print“During a joint meeting with Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang,” last Thursday, reports the Washington Times, “President Obama … made the absolutely ludicrous assertion that ‘Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”
A fine book on “the political theory of Thomas Jefferson” is “Liberty, State, and Union” by Marco Bassani, professor of history and political theory at the University of Milan, Italy. In it, Bassani notes that all sorts of hideous tyrants (whom Obama joins) have appropriated the decidedly classical liberal thinking of Thomas Jefferson for their own ends.
Still, I wonder if we libertarians do protest too much in an attempt to finesse some of Thomas Jefferson’s philosophical missteps? By way of an example, consider the debate, on the Tenth Amendment Center’s site, expanded upon by historian Tom Woods.
I remain unpersuaded. I believe that Felix Morley, great writer and scholar of the Old Right, was also in no two minds about early Americans having been undeniably influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau. There was, noted Morley in his magnificent “Freedom and Federalism,” some admiration in America for the manner in which the common democratic will found expression in revolutionary France. The influx of Marxist ideas much later from Europe further cemented America’s ideological immolation.”
I am also not inclined to finesse the odd “slip” that saw this most brilliant man—as Thomas Jefferson no doubt was—replace “property,” in The Declaration, with the “pursuit of happiness.”
The “Virginia Declaration of Rights,” written by George Mason in 1776, harmonizes “property” and the “pursuit of happiness”:
“That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Elsewhere, Jefferson affirmed the natural right of “all men” to be secure in their enjoyment of their “life, liberty and possessions.” But in the Declaration, somehow, he opted for the inclusiveness of “the pursuit of happiness,” rather than cleave to the precision of “property.”
Unforgivable.