Reviews for Thomas Jefferson

The average rating for Thomas Jefferson based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-15 00:00:00 Allan Burns Never before I have seen such vivid examples of Aristotelian philia; the megalopsychos possessed of practical wisdom ("The quality that I am attempting to describe is that special understanding of public life, which successful statesmen have, whether they are wicked or virtuous. That which Bismarck had or Talleyrand or Franklin Roosevelt or, for that matter, men such as Cavour or Disraeli, Gladstone or Ataturk in common with the great psychological novelists, and something which is conspicuously lacking in men of more purely theoretical genius, such as Newton or Einstein or Bertrand Russell or even Freud"); and the fulfillment of the Hobbesian desire that his writing might "fall into the hands of a sovereign who will consider it himself...and...in protecting the public teaching of it, convert this truth of speculation into the utility of practice" and Machiavelli's intention to "write something useful to whoever understands it." Socrates could only have hoped to find such youth to influence. The peculiar genius of these two thoughtful men—“the product of long experience with modern things and continuous reading of the ancient ones”— and their ability to transform the political problem into a technical problem while still maintaining a view of a virtuous end of man is, thanks to fortune, available in their own words and easy to read in all their imperfections and spontaneity (or perhaps it is not to fortune but, rather, to the artifice and spirit of James Morton Smith that we owe our thanks). This is a work that anyone at all interested in the edifice built, at least in a very significant and large part, by these two men on their “low but solid ground.” I wonder what their letters would have been like to read as status updates or text messages.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-12-02 00:00:00 sbsmwra YgKMkJmMZwOVXZRqRG Lots to wade through but you'll find an occaisional nugget. If you like reading other people's mail, this may be for you.