in a number of essays where he charges Jefferson with republican "dogmatism" (#449), self-contradictory support of a particular value system that was essentially religious (#450), and vacillating between commitment to the individual and to universal law as moral centers (#632). Thomas S. Derr's 1981 essay (#27) precedes some of these arguments and develops them more subtly. A different angle of attack is mounted by those who seek to devalue or explode Jefferson's principle of a wall of separation between church and state. Robert L. Cord (#80) argues that Jefferson's support for the Moravian missions to the Indians disproves any absolute separation between church and state as a matter of principle. Daniel L. Dreisbach (#613) advances a better argument when he claims that Jefferson's Bill for Religious Freedom cannot be considered in isolation but must be seen in the original context of four related bills in the Report of the Committee of Revisors. Chief Justice Rehnquist dismisses it as mere rhetoric occurring in documents without legal force (#286). Robert M. Healey (#491), however, in a cogent essay examines the Chief Justice's reasoning and historical understanding and finds them both seriously flawed.

Edwin S. Gaustad, another distinguished historian of religion in America, takes up the question of Jefferson's religious ideas and his ideas about the church-state relationship most usefully in two chapters of his Faith of Our Fathers (#409). Paul Rahe's discussion of "Church and State" (#355) is most valuable for its consideration of the role of Jefferson's anticlericalism on his basic position. Robert M. Healey also contributes another valuable essay on another topic related to religious freedom, "Jefferson on Judaism and the Jews" (#204). Sanford Kessler earlier in the decade offered two informative essays on "Jefferson's Rational Religion" (#147) and on "Locke's Influence on Jefferson's `Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom'" (#148) which claim that his ideas have in important ways influenced the doctrines of most American churches.

Another bicentennial, that of the U.S. Constitution in 1987, called forth a surprising number of essays on Jefferson and either the Constitution or constitutionalism. One suspects that a number of these were in answer to requests from editors who suffer from the too common mistake of assuming that the author of the Declaration must have had a hand in the Constitution too. Richard E. Ellis (#318) contributes to Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography a sound account of Jefferson's involvement with the Virginia and Federal Constitutions, both as a contributor and as a leader who confronted constitutional issues. Lawrence S. Kaplan (#422) and Malcolm Sylvers (#452) contend that Jefferson's residence in France affected his opinions about the Constitution, but Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler (#489) rejects such arguments, contending that Jefferson's comments on the Constitution reflect most specifically his response to Shays' Rebellion. Merrill D. Peterson offers two thoughtful essays on Jefferson and the Constitution, arguing that a belief in "strict construction" was central to Jefferson's theory (#350) and, more interestingly, that the notion of the consent of the governed shaped his notions of constitutional change in important ways (#511). Peter T. Manicas (#501) also makes an interesting argument to the effect that Jefferson obscured the meaning of "democracy" in trying to make it an instrument for democratic government and in doing so paradoxically limited the possibilities for far more democratic forms. Philip G. Henderson considers Jefferson's ideas about the constitutional role of the judiciary in his "Marshall versus Jefferson" (#145), and Stephen Presser (#627) contends for an "original understanding" of the Constitution as advanced by Justice Samuel Chase and opposed by Jefferson. Raoul Berger (#604) rejects Presser's characterization of Jefferson as "a demagogue" and asserts that his ideals, not Presser's version of a conservative jurisprudence, are central to American life.

Shannon C. Stimson's discussion of Jefferson's jurisprudential thinking in her The American Revolution in the Law (#634) makes legal history seem almost exciting; her complex and subtle argument about jural and judicial discourses throws light both on an evolving legal understanding and on Jefferson's unique position among the nation's founders. Ralph Lerner's study noted above (#426) offers a provocative view of Jefferson's proposed revision of the laws of Virginia, and Richard R. Beeman (#304) considers the impact of his training as a legal thinker on the Summary View and the proposed Virginia Constitution. Bradley Chapin (#548) puts Jefferson's efforts to revise felony law into the context of similar efforts by Benjamin Rush and William Bradford. The other important work on Jefferson and the law is surely Frank L. Dewey's Thomas Jefferson, Lawyer (#288), a careful and detailed study of Jefferson's law practice based on examination of his account and fee books. Parts of this study appeared as separate essays, but this volume collects them all and is the best treatment we have of this phase of Jefferson's life.

A trio of solid essays by Noble E. Cunningham, Jr. discuss "Political Parties" (#315), "Jeffersonian Democracy" (#190), and "Presidential Leadership, Political Parties, and the Congressional Caucus, 1800-1824" (#25). These will be most useful to students not already familiar with Cunningham's earlier work on The Process of Government Under Government. A similar comment could be made about Robert Johnstone's workmanlike but hardly unconventional discussion of Jefferson's presidency (#330). The best work, however, on Jefferson's career as a national leader focused less specifically on his political leadership than on issues of policy. Exceptions to this judgment are Richard K. Matthews' book noted above and David A. Carson's essays on Jefferson's difficulties with John Randolph and the Quids (#s 311, 481). Theodore Crackel's Mr. Jefferson's Army (#377) gives us for the first time a thorough and revisionary account of Jefferson's attitudes toward and handling of the Army during his years in office. Frederick C. Leiner's essay (#149) has the most to say about Jefferson's naval policies, particularly his infatuation for gunboats, but Spencer C. Tucker (#166) also makes a neat point by applying A. T. Mahan's theory of seapower to the gunboat scheme. Donald Jackson's Jefferson & the Stony Mountains (#7) is now our best single book on Jefferson's interest in the American West and in its exploration. Dan L. Flores' Jefferson and Southwestern Exploration (#171), however, is a useful supplement to this for its account of the various efforts to explore the Red River. Joseph H. Harrison, Jr. (#414) informatively examines Jefferson's shifting attitudes toward government support of internal improvement.

With the exception of Robert Shalhope's fine essay on "Agriculture" (#360), the best essays on Jefferson and farming looked either at his agrarian vision or at his significance for an American land policy. Examples of the former are Douglas L. Wilson's important essay "The American Agricola" (#63), his "The Fate of the American Farmer" (#528), and Rosalie Murphy Baum's "The Burden of Myth" (#242), all of which examine it as an ideal projection. Paul B. Thompson (#s 297, 636) and James Montmarquet (#568) consider it as an economic and social philosphy. James W. Hulse (#419) cites Jefferson as one of the first to try to formulate a national land policy, and Richard Austin Cartwright (#393) turns to him for an ethic of land use. Andrew W. Foshee (#250) places Jefferson's ideas of political economy in the context of an agrarian vision largely classical in description and shared with John Taylor of Caroline. Drew R. McCoy's essay on political economy in Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography (#339) is an informed account of his attitudes toward manufactures and commerce that locates his belief in free trade between nations as a key principle in various policy decisions.

Jeffrey A. Frankel (#87) opposes the conventional view that the Embargo was a failure, and William Jeffrey Bolster (#306) argues that it encouraged the development of American coastal shipping, although on the whole it hurt commerce. The American bombing of Libya encouraged several journalists to remember that Jefferson, like Ronald Reagan, had his difficulties with the Barbary Coast states, but the only essay of any weight on this subject is David A. Carson's "Jefferson, Congress, and the Question of Leadership in the Tripolitan War" (#310). Clifford L. Egan's study of Franco-American relations from 1802 to 1812 (#117) is informative about Jefferson's foreign policy concerns toward this country after the Louisiana Purchase. Lawrence S. Kaplan (#332) suggestively describes radical aspects of Jefferson's thinking about foreign policy. The most important publication of the decade on Jefferson's foreign policy, however, is Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson's Empire of Liberty (#599). The authors describe a paradoxical Jefferson, torn between a wish to mount a crusade to spread the principles of American liberty and a fear that the corrupt old world might contaminate an innocent America.

In an age of self-proclaimed "Education Presidents" we are sometimes reminded that Jefferson was the first, and perhaps the only legitimate, education president. Again, we have a good study on this subject in Harold Hellenbrand's The Unfinished Revolution: Education and Politics in the Thought of Thomas Jefferson (#596), an examination of the connection between political and educational concerns that focused on the need for an educated citizenry. Hellenbrand discusses freshly and insightfully Jefferson's attitudes toward the young and toward the relationship between mentor and student. The theme of education for citizenship was a popular concern in the 1980s as witnessed by some of the furor raised over books by Allan Bloom and E. D. Hirsch. Sidney Hook's Jefferson Lecture for 1984 (#207) called for a "National Endowment for Democracy" to direct our educational efforts. David Peeler (#348) describes Jefferson's plans for the University of Virginia to be "Nursery of Republican Patriots," and Ross J. Pudaloff (#354) sees his educational schemes as part of a desire to create a uniform national culture. Ralph Ketcham (#560), on the other hand, appeals for a liberal education designed on Jeffersonian principles that would be deep, coherent, and liberating. Susan Franzosa (#549) makes a cogent aside on Jeffersonian assumptions that civic education was a concern for men, and Lewis P. Simpson (#583) in a typically thoughtful and suggestive essay describes the University as an attempt to create an "American clerisy."

The most interesting work on Jefferson's reputation, not unsurprisingly, continues to focus on the Callender scandals and miscegenation. At last we have a good study of the world as seen from Callender's point of view in Michael Durey's very interesting "With the Hammer of Truth": James Thomson Callender and America's Early National Heroes (#594). This figure, frequently demonized as an embittered, unprincipled office seeker, becomes understandable as a sort of radical republican loose cannon. Virginius Dabney's response to Fawn Brodie and Barbara Chase Riboud (#4), noted above as not being very helpful in a biographical sense, offers a typical demonization of Callender but is useful for giving a sense of how some people see the issue. Sidney P. and Carolyn Moss (#430) demonstrate how the miscegenation legend was propagated in the nineteenth century in travel books by British authors, and in another fine essay Charles Royster (#50) shows us Jefferson contending for his own reputation with Light-Horse Harry Lee. Gary Scharnhorst provides some evidence that Owen Wister's Virginian is "Jefferson in chaps and spurs," and of the usual batch of essays on Ezra Pound and Jefferson, the best are by Ian F. Bell (#76) and Reed Way Dasenbrock (#485).

All things considered, it was a good decade for Jefferson scholarship. Although there were many restatements of the familiar truths, there were new spins given to many of them, some surprisingly new, in fact, and there were a few substantial new publications of documents and new topics opened up for discussion. The essays about Jefferson and the Constitution and about the separation of church and state indicate that when we argue about the way we want to live as Americans at the end of the twentieth century, we are still drawn to arguing about the meaning of Thomas Jefferson. There is surely hope for the republic as long as he is the contended object of our conversation. May he fare as well in the 1990s.