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Historians, Community, and the Pursuit of Jefferson: Comment on Professor Tomlins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Joyce Appleby
Joyce Appleby
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

The “tions” came to the United States in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: industrialization, urbanization, immigration, centralization, and bureaucratization. As befits such an impersonal suffix, these developments have been analyzed as parts of a systematic reorganization of society. Processes, not persons, have figured as the sources of motivation in the story of America's transformation from a rural society of loosely connected communities to an industrial nation integrated by corporations, communications, and the regulations of a government trying to catch up with the pace of change.

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 4 , Spring 1990 , pp. 35 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1. Although Tomlins' interpretation, along with those of Keith Tribe, W. G. Carson, Marc Raeff, and Franz-Ludwig Knemeyer, emphasizes the eudemonistic role given to police, the quotations from eighteenth-century European texts suggest that police were given the more limited role of securing order and protecting food supplies (pp. 7–8, 10). The American debates better exemplify his points (pp. 20–21).

2. Tomlins' characterization of colonial communities relies almost entirely upon studies of New England. For a vigorous challenge to what Greene, Jack P. calls ”the New Englandization of early North American history,” see his Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

3. Tomlins, p. 10. The quotation from Cesare Beccaria's Elements of Public Economy strongly evokes a Foucaultian domain of power.

4. See, particularly, the discussion of how Locke moved unself-consciously from a moral to a scientific meaning of natural law, in Letwin, William, The Origins of Scientific Economics (London, Methuen, 1964), 147–48, 176–81Google Scholar.

5. A masterful analysis of this development can be found in Reddy, William, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Lipscomb, Andrew A. and Bergh, Albert Ellery, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 14 (Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1905), 466.Google Scholar

7. Boyd, Julian P., ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12 (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 114–15Google Scholar; and Lipscomb and Bergh, eds., Writings, vol. 3, 342.

8. Banning, Lance, The Jeffersonian Persuasion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Manley, John F., “The American Dream,” Nature, Society, and Thought, vol. 1 (1988), 500–526Google Scholar; and Matthews, Richard K., The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson (Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

9. Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 330–31.Google Scholar

10. Cappon, Lester J., ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters, vol. 2 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 332Google Scholar.

11. Lipscomb and Bergh, eds., Writings of Jefferson, vol. 11, 2–3.