Thomas Jefferson and French economic Thought: A Mutual Exchange of Ideas

This papers is focused on Thomas Jefferson’s reception of the French economic thought, and in particular of the Physiocratic tradition, during and after his 1784-1789 period in France . At the core of this essay is to return to the genesis of the American agrarian democracy in the eighteenth-century as a path to investigate the origins of the American national identity. Jefferson’s republican ideology rested on an economic interpretation of politics. The clash between Republicans and Federalists in the 1780s and 1790s led the Jeffersonians to outline a politico-economic vision, conceived as anti-British, centred on the farmer as a politically active player in a decentralized participatory democracy. Jefferson owed much of his analysis to the French economic thought, from the Physiocracy to J.-B. Say. This approach provides reconstruction of a particular case of interaction between European and American discourses on economics and politics. The essay is also connected with the current interest in the politics of the Physiocracy, and in particular to their contribution to the discussion on the right of representation, legitimately exercised by the landowner. This perspective aims then at enlarging the present debate on republicanism, emphasizing the modern, economic-rooted, democratic and anti-English republicanism. This implied a mutual exchange between American and European culture.