Understanding Thomas Jefferson.

• Author: Cowen, Tyler

The first page mentions Knight, Hayek, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, historian Elie Halevy, and jurist Wesley Hohfeld as intellectual sources. By page xxvii of the preface Burstein invokes Mozart, Charles Burney, and several members of the Bach family. The next eight chapters (and two annexes) discuss endogenous preferences, the Jefferson-Hamilton debate, public debt incidence, utilitarianism, the cliometrics of trade embargoes, the predictability of human behavior, and 100 percent reserve banking.

Miraculously, all the pieces of this book hang together and constitute a coherent whole. Meyer Louis Burstein has penned a wide-ranging treatment of political liberty, welfare economics, and American economic history, as well as offering up the best extant book on Jefferson as an intellect. Rarely has a book had an apter title than Understanding Thomas Jefferson, or succeeded more directly. Burstein illuminates not only the words and actions of TJ himself, but also the modern philosophical and economic frameworks needed to understand TJ's thought.

The book starts with Burstein's intellectual quest, his search for a patron saint to guide him through the pitfalls of liberalism. Like so many economic liberals, Burstein has looked to Burke, Kant, Spencer, and other classic philosophers. Being ultimately disappointed in their answers, if not their insights, he was finally drawn to America's Founding Fathers.

Burstein is the first to show us that Jefferson's views on money, banking debt, agrarianism, manufacturing, and foreign policy form an integrated intellectual whole. He refutes the notion of Jefferson as a "nostalgic pudding-head, obsessed with installing millions of Horatian farmers in the vast American wilderness." Burstein admits that Jefferson is not a mind of the highest profundity or creativity, compared to, say, Hume or Smith. But Jefferson nonetheless deserves our attention for his extraordinarily modern and, in Burstein's opinion, sensible views.

Burstein's TJ bears a remarkable resemblance to Milton Friedman. Not just to the Friedman who popularizes libertarian ideas, but also to what I call the implicit Friedman--a subtle and vastly underrated philosopher and social theorist.

Jefferson's economic policies, like Friedman's, are rooted in sound classical economics, such as Say's Law, and a belief in real, as opposed to monetary, theories of the interest rate. TJ and Friedman even shared an...