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A Politics of All

Thomas Jefferson and Radical Democracy
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No historical figure is more synonymous with establishing American democracy than Thomas Jefferson. Revolutionary, iconoclastic, yet pragmatic, the legacy of Jefferson as an intellectual and politician continues to reverberate across academic and public circles. However, Jefferson's writings on power, authority, and politics point to a different understanding of self-government than dominant liberal and republican interpretations suggest. Dean Caivano's interpretation of Jefferson's political, anthropological, and sociological meditations on power reveals an unknown Jefferson, who conceives the American nation-state as a network of dynamic autonomous communities enacted by a politics of all. Caivano pointedly argues that this unknown Jefferson fittingly aligns with historical and contemporary projects of radical democracy, stressing the need for constant resistance, inquiry, and dialogue. In a period, fraught with political division and hyper-partisanship, this timely, innovative reading of Jefferson invites a reappraisal of how we understand a vital founder of the American republic and what is at stake in the battle to save American democracy.
Dean Caivano teaches political science and history at Merced College.
Chapter 1: The Ancient Greek Polis: Civic Education, Questioning, and the Staging of the Political Chapter 2: The Unwritten Law: Perpetual Reconstitution in Saxon Britain Chapter 3: Politics Without Centralized Government: Political Power and Happiness in Indigenous Societies Chapter 4: Eruptive Democracy: Challenging the Federal Republic Chapter 5: Divide the Counties into Wards: A Politics of All
At this critical moment when the West is suffering its gravest legitimation crisis since World War II, Caivano brilliantly discovers a Jefferson whose underappreciated revolutionary ideals place him beyond the stifling constraints of American political thought into the vastness of the cosmos of radical democratic theorists. Caivano shows how Jefferson's ideas hold the potential of a powerful weapon against the present authoritarian zeitgeist by its open, promising, "politics of all" for this, and future, generations to come. -- Richard Matthews, Lehigh University
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