Founding enigma.(Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind)(Book Review)

Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind, by Michael Knox Beran (Free Press, 265 pp., $25)

IN Thomas Jefferson, there is at once something and nothing for everyone. Conservatives share his fondness for a republic of yeoman farmers, but recoil at his contempt for religion and unseemly appetite for revolution, both born of an often doctrinaire Enlightenment rationalism. Liberals, who stand to find the most in Jefferson, nonetheless grimace at his belief in limited government, to say nothing of his hypocrisy (the seal of the vices, in their estimation). Michael Knox Beran all but ignores these easy oppositions in Jefferson's Demons--and grasps, instead, the genuine philosophical complexity of his subject.

We all know the Jefferson of "The Jefferson Bible": the cheerful empiricist, the sworn enemy of "every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Beran endeavors in this book to show a different Jefferson: the one who, almost in spite of himself, would harness the un-enlightened and un-rational to develop his enlightened, rationalist project.

Beran begins by identifying two human types, the "Whig" and the "Tory." Broadly speaking, the Whig stands for modernity and the Tory for pre-modernity. "In the Whig view," Beran writes, "people must take their politics, and even their religion and their private morality, much as they take their other household goods--by going to the marketplace and seeing what is on sale and at what price." The Tory, on the other hand, "pursues always his ideal of a society in which man's different endeavors--the long extent of his works and loves--can be made to form a coherent whole. [He] is an exile ... from the delicious intimacies of old Christendom."

In Beran's view, these two spirits--Whig and Tory--are alive in all of us who inhabit the modern world, but most especially in Jefferson. The Whig embodies the self-made man: the skeptic, the self-sufficient individualist. To him, the ties of family and inherited authority are so many fetters from which man must be delivered. The Tory, by contrast, recognizes obligations--to family, church, God, country--that he himself does not choose. He remains attached to these loyalties, taking comfort in what he has not himself created, and resists the modern Whig world, in which, amid an "infinity of choice" and a "superabundance of creeds ... the modern man must find his way."

Jefferson's Demons explains how Jefferson found his way. We witness his "muddy stretches," the intervals when he dwelt in darkness and shadows, distant in spirit and time from the radiance of 1776. It is in these darker episodes that Beran finds evidence for the central insight of this book: that, when Jefferson seemed paradoxical and conflicted, it was because his Whiggery could not express his most deeply felt ideals.

Beran explains, "It is a paradox of the Whig system that it cannot be built without a resort to the very materials it is supposed to render obsolete." In order to achieve his high Enlightenment aspirations, Jefferson would need to find a language more fertile than the lean idiom of rationalism--he would have to tap into the vast spiritual reservoir of the past: Greek myth, Protestant millennialism, Renaissance mysticism. "No more than other people," Beran writes, "could Jefferson live without those un-common trumpets, mystic and nonsensical, that bid a man rise from his moperies and act with an heroic creativity." Man cannot live on empiricism alone.