Gregory Freiden is chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. Born in Russia, he immigrated to the United States in 1971. He has translated, edited, and authored numerous books and articles, including Russian Culture in Transition and a Russian edition of American Federalists: Hamilton, Madison, and Jay.
 

  Why should we care about Thomas Jefferson? What does he do for us?
Why should we care about ourselves? The ideas that he formulated with passion and great energy and great political skill and that have been adopted—those ideas constitute us. As people, as individuals, as agents of our own will. That's the reason.

  What is his appeal? Why would Russians be interested in Thomas Jefferson?
You know, in many ways the ideas of enlightenment, of modernity, of the modern, of the new life—they have been current, of course, in Europe for quite a while. America was the first country to give them actual political shape. France followed. There was a lot of guillotining; heads rolled. They didn't in the United States. I think that there have been for the last 200 or so years two models for becoming modern for polities, for countries. One involved a lot of heads rolling; another involved negotiations, give-and-take, compromise, respect for individuality. That is the American model. At the end of the 20th century, it seems to be the most productive one.

  What do you like about Thomas Jefferson? Why are you drawn to him?
His weaknesses—obviously, combined with his great strengths. He was just a little bit of a crank, I think. In all of his remodelings of his Monticello and the odd placement of the building and his spending pages and pages in the Virginia book talking about how Buffon, the French zoologist, was wrong about describing the American cows as inferior to the European ones—and at the same time, in the same book, making the same mistake as he had just accused Buffon of, when he was talking about the African Americans, about the slaves. That's his weakness and vulnerability. It's a great lesson for us all.

Yet there's one thing Jefferson clearly understood during the kind of great enthusiasm of the Revolution: enthusiasm gives rise to virtue, but when the enthusiasm wanes, virtue disappears. And he knew that one has to work on virtue. That it is a difficult task to develop virtue and that a republican form of government outside of that enthusiasm of the first years of the revolution needs a lot of work, a lot of effort. That is a very important item for me for understanding democracy, republicanism.

Declaration of Independence, "Original Rough Draught"

  How do we reconcile the fact that this is the man who distilled the essence of the Enlightenment in one remarkable sentence, and yet he owned more than 200 human beings?
This is a serious issue in every respect. There's no question that this was his personal failing, because he—there were contemporaries of Jefferson's who had acted on their convictions in a different way. He was hesitant about it. I reread Notes on the State of Virginia, and what he said about African Americans there, and he was hesitant. And yet this hesitation ought to have warned him that he should not say things that he was not sure about. So this is a failing that probably has to do with the fact that he owned a lot of them, the fact that he probably was not as good a farmer, as good a businessman, as Washington was.

But what I want to focus on is not so much that, but the fact that Jefferson the man was also a vehicle for ideas that were much more powerful than Jefferson the man and which outlived him right away. While he was still alive, the Declaration—the words of the Declaration of Independence were used in Russia to declare freedom of all people, specifically including the slaves. It's interesting that in one of the drafts of the constitution that the Russian rebels wanted to establish in 1825, one of the first articles was precisely about slavery. One of the first Russian radicals or political critics in the 18th century criticized America. He was a great lover of America, a great lover of the American Revolution, worshipped Washington...but at the same time, he said that they didn't go far enough because they did not free the slaves. So the idea of the Declaration of Independence had its own fate, and Jefferson was a vehicle—a wonderful vehicle for it, but an imperfect one.

  How do you see Jefferson—statesman, scientist, inventor? What is Thomas Jefferson?
He is all that. For me, personally, the most important thing about Jefferson is his passion combined with reason, in kind of a perfect 18th-century package. Few could combine passion and reason as well as he did. And in some sense it was the 18th-century ideal of a perfect combination that cannot be disjoined. It was part of the understanding of a human being that these two things were not separable, that human beings were imperfect. And I think that he is one of the most intriguing, powerful, intense examples of this understanding of humanity.

  How should we remember Thomas Jefferson for the ages?
Well, the ages will take care of themselves, I think. For us, Thomas Jefferson, his ideas, obviously constitute us. That is to say, we are who we are in large measure thanks to the ideas that he formulated and the way he formulated them. We also understand that however perfect the ideas, the vehicles for those ideas may be imperfect, and we have to learn to separate better the vehicles and the ideas—especially in the age of electronic media, when any public figure is exposed all the time. We have to be cautious in judging people by the mistakes in their personal life. We have to be cautious judging them as statesmen by the mistakes they sometimes commit, errors they commit in their personal life. I think that's important. The other thing that's important is that we have to understand that however universal a truth may be that we pronounce or consider at a certain point, it has its limitations in time, and it has its limitations because these truths are spoken by imperfect beings and therefore they will never be complete truths.

  What is "the pursuit of happiness"—what did he mean by that?
“Pursuit of happiness”—when I first read that phrase in Russia in the 1960s, I was struck by that sentence. I was in my 20s at that time. It was my first encounter with the Declaration of Independence and I could understand "liberty," I could understand "life," but I did not think that "happiness" actually belonged with any of that. This was a very serious business, and happiness meant something sort of more hedonistic, I guess. And it took me a few years, going back to that sentence, trying to understand how virtue could be combined with happiness. It's sometimes very hard for the Russians to understand that, because traditionally, historically, the intellectuals in Russia find virtue in suffering. And sometimes too much virtue and too much suffering. And in that sense, to understand how liberty and pursuit of happiness could come together, that was very difficult. This was a striking, other way to look at life and polity.

I remember from time to time during what was probably the beginning of a human rights and dissident movement in Russia, coming back and trying to understand "What did this mean?" It certainly did not mean that it's a consumer society, I would say to myself. It certainly couldn't mean hedonism, right? Although maybe that's what they meant. And of course you have the picture of the United States that is rich and rock-and-roll and the works. Did that mean "the pursuit of happiness"? So ultimately what this sentence came to represent for me was normal, private pursuit—private life, privacy, individuality, ability to apply your talents without undue restrictions on the part of the state or other members of the society.

  This is a truly revolutionary sentence that has had effect around the world.
This is the whole story of the Enlightenment, of which this is a part. You know, people sometimes say "Well, Enlightenment—that's the 17th, 18th century, it's France, it's the Scottish Enlightenment, Locke and so on." The point is that the whole idea of Enlightenment is an idea in development. Enlightenment is not complete until other cultures in Asia or in Africa give it their own accent, so to speak, or fill its form with their own meaning. And people sometimes say "Well, the United States wants to impose its own type of democracy, its own type of political system, all over the world." Maybe some people do accept that, but in general that's not the issue, because the United States itself accepted, adopted, the ideas of Enlightenment in its own way, developed it in its own way. So we have to understand that when other people read "the pursuit of happiness," they will give it their own meaning and the same would happen to the word "liberty," and the same would happen to the word "life."

  If you could be there for one moment in Thomas Jefferson's life, what moment would you most like to be present for?
I would like to understand better how he could combine his passion and deep appreciation and understanding of liberty with slavery. I would like to be in his house and see how he dealt with his slaves. For me, this is a mystery, because some of Jefferson's contemporaries who were as committed to liberty as he was did emancipate their slaves. He did not. So for me, that would be the most interesting moment.

  Do you see this as the fault line of American life, this question of race?
In some sense, that incompatibility of the ideas of liberty with the institution of slavery, combined as they are in this person who gave us the formulation of who we are, perhaps is also symptomatic of the difficulty that this country has had in dealing with race and the problem of racial war. I think that people are created differently, and I agree with Jefferson that some of them are endowed with some gifts and others are not, but this is not—does not—correspond to racial or sexual or other lines. So in that sense, it may be a sad but a very profound admission that we have to make. We identify with Jefferson in more ways than one.

  Do you like him?
I am intrigued by Jefferson, I am charmed by him. Obviously, I admire this man. Just imagine the United States in the middle of the 18th century, and suddenly in rural Virginia a man like this arises. Well, you cannot help but be filled with awe at this event, the emergence of this kind of a character. I, of course, will always imagine him in the way...I imagine him very much as a sort of a character out of Tolstoy, out of Tolstoy's War and Peace. He would not be the generation of those who fought with Napoleon, but he would be the generation of their fathers—sort of a cranky, extremely logical rationalist, spending some of his time reading Voltaire and some of his time making something on a lathe and some of his time working as an architect. Actually, especially that aspect of Jefferson—his constant, constant involvement with architecture and building and so on—is very much like the picture of an 18th-century Russian aristocrat of a powerful make, somebody who'd be a high government official of the court of Catherine the Great and so on. In some sense, they both—the Americans in the 18th century and the Russian aristocracy, the educated elite of the 18th century—were trying to construct that new house, that new polity, that was based in large measure not on custom but on reason. And in that sense, there's a great similarity. So that's how I look at him.

  Jefferson seems to be us; we seem to be him. And this house seems to be this magnificent metaphor for the country. Talk about Monticello.
You know, I have never been to Monticello, so I just read about it and looked at pictures of it. But I was unbelievably struck by one implement that Jefferson had—that special writing implement that allowed him to make several copies of one letter. This looks like such a kind of cranky contraption of a kind that only a country gentleman who has a lot of time to think about these things might have. Someone who can think about what liberty is in the world, what power is, how corruption and government emerges, how this country should be created, and so on. Someone who can think about that and at the same time work on this little contraption. In some sense, I think, Jefferson would be at home in the age of computers. He would be constantly—we can imagine him writing small programs that would allow him to address his letters in a very efficient way and so forth. So he is very much, in that sense, an American, and I think that the fact that the United States is at this point the capital of software making is also kind of connected to Jefferson.

  I see this man who wrote these great abstract words. Their abstraction has also helped to keep them alive.
Much of what you read in the 18th century has that quality of being removed from practical concerns. But it was not abstract in the time of Jefferson. Just think about that one little item, the checks and balances, and we will understand this part of our political discourse. Well, "checks," for people before the automobile," meant only one thing—it was a check bridle on a horse. The whole notion of the American polity and the way Jefferson and the founding fathers understood it was understood on the model of the way mechanics works—that things have to be in balance, that they have to have compensations and so on. So for them, it was the stuff of their life, it wasn't abstract.

  Why is it that conservatives and liberals in our country trot out Thomas Jefferson as their mentor?
Well, he is the creator, he is the originator. He has the aura of the maker. People respect those who make, who create. It would be nice to have him in your party. So of course both parties would love to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness be the base of their own political philosophy. Any historical figure of this caliber is used to do all sorts of things—very often the opposite things. The founding fathers have this use in American polity.

  Is he a true revolutionary?
Jefferson had a very strong Jacobin streak in him, there's no question about it. Sometimes, obviously, passion took over reason. It is wonderful that we also had Hamilton, and not only Madison, not only Jefferson. The American polity was the result of compromise. Of course, we know that Hamilton founded the Federalist party, and Jefferson was very much against it. But what is interesting is that in his correspondence with Alexander the First of Russia, the first book that President Jefferson sent to the emperor was The Federalist, counseling the emperor that this is a very sound book and the best representation of the American political thought and sensibility.

  So, who won? Jefferson or Hamilton?
Restraint won, although it may have not won in the end, as of today. It certainly didn't win during the Civil War, as we all know. So we have to think about the experience of the American Revolution. It did not emancipate the slaves. And however interesting, however perfect we may think the polity that the founding fathers created was, it still did not prevent the country from falling into a horrible civil war, which some people consider to be one of the first modern wars of total annihilation.

  Do you know something about the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, its significance?
The United States, as all other countries, had disabilities, legal disabilities for members of other faiths and denominations. Jefferson was very powerful. His writing in the Statute for Religious Freedom was probably one of the most powerful documents of the 18th century. It wasn't adopted right away. But ultimately it did work, and maybe it's a very good idea for politicians in today's America, when we are looking in the absence of the Cold War for other bases for our solidarity as Americans, to reread that statute and abstain from trying to impose their own interpretation of scripture or some other ideas on the rest of the population. Tolerance is above all. Tolerance—and that's what Jefferson's legacy, for me, is all about.

  Is Thomas Jefferson a true revolutionary?
You are referring to the famous sentence about watering the tree of liberty with blood. I think that my reading of Jefferson would tell me that he was not a revolutionary in the sense that we understand this word in the 20th century. Needless to say, when oppression is intolerable, people take to arms and resort to violence. They resort to violence to protect themselves sometimes from the violence of the state. But did Jefferson believe that revolution is the favored vehicle of social change? No, I do not think he did.

  Why should we care about Thomas Jefferson?
In some sense, we should care about him because who we are was in large measure defined by Thomas Jefferson. We want to understand who we are. He helps—thinking about him and studying his legacy, as well as the contradictions of his life, helps us to become aware of the contradictions of our own life, the contradictions of the pursuit of virtue that this republic would like to encourage. It helps in another sense to ask why individuals like Thomas Jefferson emerge, appear, sometimes not even once in a generation. He gives a gift to the world, a rare one, and as such it should be cherished.

  What does he tell us about who we are?
Jefferson, in many ways, set the rules for the game that we are still playing. We are the people of beginnings. We are rational people. We are committed to virtue because without our commitment to virtue and without enlarging our virtue through education, through conviction, this republic would not stand.