Reviews of Books

Douglass G. Adair never published a major monograph in early American history before his untimely death by suicide in 1968. His many admirers had expected him to produce a book that would elaborate the themes he sketched out in his 1943 Yale dissertation, "The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian America." Yet the urgency of publishing "Intellectual Origins" probably diminished for Adair over the years. While he subsequently mined it for materials that appeared in an influential series of published essays, impatient colleagues turned to the dissertation in its original form: "the list of borrowers resembles a who's who in early American history," his student and editor, Trevor Colbourn, remarks.1 Colbourn's edition of Adair's essays, Fame and the Founding Fathers, was warmly received when published in 1975: the "republican synthesis" was then moving into high gear and Adair was widely lauded as one of its first great exponents.2 A quarter century later, political theorist Mark E. Yellin has finally seen Adair's legendary dissertation through publication. We can now ask whether Adair was wise not to pursue its publication during his lifetime.	1
One somewhat paradoxical answer to the question is that the achievement of Adair and his successors in underscoring the importance of ideas in history generally--and of "classical" learning for the Founding Fathers particularly--has been so complete that we can no longer grasp the revisionist appeal of Adair's position. In combating the economic determinism of the Progressives' class struggle, Adair boldly asserted that the American Revolutionaries were not simply the owners "of real and personal property," but that "opinions and ideas can own men" (p. 11). Now that Charles A. Beard, Adair's foil in Intellectual Origins, has faded from view in contemporary historiography, such bold formulations risk seeming banal. Yet much more was at stake here than the usual clash of academic positions. Locked as they were in a global struggle against fascism, it is hardly surprising that Adair and his contemporaries--including, it should be noted, Beard himself--would take the core ideas that defined the American regime seriously.	2
Adair's great contribution was to help cast these ideas--the ideas that "owned" Americans--in a capacious classical and Western framework, eschewing spread-eagle exceptionalism. "We dare start no later than the fourth century b. c. if we would understand the Agrarian Republic that Jefferson and Madison idealized in 1800" (p. 30). This genealogy did not lead into a historicist cul de sac, as it has done for later students of "classical republicanism" who have emphasized the distinctive communitarian, even antimodern values of American Revolutionaries before the great transformation to liberal modernity. Adair insists instead that the Jeffersonian conception of the Agrarian Republic simultaneously reflected "the vast impact of classical traditions of political theory on two of the most widely read and scholarly statesmen America has ever known" (p. 12) and provided the script for the subsequent course of democratic development. Editor Yellin correctly notes that James Madison, not Thomas Jefferson, does all the heavy lifting here and suggests that Adair's book might be called "The Intellectual Origins of Madisonian Democracy" (p. xv). But such an editorial intervention would do violence to Adair's larger thesis, for his most crucial premise is that the two men were in fundamental accord, that Madison's "collaboration with Jefferson" was therefore "a foregone conclusion," and that Jefferson would carry the project forward toward its ultimate consummation. Jefferson's "passion for republicanism burned with a flame higher even than Madison's" (p. 167), lighting the way for a democratic future. Notwithstanding the almost exclusive attention to Madison's thought, "Intellectual Origins" is as much a monument to the iconic Democrat Jefferson as is the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D. C., also completed in 1943.	. . .