--- Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Jefferson's ideal, IIRC, was citizen-farmers. 
> Considering the fact that
> overwhelming majority of people worked the land at
> the time, that made
> sense.  Its true that he didn't see the immense
> wealth that could be
> obtained by the average person from the Industrial
> Revolution, but that
> wasn't apparent for a long time....in the 20th
> century.  Marx missed it
> much more severely, and he wrote much later.

Depends on when in Jefferson's career you're talking
about.  Most thinking on his ideas focuses on his
early and mid-life thoughts on democracy, which is
where the citizen-farmer idea comes from.  Later in
his life he actually switched to believing that
factories and such were not necessarily incompatible
with democracy, although of course he never reached
quite the level of boosterism that Hamilton did.  But
late Jefferson was probably a lot closer to Hamilton
than early Jefferson was, in some respects, at least. 
To what extent (probably considerable, but I don't
know) he was influenced by sheer pragmatic concerns -
his understanding that Britain was industrializing and
the US would be unsafe if it did not do the same - I
can't speak on with any authority.

=====
Gautam Mukunda
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Freedom is not free"
http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com


                
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