This course provides an overview of Thomas Jefferson's work and perspectives presented by the University of Virginia in partnership with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Together, UVA and Monticello are recognized internationally as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Love and Democracy
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Age of Jefferson
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'The earth belongs to the living'
In 1789, Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison from Paris in which he asserted that “the earth belongs to the living.” Calculating that a single generation could be said to last nineteen years, he proposed that no debts should be incurred that could not be paid off in nineteen years; that all laws should be re-written every nineteen years; and that Americans should re-write even their constitutions every nineteen years. Madison thought the ideas Jefferson outlined in this letter to be wildly impractical, and most commentators since then have come to the same conclusion. In this module, however, we’ll explore what Jefferson was getting at in claiming that “the earth belongs to the living.” In so doing, we’ll discover how this phrase expresses an idea that lies at the very core of Jefferson’s conception of equality, democracy, and the American nation.
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Professor Peter S. OnufThomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
Corcoran Department of History
This is the genius of Jefferson's proposal, and that is this.
You recall I said that every generation is like an independent nation.
Well that sounds like anarchy to, doesn't it?
Because that's what international relations are, it's an anarchic rule.
Meaning there is nobody to give law.
Law has to be spontaneously generated and self enforced in the affairs of nations.
There is no real international law.
So why would Jefferson use this trope or
this figure to explain the solution to the problem of democracy?
How do we maintain order?
What's to bring us together?
I'm gonna risk getting very sentimental soon, so
I know you're gonna be moved by this, I'm just warning you in advance.
[LAUGH] About what Jefferson's solution is.
Jefferson doesn't think that the nations,
the generations that are nations, will make war on each other.
That's not his vision.
He doesn't think that's what's gonna happen.
Because after all, we are talking about fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.
We're talking about people who, you'll forgive the term, who love each other.
At least that's what we expect from you young people.
I don't know what you're feelings are genuinely but
that's why we have therapists.
It's love that holds families together.
What is the most natural social bond?
What keeps the community together?
What's the foundation of the republic?
Well Jefferson will tell you, it's not that everybody got
together from a Hobbesian state of nature or anarchy and said enough already.
This war of all against all is intolerable.
How can we preserve, selfishly, our little bits of property
if don't come to some kind of agreement or social contract?
No that's not the solution for Jefferson.
That's just sustaining a state of war.
A kind of a cold war, otherwise known as the social contract.
And even contracts themselves, to be really effective, depend on trust.
They depend on our willingness to trust our fellow men and women.
Trust, love, sentiment, bonds, attachments.
This is what we're talking about.
If you were going to establish an enduring social order
that would last forever to the thousandth and thousandth generation.
What would be the foundational material?
How would you build that great structure to last forever?
You would do it on the basis of what nature tells us.
Of course, our Republican governments,
our Democratic governments are based on natural law.
But what does nature teach us?
Nature teaches us that we should build on family relations.
And it teaches us indeed that society, which is natural,
according to people like Jefferson and Thomas Paine, society is natural.
It's government, and by this he means the government of old regime monarchies,
which is artificial and unnatural.
Society will stay together because,
after all, each one of you is endowed with a moral sense.
A capacity to recognize in each other yourself.
That identity.
That ability to put yourself in the position of the impartial observer,
as Adam Smith says.
And to imagine yourself being somebody else.
That's based on that fundamental recognition.
That notion of affinity that we are all one and that's based on biology.
That's based on affection.
That's based on these sorts of things that bring us together.
The moral sense is very much like the Freudian libido.
It's what drives us.
And you young people particularly can identify with this.
You are attracted to each other for good and wholesome reasons.
I want you to know that in case people have been wondering.
You are drawn together because nature
programs you to come together to form families.
And here is the Jefferson's great contribution or his insight.
What he calls his principle.
That he wants Madison to understand, and that is,
if we form these families and then, we take a step back
and we say, I talked about that moral sense, that recognition of others, that
we're all humans, we can see that in each other, we're all committed to this thing.
Well, then we don't want to favor our sons and
daughters at the expense of other sons and daughters.
This is what a generation is.
Remember the American Revolution it's leading exponents
are talking about sons of liberty, this,
they're talking in generational terms, we are bound together by
ties that are like those ties of a family, a nuclear family.
But they are universalized.
We will not be divided between aristocratic privileged families and
the families of the oppressed, the people who are merely here on Earth
to do the dirty work for those who own the world.
That idea of all men are created equal, of course for Jefferson,
what he's thinking is really men.
He's thinking about household heads.
He's thinking about patriarchs.
I'm sorry women, he's thinking about you, but
not in a way you want to be thought about.
Because what he thinks is that the natural position for a woman is in the family.
Is reproducing.
Is bringing on the next generation.
Nurturing that next generation.
And it's only in a republic that women can enjoy true equality he says.
Would you rather be Indians?
And have more powerful Indian men make you go work in the fields?
That's a kind of slavery too, isn't it?
A very primitive, brutal sort of slavery where the larger stronger males
make the women work for them.
Or would you like those unnatural gender relations that were
all too characteristically titillating for Jefferson in Paris
where women seemed to influence everything by their seductive charms.
Women who don't know their place, who violate family norms.
Jefferson has a notion of family that will not resonate today.
I know some of you are probably into family values.
This couldn't possibly be what you mean.
But for Jefferson, it's foundational.
All men are created equal means that all families will be created equal.
All families will be created equal.
We will not favor some families over others.
That's the genius of Jefferson's idea.
And so with that idea of all families being equal, and
none will be privileged over others,
then we can imagine a new foundation for an enduring republican society.
I talked about the word love.
Let me develop that a little bit.
Let's talk about the aristocratic family.
The classic family in which we have old
aristocrats, patriarchs, manor lords who refuse to die in a timely fashion.
Leaving middle aged sons competing with each other to see,
who can stay alive to inherit.
And this gets, I think, to the heart of the unnaturalness of aristocracy.
You, sons, young people here in the front, have every incentive to kill your father.
This wasn't something that Freud invented to make you feel bad about your
oedipal impulses.
This is the fact.
You have accumulated massive debts as a gambling wastrel.
I mean, what else would you do?
It's undignified for you to actually do something useful.
You're just waiting for him to die, aren't you?
And you, brother.
He's older than you are.
What, does that make him better than you?
Does he deserve to inherit?
What's in it for you?
You have to go into the Army, don't you?
They'll buy you a position in the Army, you could be an officer so
you can brutalize your soldiers.
Is that satisfactory for you?
You want to go into the clergy?
We'll take care of you.
How about it?
Why don't you just kill him?
Look, you gotta get this down.
This is what aristocracy's all about.
It's very unhealthy for families.
What is so wonderful about being descended from some great family.
When, as Jefferson tells us in one of his reflections on the crowned heads of
Europe, is the distinctive thing about these people that
have very limited marriage pools.
You just can't marry anybody if you're a royal, can you?
So you marry another royal.
And what does that mean?
Inbreeding.
And so what we have is perpetual families of
individuals who through inbreeding are becoming increasingly stupid,
ignorant and inbred, as the word suggests.
That is the horrific vision of what aristocracy really essentially means.
Conflict within families, within this family,
these three brothers, conflicts between families.
Because has dynastic succession always been smooth and easy?
Or are there always pretenders to the throne?
Are there always people challenging your legitimacy?
Why does birth matter?
You may be a bastard son.
You don't have any claim at all.
Does that seem unnatural,
even if you are a bastard, are you therefore not a human being?
This notion of equality then, it has this other dimension.
I talked about equal patriarchs equal households, equal families.
But it's the equal worth of each human being.
And that would for
Jefferson even include women which is a major concession on his part.
All right so, I've settled that for you.
Now let's talk about democracy.
You never though that democracy was so complicated did you?
You thought it was some kind of decision rule.
That a political scientist invented once about how we take a vote and
then we know what we think and then the 49% just suck it up.
No, that's not gonna do it.
And Jefferson living in the midst of a democratic revolution understands
that the real challenge for
the revolutionaries is to sustain the spirit of 1776 across the centuries.
And how will you do that?
Well, let's think about this idea of
universalizing through the idea of a generation, the opportunities for
the rising generation, in which all of you are our children.
And there will come a moment, and Jefferson believes that moment comes in
the last ten or 15 years of his life or certainly after he retires in 1809.
When and his colleagues walk off the stage, they are the living dead.
They haven't actually died, but it's not their world anymore.
And Jefferson himself frequently writes in his late years,
I can't deal with this problem.
It's up for you, the young people.
It's your world, your future.
That's what the Earth belongs to the living is all about.
Well let's think about that relationship.
Now usufruct was the key word.
And it means a kind of stewardship.
What it means is, remember I talked about entail, keeping the estate whole?
That's precisely what usufruct is about.
Your responsibility when you come into the estate collectively.
That is, the country becomes yours, you are the living generation, you rule.
Your responsibility is not to waste that estate.
You must pass it on whole, improved, if you can, so
that future generations can enjoy the benefit.
Because the law of nature does not validate property rights.
Property rights come from our agreement about what will be property.
The right that we all have as human beings is to nature and nature's gifts.
to cultivate the land, to live from the land, and it is your responsibility as
the fathers, as the living generation to make sure that that estate is not wasted.
You take on that responsibility, do you understand what we're asking from you?
You owe something to future generations.
This is the central premise for the revolutionaries.
They are founders.
They are starting something.
It's not for them.
We fought and died not so
that we could revel in our wealth and power but so
that the world would be there for you, for our children and our children's children.
This is the way we think about immortality.
It's not the perpetuity of a particular family line, say, Onov.
Because that name will disappear from the face of the Earth.
There are no more Onovs but I don't care.
Because I'm a good Jeffersonian Democrat.
I look at you and say, you are all my children.
I hope you're overcome with emotion at this point.
[LAUGH] And he's saying, is this a shock at recognition.
Dad, this is beautiful.
[LAUGH] But what I want to say to you my young
generation, the living generation coming onto the stage is
that I have done everything for you.
Now I know you're talking to your therapist about this kind of line,
you say that's manipulative, you're making me feel guilty but
of course I'm making all of these sacrifices for you.
Jefferson didn't have the sophistication to recognize this sort of manipulation.
What he expected in return for the gifts that he gave to his children,
and that is, he actually didn't give them that much, but that's the idea the gifts
that he provides to his children will be reciprocated by love.
Remember how the younger generation wants to kill the older generation
in my aristocratic scenario.
Rather than conflict, contest for
scarce resources, instead we have a vision of an ever expanding world,
in which the bond that connects you and me is the bond of love.
Love, remember, is what makes families.
That notion of a family of families, an entire generation,
That is what's gonna sustain the republic.
[MUSIC]
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