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PAPER PRESENTED AT THE 6TH AUSTRIAN SCHOLARS CONFERENCE,

AUBURN, MARCH 24-26, 2000

LUIGI MARCO BASSANI*

PROPERTY AND HAPPINESS IN THOMAS JEFFERSON’S POLITICAL

THOUGHT

Draft

A recent survey of rank and file libertarians in America shows that the

top intellectual heroes of the past they venerate are Thomas Jefferson

and Ayn Rand (the Mises-Rothbard dyad would be much better, but

that is another story). Most of these people are not professional

scholars and some might also be unaware of the fact that Jefferson is

depicted, in academic circles, as a quasi social-democrat, as the

champion of majority rule and a powerful enemy of the “possessive

individualism” that permeated the revolutionary period and the early

republic. It is my contention that the expert academics are wrong and

the amateur libertarians are right. This article - or at least the complete

version of it - should reassure libertarians who revere Jefferson as a

supporter of individual rights, freedom of choice, limited government

and above all property rights, that they are right, in spite of the

extravagance that has come out on this old subject from the universities

in the past century.

1. Human rights and the rights of property

It is common to associate Vernon Parrington, who wrote the classic

treaty on American thought for the generation that came of age

between the two world wars, with the fullest narration of Jefferson as

* Assistant professor, Dipartimento Giuridico-Politico, Università di Milano, Via Conservatorio 7,

20122, Milano, Italy. marcbass@mailserver.unimi.it

2

the champion of human rights against the rights of property. The

Declaration of independence was seen by the Harvard graduate as a

“classical statement of French humanitarian democracy, [while the

Constitution] an organic law designed to safeguard the minority under

republican rule”.1 It was obvious to Parrington that the two documents

were part of the all encompassing “ceaseless conflict between the man

and the dollar”.2

The author of Main Currents in American Thought was clearly

influenced by J. Allen Smith, Frederick Jackson Turner, and, of course,

Charles Beard. The progressive historians of the early 1900s had

developed what is known as the conflict interpretation of American

history, i.e., the idea that the country was entrapped from the beginning

in an endless fight between persons and property, democracy and

aristocracy. It was Beard’s moot claim to fame to have articulated this

opposition in terms of rights of persons and rights of property

(incorporated respectively in the Declaration and in the Constitution).3

This devious dichotomy has unfortunately shaped the American mind

of the past century and in spite of the bankruptcy of the progressive

school it has captured the imagination of many jurists, influencing

Supreme Court critical decisions and much of the literature on the

subject of property rights.

It is well known by most of you that the best refutation of this

opposition is to be found in the works of Murray Rothbard, which to a

certain extent could be considered the most forceful arguments ever

advanced to prove that every human right is actually a property right,

and that where there is no property there is no right and hence no

liberty.

However, since it is so uncommon to hear some sense from the

juridical quarters, it might be interesting to quote judge Potter Stuart, in

the decision Lynch v. House-hold Finance Corporation of 1972.

Writing the majority opinion he stated that “the dichotomy between

personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not

1 Vernon L. Parrington, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America (1860-1920), (Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), p.411. The book is the last of the three-volume classic Main

Currents in American Thought, published between 1927 and 1930. This was published posthumously

and in fragmentary form since the author died in 1929.

2 Ibid., p.412.

3 See Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New

York: Macmillan, 1913) and Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Macmillan,

1915).

3

have rights. People do. The right to enjoy property without unlawful

deprivation, no less than the right to speak or the right to travel, is in

truth a “personal” right ... In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists

between the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property.

Neither could have meaning without the other.”4

2. The “republican To better understand the person v. property dichotomy one has to go

back to the supposed source of it, the American Revolution, and its

European intellectual heroes.

According to Jefferson, it was John Locke who had a most relevant

role in shaping the “harmonizing sentiments” of the American

Revolution. He thought the Declaration to be no original document, but

merely a recapitulation of the American sentiments of 1776. In fact,

Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794) accused Jefferson of plagiarism.

According to the man who signed the first motion for independence in

June 1776, the Declaration was copied from John Locke’s Second

Treatise.

The Virginian had no reason to contend that allegation. In fact he

considered it to be its real strength:

This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find

out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not

merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place

before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and

firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the

independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at

originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular

and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the

American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and

spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the

harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation,

in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as

Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c..5

At the end of his life, again Jefferson was ready to put the author of the

4 405 U.S. 538, 552 (1972), quoted in Leonard W. Levy, “Property as a Human Right”,

Constitutional Commentary, 5, 1988, p.184.

5 Th. Jefferson a H. Lee, May 5, 1825, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,

(New York-London: Putnam-Knickerbocker Press, 1892-99), 10 vols. [Writings] v.10, p.343.

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Second Treatise in the American Olympus on liberty and government:

as to the general principles of liberty and the rights of man, in nature

and in society, the doctrines of Locke, in his "Essay concerning the

true original extent and end of civil government," and of Sidney in his

"Discourses on government," may be considered as those generally

approved by our fellow citizens of this, and the United States.6

The conventional wisdom of the historians up to the 1960s was pretty

much in line with what Jefferson and other protagonists of the

Revolution stated so clearly: The Lockean influence on the late colonial

and revolutionary generation. In his seminal work of 1922, Carl Lotus

Becker (1873-1945), analyzing the theoretical framework of the

Declaration of Independence, concluded that Jefferson had imported

Lockean natural rights philosophy into the birth certificate of the

country.7 According to Becker: “the lineage is direct, Jefferson copied

Locke and Locke quoted Hooker”.8 During the 1950s the Lockean

thesis had its climax in the work of Louis Hartz (1919-1986): “Locke

dominates American political thought, as no thinker anywhere

dominates the political thought of a nation”.9

However, Jefferson’s words, and the conventional wisdom of a

generation of scholars, have fallen on deaf ears later on, and with few

notable exceptions, academics in the past fifty years have tried to

present a Jeffersonian mind, as well a revolutionary one, more or less

“debugged” of any sort of Lockean influence.10

In general, as far as the whole revolutionary period is concerned, it has

6 Th. Jefferson, “From the Minutes of the Board of Visitors”, University of Virginia, 1822-1825,

October 3, 1825.

7 C.L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence, a Study in the History of Political Ideas (New

York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922).

8 Ibid., p.79.

9 L. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since

the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955) p.140.

10 See in particular, Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New

York: Doubleday, 1978). The proper title of this work should be Inventing Jefferson (and

Hutcheson) as the author tries to argue that the Virginian was “enlightened” in his political thought by

the authors of the Scottish Enlightenment, and totally ignorant of Locke’s work. Of course, after

construing a never existed Jefferson Wills goes on to build up a totally deceptive Hutcheson, who

supposedly influenced the Declaration’s ideas on property, natural rights and moral philosophy in

general. This book has been attacked with deserved severity: see Ronald Hamowy, “Jefferson and the

Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills’s Inventing America”, William & Mary Quarterly,

3rd series, 36, 4, 1979, and K.S. Lynn, “Falsifying Jefferson”, Commentary, 66, 4, October 1978,

pp.66-71.

5

been the task of the so-called “Republican synthesis” to challenge the

long accepted notion of a Lockean influence on the colonists. The

works of John Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and Lance

Banning, just to name the front runners of a vast intellectual revisionist

movement, have been a powerful challenge to what they call the

“Lockean myth”.11 In the past forty years these authors developed a

real school that has its center in the devaluation of any influence of

classical liberalism, particularly of the Lockean inclination, on the men

of 18th century America.

As far as the pars contruens is concerned these scholars have modified

the notion of “republicanism”, transforming what was once considered

merely a crystallized form of government into a dynamic ideology. It is

their contention that this ideology molded both the ancient world and

the modern one, and in particular, dominated the Florentine political

universe of the Cinquecento, reaching England in the 16 hundreds and

America in the revolutionary and early republic era. The key modern

figures of this novel interpretation are Machiavelli, Harrington and ...

Thomas Jefferson. The most talented historian of the republican school,

J.G.A. Pocock, asserted in the 1970s: “an effect of the recent research

has been to display the American Revolution less as the first political

act of revolutionary enlightenment than as the last great act of the

Renaissance”.12

Let’s briefly review the main points of contrast between the republican

interpretation of the American past and classical liberal/Lockean one.

Republicanism’s most important conjecture is that the supreme political

end is the pursuit of the “public good”, which in turn is defined almost

always ex negativo as the opposite to the search for private interests. It

follows that liberty is essentially the Florentine ideal of “vivere civile”,

or civic virtue, and it has nothing to do with the classical liberal

definition of liberty in terms of non interference of public authorities in

11 See J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic

Republican Tradition (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975); Bernard Bailyn The Ideological

Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Gordon S. Wood,

The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 1969); Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion, Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1978). Strictly speaking, Bailyn should not be included in the bunch, as his

analysis tends to put Locke somewhat more behind the scenes than it used to be, but it is perfectly

compatible with the classical historical readings of the American Revolution.

12 J.G.A. Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century”, Journal of Interdisciplinary

History, 3, 1, 1972, p.124.

6

the lives of the individuals.13

The cardinal category of the republican school is that of “virtue”,

understood very broadly as a sacrifice of the self (especially of self

interests) in order to perfection the individual participation to the

construction of the res publica. The central thesis of a successful book

by Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787,

one of the most radical assessments of the republican view, is that for

the Americans the essence of the Revolution was the regeneration of

the people’s character, the pursuit of the public good, and the search

for “virtue”, as self-denial.14

Property in this framework isn’t much more than an instrumental tools;

a pathway to public participation and a safeguard of autonomy and

independence. As Wood puts it: “Property in a republic was still

conceived of traditionally - in proprietary terms - not as means of

personal profit or aggrandizement but rather as a source of personal

authority or independence”.15 But it was no natural right, rather a

conventional and society given right. The whole discourse of natural

rights is in fact quite estranged from the republican tradition.

Classical liberalism, most notably embodied in Lockean political

thought, guarantees the full moral and political legitimacy, to the

pursuit of purely private interests. This vision implies a fundamental

consequence: the individual is seen in duplicity of relations, with other

fellow human beings in the free market, and with agents acting on

behalf of the government. The free market consensual relations regulate

the legitimate order of dealings with other individuals, and the natural

rights doctrine (the idea that there are certain inalienable rights that

cannot be encroached upon by the State) limits the actions of legitimate

government conduct. The limitations of power, thus, being so clearly

linked to liberty, become the most important political end of the

classical liberal tradition.

At the end of the 1970s the republican school was enjoying a

popularity soon to be challenged. A fine example of the overstated

optimism that was cultivated by scholars can be found in the words of

13 See Philip Pettit, Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1997) and Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 1998) pp.80-86.

14 See Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, pp.91-124.

15 G.S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. How a Revolution Transformed a

Monarchical Society into a Democratic One Unlike Any That Had Ever Existed, (New York: Knopf,

1992) p.178.

7

Lawrence Stone: “the history of political thought in the west is now

being rewritten, primarily by J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and

Bernard Bailyn”.16

Finally some very persuasive works came out to question the

republican synthesis.17 Recently Jerome Huyler, who in the book Locke

in America has definitely shown the diffusion of Lockean liberalism in

the revolutionary age, believes it is high time to abandon the fallacious

dichotomy “republican v. Lockean”.18

However the most succinct and successful refutation of entire

intellectual republican construction is to be found in a divertissement

by John Diggins: the rewriting of the Declaration using the rhetoric of

republicanism.19 The result is so grotesque that the Jeffersonian

political universe comes out clean of any influence of “vivere civile”

and civic humanism.

Actually, what comes out of almost every Jefferson page we read is

preference for an extremely limited government, so limited it could

hardly be called a government by our standards. Moreover, as Joyce

Appleby noted very aptly, “the private came first. Instead of regarding

the public arena as the locus of human fulfillment where men rose

above their self-interest to serve the common good, Jefferson wanted

government to offer protection to the personal realm where men might

freely exercise their faculties”.20

When a thinker is revisited with the categories and fallacies of the

republican school, (virtue, public good, political participation and the

like) all questions concerning the limitations of power and coercion by

16 Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History”, Past and Present,

85, 1979, p.14.

17 See, among the various works that dispute the republican interpretation: Stephan Dworetz, The

Unvarnished Doctrine, Locke Liberalism, and the American Revolution (Durham: Duke University

Press, 1990); Michael P. Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1994) and The Natural Rights Republic, Studies in the Foundation of the American

Political Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996) Paul A. Rahe, Republics

Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution, (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1992). From another perspective, a neo-Marxist one, a notable

historian has criticized the school, see Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism.

Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1990).

18 See Jerome Huyler, Locke in America. The Moral Philosophy of the Founding Era (Lawrence:

University Press of Kentucky, 1995) p.39.

19 See John Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics, (New York: Basic Books, 1984) pp.364-

365.

20 Joyce O. Appleby, “What is Still American in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson”, in:

William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 39, 2, April 1982, p.293.

8

governments on the individuals simply disappear. This is peculiarly

deceptive when it comes to Thomas Jefferson, a man who spent all his

life reflecting on the best instruments to prevent concentrations of

power, of the state against the individuals and of federal government

against the states.

It has being noted by Erler that “it was the change from historical

prescription to natural rights that represents the radical core of the

American Revolution and the American Founding. It was not the rights

of the Englishmen ... that was the subject of the Declaration, but the

rights of man derived, not indeed from any particular constitution or

positive law, but from nature”.21

This seems particularly true. The third president, comparing the

Glorious to the American Revolution in 1824, affirmed that “our

Revolution commenced on more favorable grounds. It presented us an

album on which we were free to write what we pleased. We had no

occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or

to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry.

We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved in our

hearts.”22

The real deus absconditus (but this god is hidden only for republican

historians) of the whole Jeffersonian political thought is the natural

rights doctrine, and inside the constellation of modern natural rights

doctrine, he has no better guide than John Locke.

3. The great omission/substitution: pursuit of happiness in lieu of

property.

The idea of a Jeffersonian hostility to property rights - or better, to the

natural foundation of property rights - although quite common, is based

upon very scanty evidence. Actually on no evidence at all, as we shall

see shortly.

Evidence number one, by far the most quoted, is an omission. An

omission and a substitution: the pursuit of happiness in lieu of property.

Let’s quote the famous passage, as Jefferson first drafted it:

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are

21 Edward J. Erler, “The Great Fence to Liberty: The Right to property in the American Founding”,

Liberty, Property, and the Foundations of the American Constitution, Ellen Frankel Paul and

Howard Dickman, eds., (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989) p.47.

22 Th. Jefferson to John Cartwright, June 5, 1824.

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created equal and independant, [sic] that from that equal creation they

derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the

preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to

secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving

their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any

form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the

rights of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new

government laying it’s foundation on such principles and organising it’s

powers in such forms, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their

safety and happiness.23

Once again we have to go back to Parrington for the classical

formulation of the supposed importance of this change: “The

substitution of ‘pursuit of happiness’ for ‘property’ marks a complete

break with the Whiggish doctrine of property rights that Locke had

bequeathed to the English middle class, and the substitution of a

broader sociological conception; and it was this substitution that gave

to the document the note of idealism which was to make its appeal so

perennially human and vital”.24

The first thing one may want to point out is that if Jefferson had had a

contrast with John Locke on matters of property he would have made it

quite clear. He, in fact, had usually little respect for authorities (the

proof is that at the age of 71, while he was reading again Plato’s

Republic he had no problem writing to John Adams that the Greek

philosopher was a much overrated thinker).25 However, not only did he

never criticize Locke, but he constantly praised him, stating that

“Locke’s little book on Government, is perfect as far as it goes”26 and

23 Th. Jefferson’s “original Rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence, Julian P. Boyd, et al.,

eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1950-present) vols. 1-

27. [Papers] vol.1, pp.423-424. This is the first draft, not the final one that came out from the

committee with the self-evident truths (probably Thomas Jefferson himself changed sacred and

undeniable for self-evident).

24 V. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, The Colonial Mind, (New York: Harcourt,

Brace, 1927), v.1, p.350.

25 “Having more leisure there than here for reading, I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s

republic. I am wrong however in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went

through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to

go through a whole dialogue. While wading thro' the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible

jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should

have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?” Th. Jefferson to John Adams,

July 5, 1814, Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and

Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) p.432.

26 Th. Jefferson to Thomas M. Randolph, 30/5/1790, Writings, v.5, p.173.

10

he is referring to the Second Treatise, which contains Chapter V, “Of

Property”.

The fact remains: the famous Lockean triad “Life, Liberty and Estate”

was changed to the even more famous “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of

Happiness”. Before making too much of it, several questions should be

addressed.

First, does this indicate a total eclipse within the Jeffersonian political

reflection of the natural rights of the classical liberal tradition, i.e. “life,

liberty and property”? The answer is a macroscopic NO. The terms

“life and property”, “liberty, life, and property”, “liberty and property”

are scattered all over his writings. And these terms are used in a

context that is perfectly consistent with the entire classical liberal

tradition. A few examples will be sufficient to prove the point.

In 1775, writing one of his first official documents, Jefferson stated that

it was the colonists’ right “to protect from every hostile hands our lives

& our properties”.27 Half a century later we find in the last official

document he wrote for the Virginia Assembly in 1825,the idea that

“man is capable of living in society, governing itself by laws selfimposed,

and securing to its members the enjoyment of life, liberty,

property, and peace”.28

In between we find a series of allusions to the natural rights of the

classical liberal tradition that should leave no doubt in an honest

historian bout his inclinations. In 1809 he declared his satisfaction

about the relative success of the American experiment of selfgovernment,

and added: “in no portion of the earth were life, liberty,

and property so securely held”.29

His private correspondence is rich of analogous references. In 1823,

talking about the various state constitutions, he asserted that, although

very different, “there are certain principles in which all agree, and

which all cherish as vitally essential to the protection of life, liberty,

property, and the safety of the citizen”.30

In 1803, when he was trying to convince the American people of the

wisdom of the Louisiana Purchase, he also mentioned what had to be

27 Th. Jefferson, “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking up Arms, Jefferson’s draft, 23

June-6 July”, 1775, Papers, v.1, p.197.

28 Th. Jefferson, “Declaration and Protest of the State of Virginia, 1825”, Andrew A. Lipscomb and

Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, (Washington DC: Thomas Jefferson

Memorial Foundation, 1904-5) 20 vols. [Memorial Edition], v.17, p.446.

29 Th. Jefferson, “Reply to the Virginia Assembly, 1809”, Memorial Edition, v.16, p.33.

30 Th. Jefferson to A. Coray, 1823, Memorial Edition, 15, p.489.

11

done:

With the wisdom of Congress it will rest to take those ulterior

measures which may be necessary for the immediate occupation and

temporary government of the country; for its incorporation into our

Union; for rendering the change of government a blessing to our

newly-adopted brethren; for securing to them the rights of conscience

and of property: for confirming to the Indian inhabitants their

occupancy and self-government, establishing friendly and commercial

relations with them, and for ascertaining the geography of the country

acquired. Such materials for your information, relative to its affairs in

general, as the short space of time has permitted me to collect, will be

laid before you when the subject shall be in a state for your

consideration.31

In spite of all this evidence, the substitution remains a problem for

many commentators. In my opinion, the pursuit of happiness appears to

be relatively ample as to comprehend the right to acquire and dispose

of property as an individual saw fit. No one explained the authentic

meaning of pursuit of happiness better than Ronald Hamowy: “men

may act as they choose in their search for ease, comfort, felicity, and

grace, either by owning property or not, by accumulating wealth or

distributing it, by opting for material success or asceticism, in a word

by determining the path of their own earthly and heavenly salvation as

they saw fit”.32

As it usually happens in America, the case of was even settled by

Court. In 1906 the Supreme Court of Wisconsin in the decision

Nunnemacher v. State, established that the expression “pursuit of

happiness ... unquestionably ... [comprehends] the acquisition of

private property”.33 However historians were not satisfied and went on

quarreling for the next century on the very same thing that was

adjudicated in 1906.

It has been often noted how various contemporary documents draw

together property and happiness in a perfectly Lockean and

individualistic fashion. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, of June

31 Th. Jefferson, “Third Annual Message, October 17, 1803” (italics mine). One need only be vaguely

familiar with Jefferson’s ideas about liberty of conscience to appreciate the importance of this

passage.

32 Ronald Hamowy, “Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment”, p.519.

33 129 Wis. 190, 108 N.W. (1906), p.629, cit. in Stanley N. Katz, “Republicanism and the Law of

Inheritance in the American Revolutionary Era”, Michigan Law Review, 76, 1, 1977, p.6.