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33 

Thomas Jefferson, Ideologue  
 

Stephen Tomlinson 
University of Alabama 

 
Information in the last letter of M. de La Feyette that your 
eye sight has improved excites in me a hope that you might 
be able to finish your last work, and fill up the Ideological 
circle in which you made so great and happy a progress.  I 
hope it for the benefit of a child of my old age, the University 
of Virginia. . .  It’s misfortune will be that identity of 
language will confine the choice of it’s professors to the 
countries speaking our own.  But it will still be your science 
which shall get thro’ that medium. 

Thomas Jefferson to Destutt de Tracy, Nov 5th 1823. 
 

In his 1957 introduction to Living Thoughts of 
Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey claimed that French political 
philosophy had little influence on Jefferson. (Dewey, 1957). 
With the possible exception of laws governing the 
inheritance of property, Dewey maintained that “every one of 
Jefferson’s characteristic political ideas . . . was definitely 
formulated by him before” he assumed the position of 
American Ambassador in Paris during the summer of 1784 
(Dewey, 1957, 23).  Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, composed 
in 1781 and 1782, seems to support Dewey’s contention 
(Jefferson, 1984).  Responding to a number of queries from 
the French Legation in Philadelphia, he contributed to a 
statistical survey of America with a wide ranging account of 
the geographical, economic, social, and political conditions 
of life in the State that clearly demonstrates the continuity of 
his early and later thought.   

The scope of Jefferson’s scientific learning, his 
classical erudition, and his articulate defense of liberal 
ideals—including the doctrine of natural rights and the 
separation of church and state—was immediately appreciated 
by the philosophes (Ellis, 1998).  But while discussing 
history and government with Filippo Mazzei, the nature of 
species with Buffon, and race with Condorcet, Jefferson 
always kept an intellectual and social distance between 
himself and the French savants.  Shocked by Parisian morals, 
and, it seems, his own errant passions, he could not emulate 
the flamboyant Franklin.  Of all the societies he visited, he 
was perhaps most at home in the salon of Mme Helvétius.  
The meeting place of Condillac, Diderot, D’Alembert, and 
D’Holbach, during the 1780s Antiuil became a retreat for 
materialist philosophers and liberal political theorists.  It was 
here that the shy and retiring Virginian formed his closest 
bonds with Pierre Cabanis, Pierre de La Rosche (editor of 
Helvétius’ collected works), and the economic theorist Pierre 
Samuel Du Pont de Nemours.  Schooled in the writings of 
Locke, Shaftsbury, Bolingbroke, Hutchinson, and Kames, 
Jefferson was clearly sympathetic to the political and 
epistemological discourse of the salon.  But he did not adopt 
a new master.  Rejecting the radical implications of 
sensationalism, he returned home still firmly grounded in the 
Scottish moral sense philosophy and Whig political thought 
he had imbibed as a youth.  It was only in the final two 

decades of his life, after his retirement from the Presidency, 
that Jefferson became enamored with the work of Destutt de 
Tracy, and an advocate for Ideology in America.  
Accordingly, Dewey and other commentators are somewhat 
wide of the mark in concluding that if there were a stream of 
influence between the two nations, it was surely from 
America to France, for, as this chapter will show, Tracy’s 
materialistic writings, especially his texts on economics, 
politics, religion, and public schooling provided a powerful 
philosophical justification for Jefferson’s mature vision of a 
virtuous republic (Adams, 1997).  As he announced in 1820, 
after establishing a professorship in Ideology at the 
University of Virginia, Tracy’s works were sure “to become 
the Statesman’s Manual with us (Chinard, 1925, 203).”  
 

The Improvement of the Race 

Jefferson’s educational proposals are contained in 
Query 14 of the Notes, right after his discussion of race, an 
appropriate location given his views on the perfectibility of 
human nature and the fact that 40% of the states’ population 
lived under the yoke of slavery.  This authoritative account of 
the physical, moral, and intellectual capacities of the red, 
white, and black peoples of the New World shaped debates 
over the emancipation and schooling of African-Americans 
for the next seventy-five years (Winthrop, 1968). A nest of 
legal and scientific arguments over the identity of the human 
species, the status of the mulatto, the relationship between 
climate and race, and the consequences of social integration 
that Samuel Gridley Howe was forced to reconcile with 
Whig political ideology in the founding document of the 
American Freedmen’s Bureau (Tomlinson, 2005). 

Jefferson opened his discussion of human 
improvement with an explanation of how the State of 
Virginia had revised colonial laws to fit the spirit of the new 
republic.  Chief among these changes, contrary to Dewey’s 
claim, was an amendment to the rules of descent ensuring 
“that the lands of any person dying intestate shall be divisible 
equally among all his children,” and legislation “to establish 
religious freedom on the broadest bottom (Jefferson, 1984, 
263).” Although not yet brought before the government, 
Jefferson also explained that a resolution had been drafted to 
emancipate the state’s slaves, colonizing blacks to some 
distant land and recruiting white workers to take their place. 
“It will probably be asked” he continued, “why not retain and 
incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the 
expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the 
vacancies they will leave (Jefferson, 1984, 264)?” He 
responded with two separate arguments: the deep seated 
social prejudices of whites and the basic “distinctions which 
nature has made” between the races.  After enumerating a 
number of physiological differences—skin color, hair, sweat 
glands, the size of the lungs, and sleeping habits (all of which 
had important moral implications)—he turned to the 



34 

intellectual capacities of blacks.  Unlike Indians, who 
developed art and “astonish you with strokes of the most 
sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment 
strong, their imagination glowing and elevated,” the African 
knew nothing of drawing and produced only the crudest 
music (Jefferson, 1984, 266).  Even the literary works of 
educated blacks were immature. Their “imagination,” he 
concluded, was “dull, tasteless, and anomalous (Jefferson, 
1984, 266).” If “in memory” they were “equal to the whites; 
in reason [they were] much inferior (Jefferson, 1984, 266).” 
Could such differences be explained by the cruel and harsh 
terms of their confinement?  Apparently not.   Despite even 
harsher conditions, the classical world bore testimony to the 
achievements of white slaves. “Misery,” Jefferson reflected, 
was “often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry 
(Jefferson, 1984, 269).”  “Among the blacks is misery 
enough, God knows, but no poetry (Jefferson, 1984, 269).”  
In any case, he insisted, the commonly recognized 
“improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first 
instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed 
by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect 
merely of their condition of life (Jefferson, 1984, 269).”  He 
conjectured therefore, “as a suspicion only, that the blacks, 
whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time 
and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the 
endowments both of body and mind (Jefferson, 1984, 267).”  
“Will not a lover of natural history,” he asked, “one who 
views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye 
of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the 
department of man as distinct as nature has formed them 
(Jefferson, 1984, 267)?”  The purity of the white race was at 
stake.  “Among the Romans,” he noted, “emancipation 
required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might 
mix without staining the blood of his master.  But with us a 
second is necessary, unknown to history.  When freed, he is 
to be removed beyond the reach of mixture (Jefferson, 1984, 
270).”  Torn between morality and practicality, he would 
spare no effort to prepare emancipated slaves for independent 
living—“sending them to a distant land with arms, 
implements of household and of the handicraft arts, feeds, 
pairs of useful animals etc.”—but offered absolutely no hope 
of schooling for the blacks of Virginia (Jefferson, 1984, 264). 

For white citizens, however, education was integral 
to Jefferson’s political principles.  He even claimed that his 
1779 Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge 
“was the most important bill in our whole code,” completing, 
had it passed, the laws against entails and primogeniture, and 
the separation of church and state (Padover, 1952, 70). As 
Montesquieu taught, he understood that corruption nestled in 
all societies, and that a political mechanism had to be devised 
to prevent the degeneration of government.  But rather than 
the widely vaulted checks and balances of the British system, 
Jefferson put his faith in representative government and the 
good sense of the common man to elect wise and virtuous 
leaders—or, more accurately, representatives who would 
elect wise and virtuous leaders.  “Having put down the 
aristocracy of the clergy,” and nurtured an equality of 
condition” among the population, he later told John Adams 
that “education would have raised the mass of the people to 

the high ground of moral respectability necessary to their 
own safety, and to orderly government; and would have 
completed the great object of qualifying them to select the 
veritable aristori, for the trusts of government (Jefferson, 
1959, II: 390).   Schooling in Jefferson’s Virginia would thus 
have two components: the development of a literate 
population capable of making informed choices, and the 
education of the moral and intellectual elite.   

Where Adams saw the great aim of government as 
management of the passions, Jefferson put his faith in a basic 
moral sense common to all men and women.  Conscience, he 
told his nephew Peter Carr, was as much a part of human 
nature “as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling (Jefferson, 
1984, 901).” While given to individuals 

 
in a stronger or weaker degree . . . [it] may be 
strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of 
the body. This sense is submitted, indeed, in some 
degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small 
stock which is required for this: even a less one than 
what we call common sense.  State a moral case to a 
ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it 
as well, and often better than the latter, because he has 
not been led astray by artificial rules. 

(Jefferson, 1984, 901-902) 
 

Armed with this insight, and a basic knowledge of the natural 
and social worlds, the citizenry themselves could provide the 
moral basis of a virtuous community.  To this end, Jefferson 
proposed a system of free education for all (white) children.  
Situated within each ward (a five square mile miniature 
republic), schools would be erected and a teacher employed 
to provide three years of instruction in reading, writing, and 
arithmetic, together with lessons in the principles of civic 
virtue and Republican government.  Study of the Bible—
which was far too demanding for the immature mind—was to 
be replaced with “useful facts from Grecian, Roman, 
European and American history” that would teach the 
essential character of human nature and the basic hierarchical 
structure of a good society (Jefferson, 1984, 273). 

As reason strengthened, such knowledge would then 
enable each citizen “to work out their own greatest 
happiness, by shewing them that it does not depend on the 
condition of life in which chance has placed them, but is 
always the result of a good conscience, good health, 
occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits (Jefferson, 1984, 
273).” Jefferson’s grand vision of a political community 
sustained through public schooling was thus quite different to 
the kind of embryonic democracy central to Dewey’s 
educational philosophy: progress and stability would be 
achieved through deference to wise and noble leaders, not a 
faith in common intelligence and conjoint problem solving. 

Jefferson’ second concern was the selection and 
education of the elite.  Conscious of the ethical problems of 
eugenic engineering, “for experience proves that moral and 
physical qualities of man, whether good or evil, are 
transmissible in a certain degree from father to son,” he 
contented himself with the existence of an “accidental 
aristori produced by the fortuitous concourse of breeders 



35 

(Jefferson, 1959, 388).”  This, he told Adams, was “the most 
precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and 
government of society (Jefferson, 1959, 388).” He thus 
proposed a revolutionary scheme for the selection and 
training of his natural aristocracy.  Each year the school’s 
visitors would select the top boy and send him, at public 
expense to one of twenty grammar schools established 
around the state.  After one or two years of study in “Greek, 
Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical 
arithmetic,” the most able would be selected for four more 
years of instruction.  By this means,” Jefferson asserted, 
“twenty of the best geniusses will be raked from the rubbish 
annually (Jefferson, 1984, 272).” Finally, at the end of their 
education, “one half are to be discontinued (from among 
whom the grammar schools will probably be supplied with 
future masters); and the other half, who are to be chosen for 
the superiority of their parts and disposition, are to be sent 
and continued three years in the study of such sciences as 
they shall chuse, at William and Mary college (Jefferson, 
1984, 272).” 

The final part of this scheme demanded a radical 
revision Jefferson’s alma mater.  As argued in Bill 80 for 
Amending the Constitution of the College of William and 
Mary, the original mission of preparing Anglican ministers 
had to give way to the civic needs of the people.  This 
entailed replacing Latin, Greek, and Divinity with a more 
secular, scientific curriculum.  Ancient languages, he 
complained in the Notes, “filled the college with children 
(Jefferson, 1984, 277).” By restricting such preparatory skills 
to the previous educational level, professional schools in 
Law, Medicine, and Government could be established to 
transform traditional on-the-job training with knowledge of 
the principles governing human nature.   

Although the legislature failed to approve Bill 80, 
Jefferson was able to institute elements of his plan in 1779, 
when, as governor, he became a trustee of the college.  Under 
his guidance, the curriculum was reorganized around 
professorships in Law and Police; Anatomy and Medicine; 
Natural Philosophy and Mathematics; Moral Philosophy, the 
Law of Nature and Nations, and the Fine Arts; and Modern 
Languages.  In the Notes he expressed hope that other 
professorships would soon be funded to offer specialized 
work in the sciences.  But the College’s charter, its lack of 
funds, and its increasing isolation from the political center of 
the state frustrated Jefferson’s goals.  By 1800 he had given 
up on transforming William and Mary.  Virginia, he now 
understood, needed a new State university to educate its 
future leaders and offer the South an alternative to what he 
saw as the baleful influence of New England learning.  
Jefferson was also frustrated by legislature’s reluctance to 
fund public schools.  A much diluted form of Bill 79 did pass 
in 1796, but, Jefferson explained in his Autobiography, on 
realizing that the taxes levied for instruction “would throw on 
wealth the education of the poor . . . the more wealthy class 
were unwilling to incur that burden,” and, as a result, 
schooling failed “to commence in a single county (Jefferson, 
1984, 43) 

As Jefferson’s duties drew his attention to the 
national stage, he also considered a number of schemes to 

establish a system of education for the entire country.  In 
1794, for example, he explored the possibility of founding a 
national university with émigré faculty from the University 
of Geneva.  Later, as President, he commissioned Du Pont de 
Nemours to design a system of schooling and supported Joel 
Barlow’s scheme for a national university and Institute of 
learning based upon the French model.  Neither proposal was 
embraced by Congress; indeed, it seems that Jefferson had 
his own reservations about the federal control of knowledge.  
Accordingly, it was only after his return to Monticello, in the 
1810s and 1820s, that he threw his full energies into the 
cause of educational reform, proposing, once again, the 
three-tiered system of public schooling outlined in Bills 79 
and 80. Only now, influenced by the philosophy and social 
science of the Idéologues, his original plan was strengthened 
by the political philosophy of Tracy, who, in the years prior 
to Napoleon, had been instrumental in establishing a similar 
structure of schooling in France.     
 

Destutt De Tracy 

When, in the aftermath of the Terror, Sieyès, Garat, 
Volney, and many of the other liberal reformers who met at 
the salon of Mme Helvétius came to power in the Directory 
(1795-1799), they turned to the moral philosophy and 
disciplinary pedagogy sketched by Cabanis as the means to 
bring order and stability to the new republic.  Public policy 
was to be informed by “the science of man,” or what would 
later become known as “social science.”  This incipient 
movement gained political and philosophical focus in 1796, 
when Cabanis’ friend Destutt de Tracy was elected to the 
section devoted to the analysis of sensations and ideas at the 
newly established National Institute.  It was Tracy who laid 
out the political agenda flowing from this physiologically-
based sensationalist epistemology and coined the ill-fated 
neologism, Idéologie.   

A youthful supporter of the American Republic and 
Turgot’s liberal reforms, Antoine Louis Claude, Comte 
Destutt de Tracy embraced revolutionary calls for greater 
representation of the Third Estate.  As a delegate of the 
Bourbonnais nobility in the National Assembly (1789-1791) 
he supported the Declaration of the Rights of Man, advocated 
the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, and strongly 
endorsed anticlerical legislation.  Together with Cabanis, Du 
Pont de Nemours, Talleyrand, Garat, Sieyès, Condorcet, and 
the other prominent intellectuals who met at the Société 
1789, he envisioned a scientifically enlightened 
representative government that avoided the radical 
egalitarianism of the Democrats.  Most troubling for Tracy, 
was the spreading discontent in the Army.  A colonel under 
Lafayette (the future father-in-law of his daughter), he 
struggled to maintain discipline amid radical attacks on the 
privilege of rank.  With the arrest of the king, and Lafayette’s 
subsequent escape to Belgium, Tracy resigned his 
commission and retired to Antieul, where, out of the public 
eye, he kept company with Condorcet and Cabanis.  But 
Tracy’s aristocratic background proved too much for the 
Jacobins.  Imprisoned for eleven months, he was only saved 
from the guillotine by the fall of Robespierre.  It was during 



36 

this internment that he immersed himself in Condillac and 
the other philosophical works that would become the basis 
for Idéologie—literally, the science of ideas.   

Like the epistemological and behavioral doctrines of 
the logical positivists, Tracy believed that a sound foundation 
for knowledge could be established by carefully assembling 
ideas out of the basic features of sense experience: thought 
had to proceed from simple to complex in steps immediately 
comprehensible to the attentive mind.  In contrast to 
Condillac, however, Tracy did not view the faculties as an 
amalgamation of sensations, but rather, as Cabanis explained, 
basic responses of the human organization.  Perception, 
memory, judgment, and desire were functions of the brain, 
the nervous system, and the bodily temperaments.  
Ultimately, Ideology was part of zoology.  But it also 
suggested rational laws of mind and behavior.  Fusing 
Condillac's analysis of signs with a moderate utilitarianism, 
he explained how social and moral codes could be 
constructed to foster happiness.  The key to human well-
being was the creation of a political order that properly 
regulated desires by rewarding virtue and punishing vice.  
For while direct instruction in moral principles might 
influence the behavior of more philosophic minds, the 
average person learned little from the classroom or the 
Catechism: the legislator and the laws were the true teachers 
of mankind.  Rejecting the concept of a moral intuition, 
Tracy was adamant that even the most basic notions of right 
and wrong were acquired through socialization in the family 
and other cultural institutions.  It was thus incumbent upon 
political leaders to engineer public and private practices that 
would develop correct habits and teach the population the 
fundamental link between reason, virtue, and happiness.  
This included maintaining an economy which fostered small 
industry while eliminating debt, speculation, and the evils of 
extreme wealth; the abolition of primogeniture; and, the 
removal of clerical influence over civil institutions.  

Political economy was at the heart of Tracy’s 
system.  Grounded in his conception of human well-being, 
productive activity was to be measured by “goods” that 
promoted the full and harmonious development of the 
faculties.  Following Jean Baptise Say, he rejected the 
physiocrats’ premise that wealth was measured by 
agricultural production.  According to Du Pont de Nemours, 
for example, manufacturing and commerce contributed little 
to the production of useful goods: the key to prosperity was 
simply to increase the efficiency of farming.  Characterizing 
the efforts of the bourgeoisie as sterile, he promoted 
economic development through improved farming techniques 
and a centralized monarchy capable of coordinating the 
production and distribution of food.  Say thought that this 
focus on agriculture was too narrow.  The manufacturing and 
commercial classes were also involved in producing tools, 
food, and other materials that contributed to the country’s 
wealth.  Value, which reflected human needs, was best 
measured by the market.  Tracy concurred.  It was not the 
middle classes that were sterile but the landowners who lived 
in luxury off the labors of the peasants.  There were three 
actors in Tracy’s economic system; the savant, educated to 
understand the scientific principles governing nature and 

society; the worker, who provided the physical power 
necessary for production; and the entrepreneur, who invested 
capital to make possible socially useful enterprises.  While 
recognizing the inequalities inherent in this organization of 
money, mind, and labor, he insisted that the interests of each 
class were best served by developing their talents in the 
position that fate had placed them—much as Jefferson had 
argued in the Notes.  Modest industrialization would not hurt 
the worker: money saved in one area permitted further 
investment that created new jobs.  The essential point was to 
combat unrestrained capitalism and the gross inequalities it 
produced.  But Tracy was hopeful that in a more liberal state 
property owners would realize that a well-paid and trained 
laborer was good for all, and, with the kind of representative 
government established in America, educated workers would 
appreciate the importance of electing virtuous leaders who 
would work for the common weal rather than narrow class 
interests. 

Indeed, Jefferson’s Republicanism seems to have 
served as something of a blueprint for Tracy’s political 
theory.  As expressed in his Critique of Montesquieu’s Sprit 
of the Laws (composed in 1805-1806 as Napoleon 
consolidated power and disenfranchised the Idéologues), 
Tracy defended representative government as a modern 
solution to the problem of a just society (Tracy, 1969).  
Montesquieu identified three basic forms of government 
(Republic, Monarchy, and Despotism) and explored the 
sentiments each created in order to retain authority over the 
population.  In Tracy’s mind this division failed to carve the 
political world at its joints.  Governments, he believed, were 
more productively categorized according to whether they 
promoted the general will or special interests.  And, rather 
than asking how each conserved power, it was far more 
important to examine how they promoted public or private 
good through the dissemination of knowledge.  As 
Montesquieu noted, only “those governments which are 
founded on reason, can alone desire that education should be 
exempt from prejudice (Tracy, 1969, iv).” “In a hereditary 
monarchy,” for instance, a prince “ought to inculcate and 
propagate the maxims of passive obedience, and a profound 
veneration for the established forms (Tracy, 1969, iv).” There 
should be a “dislike for the spirit or innovation and enquiry, 
or the discussion of political principles (Tracy, 1969, iv)” 
And, “above all,” Tracy continued, he should employ 
“religious ideas, which taking possession of the mind from 
the cradle, make durable and deep impressions, form habits, 
and fix opinions, long before the age of reflexion (Tracy, 
1969, iv).” Conversely, in a Republic, a government fearing 
“error and prejudice” would “constantly to attend to the 
propagation of accurate and solid knowledge of all kinds” 
and  

prevent the poor class from becoming vicious, 
ignorant, or miserable; the opulent class from 
becoming insolent and fond of false knowledge; and 
should cause both to approach that middle point, at 
which the love of order, of industry, of justice, and 
reason, naturally establish themselves. 

(Tracy, 1969, iv: 0).  
 



37 

Tracy gained a powerful weapon in his battle 
against the hegemony of the Church with the publication of 
Charles Dupuis’ twelve-volume Origin of all Religious 
Worship (Dupuis, 1795/1984).  As Tracy summarized Dupuis 
in his anonymous Analysis, all the world’s religions, 
including Christianity, could be reduced to myths of nature, 
allegorical tales and metaphysical constructs that sought to 
explain the unknown forces governing events.  Most 
invidious was the priesthood, which built elaborate 
theological arguments to defend the spiritualization of nature 
and silence rational inquiry.  Rather than elevating the 
population by teaching that happiness and virtue went hand 
in hand, it sought to maintain social privilege through the 
spread of superstition and fear.  In 1799 Tracy had an 
opportunity to correct this abuse and construct his own vision 
of a rational and moral society.  Elected to the Council for 
Public Instruction, he poured his energies into fashioning 
elite schools for future leaders, convinced that a class of 
scientifically trained savants could craft the institutional 
practices, legal statues, and popular customs necessary to 
perfect the intellectual and moral powers of the masses. 
 

The Government of Mind 
One of the central pillars of the Constitution drawn 

up by the National Assembly was a commitment to the 
education of all citizens.  Having eliminated the tithes and 
taxes that supported religious schools, nationalized Church 
property, and suppressed traditional universities, the 
Assembly turned to the construction of a system of public 
education free from ecclesiastical control.  This meant a 
radical revision of the religiously oriented Latin curriculum 
maintained by the Church, in line with the theories of mind 
and secular ethics advanced by enlightenment thinkers.  But 
while clear in their political aims and philosophy of 
education, the revolutionary planners struggled with the 
particulars.  The philosophes had left no blueprints and there 
was no other national system of schooling for them to draw 
upon.  Should all children attend school beyond the 
elementary level?  Should fees to be assessed? Was 
education to be controlled by state or by local officials?  
Buildings, desks, books, and teachers, everything was open 
to debate.  It is hardly surprising then, that more than twenty 
proposals were submitted in the first two years of the 
Republic.  Most influential were the schemes of Mirabeau 
(authored and published by Cabanis) and Talleyrand (1791), 
both of which proposed a four-tier system comprising 
elementary and secondary schools, technical colleges or 
lycées (to replace universities), and a National Institute.  

To review these proposals the short-lived 
Legislative Assembly (1791-1792) appointed a Committee 
on Public Instruction under the leadership of Condorcet, who 
had roused popular opinion the previous year with a series of 
five memoirs on the necessity of education to the future of 
the Republic.  Condorcet's report, The General Organization 
of Public Instruction, preserved this same basic structure 
while advancing a more egalitarian philosophy (Palmer, 
1985, 124-129).  Not that he endorsed the leveling scheme of 
Robespierre, who, in 1793, advocated a nationwide system of 
boarding schools, Maisons d’Egalités, in which children from 

age 5 to 12 could be raised without distinction.  Condorcet's 
goal was simply to avoid the great disparities in education 
that underwrote the political oppression of the Ancien 
Régime.  Similar in its details to Jefferson’s proposal, but 
with two extra levels, he suggested primary schools to 
educate the masses free of charge, secondary education, with 
scholarships for the able poor, district grammar schools, and 
lycées.  Finally, above and controlling all, would be a 
National Society divided into classes for mathematics and 
physical science, the moral and political sciences, the applied 
sciences, and literature and the fine arts.  

Condorcet's timing could not have been worse.  
Before any action could be taken the Assembly turned to face 
the threat of the Austrian and Prussian alliance, and all 
enthusiasm for educational reform was lost in the tide of 
nationalistic spirit.  It was not until the end of 1794, with the 
rise to power of the Idéologues, that the National Convention 
(1792-1795) finally started to take action.  Marked by the 
execution of Louis XVI (December 1792) and the rise of the 
Jacobin Terror (September 1792-June 1794), the intervening 
years had decimated cultural life.  Schools, universities, and 
learned societies had been closed, and many prominent 
intellectual leaders and public figures, including Condorcet 
(who denied the guillotine by dinking a poison provided by 
Cabanis), had been put to death or ostracized.  The need for 
order now superseded the need for equality.  As the 
Idéologues saw it, schooling had to establish a secular 
morality necessary for a stable republican government, and 
France's place as the leading center for science and the arts 
restored.  Again, the Commission on Public Instruction was 
asked for its recommendations.  This time, under the 
guidance of Garat, Joseph Lanakal authored a number of 
reports suggesting amendments to Condorcet’s scheme in 
line with growing anti-democratic sympathies.  Eventually 
passed into legislation, most importantly in Pierre Daunou's 
Law of the Third Brumaire (October 25, 1795), a 
comprehensive, if hierarchical, system of education was 
founded—and remained in place until Napoleon reorganized 
French schooling in 1802, and the National Institute in 1803.  

The Daunou law required that one or more fee-
paying primary school be located in each canton and an école 
centrale, a center for learning and educational activities, 
established in every department.  Unlike the secondary 
schools envisioned by Condorcet, these were not meant to be 
an extension of primary education, but rather separate elite 
academies for students beyond age twelve who wished to 
prepare for higher education or careers in the civil service.  
Indeed, in contrast to the more radical plans of the Assembly, 
primary schooling was not even compulsory.  True, funds 
were provided for the meritorious poor, but this provision did 
little to satisfy democratic critics who bemoaned the loss of 
earlier, more egalitarian schemes.  Thus, where the primary 
schools were charged to teach the fundamentals of reading, 
writing, and arithmetic, natural history, and the basis of 
republican government to the working poor, the more 
academic curriculum of the central school—comprised 
drawing, ancient languages, mathematics, physics, chemistry, 
general grammar, belles-lettres, history, and legislation—was 
designed for children of the middle classes.  The next level of 



38 

education also departed from Condorcet's plan.  Instead of 
the Lycées, ten higher specialized academies were to be 
founded.  And, while a National Institute was established, it 
also differed in structure and mission to what Condorcet 
envisioned.  Less a controlling body for the whole system 
than a center in which to celebrate French learning—a living 
encyclopedia of knowledge, as Daunou put it—the Institute, 
omitting the applied sciences, divided 144 of France’s 
leading scholars into the remaining three of Condorcet's four 
classes (Stein, 1961).   Cabinas, Tracy, and several other 
prominent Idéologues were appointed to a section of the 
Second Class on Moral and Political Sciences devoted to the 
analysis of sensations and ideas. 

At the height of the Jacobin Dictatorship plans had 
been drawn up to develop a corps of teachers armed with the 
knowledge and pedagogic skills necessary to educate a nation 
of republican citizens. Ten thousand men would attend a 
central seminary in Paris, and from there disseminate correct 
practices by opening normal schools in their own 
departments.  Supportive of this initiative to spread the art of 
teaching, Garat and Lanakal combined early in 1794 to 
advocate the establishment of what would become the Ecole 
Normale.  But with the change in political climate their 
political interests gradually changed from preparing primary 
teachers to establishing a higher seat of learning to guide the 
education of an elite class.  Accordingly, when the Ecole 
Normale opened in January 1795, a single auditorium in the 
Natural History Museum, the fourteen eminent professors 
engaged for the four month semester did not have young 
children on their mind.  Rather, their courses laid out the 
curriculum of the écoles centrals, established the following 
month by the Law of 3 Ventose.  Among the many notable 
intellectuals, Lagrange and Lapalce lectured on Mathematics, 
Garat on “Analysis of the Understanding,” and Sicard on 
General Grammar.  All of this must have appeared quite 
esoteric to the majority of students, who had been sent by 
local authorities in order to train as primary school teachers.  
By May, more than half had departed, leaving the faculty to 
justify their role as the guardians of higher education rather 
than masters of pedagogy. 

As its first few years of existence soon revealed, the 
public school system created by Daunou’s Law faced serious 
problems.  Hindered by the lack of central authority, the 
Idéologues’ plans were invariably subverted by local 
conditions.  The chief concern was the existence of a large 
number of Catholic independent schools guaranteed by the 
right of conscience secured in Title X of the Constitution.  
Often supported by charitable funds, this alternative system 
enrolled more than half of all pupils.  Not only did this 
subvert Condorcet’s goal of a unified system, but, for 
democratic critics within the Directory, it became a palpable 
threat to the Republic.  Orthodox clergy, it was claimed in 
the debates of 1798, were using elementary schools in a 
counter-hegemonic struggle against the political ideology of 
the revolution.  To combat this threat, laws were enacted to 
bring private education in line with public policy.  
Government officials had to enroll their children in public 
schools; local authorities were charged with monitoring 
private education to ensure schools used approved textbooks; 

and, in order to exclude any priest not committed to civic 
codes, headmasters had to be married or widowers.  As for 
the central schools, the confusing mission of educating both 
university and primary level students led to a hodge-podge of 
classes for all ages and abilities. Attendance was sporadic, 
lectures disorganized, and teachers lacked training.  With no 
bureaucratic mechanism to enforce its directives, most of the 
ministry’s edicts fell on deaf ears. 

Equally important to democratic critics was the 
divide between elementary adn secondary schooling.  The 
curriculum of the écoles centrales did not dovetail with the 
primary school’s, and, by the Law 3 Brumaire, students were 
not permitted to enroll until age 12, three years after their 
elementary education was completed.  Fearful of creating a 
new aristocracy, Democrats called for sweeping changes.  
The Idéologues resisted.  The staggering costs aside they saw 
no purpose in expanding the education of the masses.  What 
was the use of schooling millions of peasants in the higher 
branches of knowledge?  Too much learning would only sour 
the worker for the life of toil to which they were destined.  
Primary education, Tracy explained, had to be short and 
sweet.  It should pass on the most basic knowledge and 
values of the social elite, but ought not to be considered an 
introduction to the work of the central schools.  Unlike 
Jefferson, he did not even think it appropriate for the children 
of the classe savante to attend primary schools.  Far better 
that these future leaders of society stay home and cultivate 
their tastes in a more refined environment until they had the 
maturity to pursue the more demanding studies of the écoles 
centrals—as outlined in Tracy’s Observations sur le Systême 
Actuel d'Instruction Publique, an eight year syllabus in 
Language and Literature, the Physical Sciences and 
Mathematics, and the Ideological, Moral, and Political 
Sciences (Tracy, 1801).  But debate was mute.  With foreign 
armies surrounding France, and the threat of a Jacobin 
revival, Liberals threw their support behind Bonaparte’s coup 
d’état of November 1799.  Led by Sieyies, the Idéologues 
helped engineer Napoleon’s rise by designing the three-
chamber scheme of the Legislative Body, the Tribunate, and 
the Conservative Senate—only to compromise their own 
authority in the final agreement, by ceding executive power 
to the First Council.  Napoleon did not have to answer to the 
Senate.  Thus, on December 28th, when Tracy, Cabanis, 
Garat, and a host of other Idéologues accepted the honored 
and highly paid role of senators, they lost a direct voice in the 
formation of government policy.  From then on, as they 
ceased to be of value to the First Council, they gradually 
became his scapegoats, metaphysicians, responsible for all 
the ills of the revolution.  The faults of the school system 
would now be addressed by administrative fiat rather than 
parliamentary debate. 

At first the Idéologues were confidant that Napoleon 
would help carry their scheme forward; a visitor at Auteuil 
and a member of the National Institute, Bonaparte had 
courted the approval of intellectuals and promised to 
maintain important political appointments.  Crucial for their 
educational ambitions was the Council on Public Instruction, 
an advisory group formed in October 1798 to guide the 
Minister of the Interior.  Originally comprising eight 



39 

members of the National Institute, including four from from 
the section on analysis of sensations and ideas, the 
ideological agenda of the group was strengthened the 
following February when Tracy joined their number.   

In 1797 professors were instructed to submit their 
teaching plans and course notes, but few responded.  
Determined to see how Ideological principles were being 
enacted, Tracy issued a rather stern reminder together with a 
detailed questionnaire designed to assess the effectiveness of 
the nation’s one hundred central schools.  He was not happy 
with the results, but mindful of the debates raging in the 
legislature, took care to press his principles without opening 
the central schools to political attack.  Tracy was most 
concerned with the presentation of history, geography, 
legislation, and political economy, the social sciences 
necessary for the future savants of his secular state.  In a 
number of circulars distributed just prior to Napoleon’s coup, 
he reminded professors of the relationship between mind and 
language, and the system of laws, institutions, and social 
customs that arose from a knowledge of human nature.  As 
teachers of future legislators and administrators, it was their 
duty to prepare students with the ability to shape behavior in 
positive ways.  Yet the materials they presented revealed 
either a total misunderstanding of Ideology or a stubborn 
commitment to Spiritualism.  The fundamental problem, 
Tracy reported, was the failure to make the philosophy of 
language the basis for all learning.  How could students 
understand the purpose of their studies if they did not 
appreciate the basic relationship between signs and thought? 
Recommending they read Condillac, he outlined the 
Ideological project and explained how an ordered system of 
signs yielded knowledge free from conceptual confusion and 
charted a pedagogic path to reason and virtue.  Ideology itself 
had to become a subject of inquiry to properly prepare 
students for classes in legislation, literature, and history. 

Armed with an understanding of mind and 
character, pupils would explore the civic codes, criminal law, 
commercial regulations, and critically evaluate their capacity 
to promote freedom, prosperity, and happiness.  They would 
then be in a position to appreciate the development of 
societies through history.  Like Condorcet, in his 
monumental Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress 
of the Human Mind (1795), Tracy viewed the past through 
the lens of ignorance and oppression.  The traditional script 
of sacred tales, heroic stories, and political myths had to be 
replaced by a scientific study of peoples that revealed the 
causal structures necessary to engineer social progress. 

Unfortunately for the Idéologues, secular social 
science was not popular with either students or faculty—
grammar, legislation, and history were among the classes 
with the lowest enrollments.  Many teachers reported that 
attention to writing skills left little time for philosophical 
study.  Even those who did address the nature of mind tended 
to integrate Ideology and Spiritualism.  Moreover, although 
teachers embraced the goal of political criticism, they 
stubbornly presented revealed religion or the dictates of the 
Church as the basis of morality.  As for history, Tracy noted 
a broad sympathy for studying the past as a ladder to 

civilization, but much to his chagrin, found almost no interest 
in Dupuis’ masterwork. 

Presenting the group’s report to Lucien Bonaparte, 
Tracy maintained the écoles centrales had proven themselves 
indispensable to the future of the Republic.  Certainly, some 
changes were necessary.  The minimum age of enrollment 
had to be lowered, prerequisites needed to be established, 
studies ought to be more carefully coordinated, and national 
examinations instituted—but the system was sound.  By 
concentrating on the social sciences, the rigorous schooling 
of middle-class children between ages 8 and 16 would 
prepare elite students for careers in the civil service, or 
professional training in one of the special schools.  It would 
even help develop a core of dedicated teachers capable of 
revolutionizing the primary education of the masses.   

Tracy’s report died on the minister’s desk.  Eight 
months passed without a word, then, in October 1800, 
Bonaparte dissolved the Council and took charge of its 
papers.  Determined to preserve the existing system, Tracy 
joined the growing public debate on education by publishing 
the Council’s findings and presenting his own textbook for 
the central schools—the first of his multi-volume Elements of 
Ideology (Tracy, 1803; Tracy, 1804; Tracy 1805).  
Dissatisfaction with the lack of organization and the confused 
mission of the central schools was growing. Determined to 
address this potentially volatile situation, and meet 
Napoleon’s political goals, officials from the Council of State 
crafted the bill eventually passed by the Legislative Body on 
May 1st, 1802 as the Law of Eleven Floréal.  It appears that 
Bonaparte was instrumental in shaping the most important 
provisions of the act.  He did not share the secular goals of 
the Idéologues, and certainly did not need an army of social 
scientists.  Resurrecting elements of Condorcet’s plan, the 
lycée was established to provide students between 9 and 16 
with a general education prior to technical training in the 
special schools and écoles secondaires (while not a step 
toward the lycéss) to foster social advancement for talented 
children of the lower orders.  However, it was political 
patronage, not leveling, that underwrote the extensive system 
of scholarships that would make this new system possible.  A 
lycée education was to be both a reward for the children of 
loyal government employees and a training ground for a 
future corps of dedicated and tough-minded public 
professionals.  The same logic was then applied to the 
teaching body itself, when, in the laws of 1806 and 1808, 
Napoleon created the Imperial University, a hierarchically 
administered state run bureaucracy that turned lycée and 
secondary school faculty into civil servants and standardized 
both public and private education.   

By this time the Idéologues had lost almost all 
influence over government policy.  Starting shortly after the 
coup of 18 Brumaire, the rift with Napoleon came to a head 
with their opposition to the Concordant of 1802.  
Fundamentally opposed to the re-introduction of the Church 
into public life, they hoped to frustrate Napoleon’s initiative 
in debate, but instead found themselves ostracized from 
power as Bonaparte pressured the Senate to purge the 
Tribunate and the Legislative Body of his opponents.  Four 
months later the Senate was forced to name Bonaparte 



40 

Consulate for life and accept a new constitution that 
effectively neutered its control of the Executive.  The final 
nail in the Idéologue’s coffin came early the following year 
when Bonaparte reorganized the National Institute, 
dissolving the class on the analysis of sensations and ideas.  
Out of political favor, and with no voice in the shaping of 
educational policy, Cabanis, Tracy, and the other Idéologues 
gradually receded from public life.  Ideology had become 
both passé and dangerous: There was simply no place for the 
“science of man” in a state that denied politics.  Accordingly, 
while the school system of post-revolutionary France 
retained vestiges of the structural reforms suggested by the 
Idéologues—a two-track system that provided basic 
knowledge for the masses while preparing elite students for 
advanced training—it was shorn of the secular mission and 
social science curriculum fundamental to the positivist state 
envisioned by Tracy.  The lycée, as Napoleon recognized, 
had become the great instrument for the maintenance of his 
bureaucratic empire.  

 
Thomas Jefferson, Idéologue 

It is not surprising that struggling to consolidate 
authority within the Napoleonic regime, the Idéologues 
would seek the endorsement of a powerful and sympathetic 
friend, the American President, and president of the 
American Philosophical Society (a group of scientifically 
minded men, including Benjamin Rush, Joseph Priestly, and 
David Rittenhouse openly sympathetic to the physiological 
doctrines of Sensationism).  In 1802 Jefferson was elected as 
an associate member of the class on Moral Science and 
started receiving texts from the movements leading theorists.  
Say sent his two-volume Treatise on Political Economy, 
Cabanis his Reports on the Physical and the Moral, and 
Tracy the first two volumes of his Elements of Ideology.  
Encumbered by the demands of his office, Jefferson had little 
time to examine these works, especially, he later admitted to 
Adams, Tracy’s rather dense and dry epistemological tract, 
but he did write back expressing his gratitude for the honor 
they had bestowed upon him and his interest in their future 
practical and theoretical labors.  His retirement, he promised, 
would be sweetened by the careful perusal of his new library.  
In 1806, Jefferson received a second package from Tracy, the 
French manuscript of his Commentary on Montesquieu.  
Unable to publish under the eye of Napoleon, Tracy hoped 
the work would gain proper attention in America.  Here was 
a topic much more to Jefferson’s liking.  As a student he had 
carefully dissected Montesquieu’s masterpiece in his 
commonplace book.  But, while accepting the relationship 
between human nature, government, and institutions—even 
the physiological arguments about climate, temperament, and 
manners—found the defense of Monarchy totally 
unacceptable. Tracy corrected and updated Montesquieu 
arguments: aligning the character of the state with the 
anthropological physiology of Cabanis, he presented a 
scientific justification of republican government.  Apart from 
a small disagreement over the virtue of single verses a plural 
executive, Jefferson was enthralled.  Here was the principle 
political text of the generation.  As Napoleon villainized the 
Idéologues for all the excesses of the Revolution, Jefferson 

had the work translated and published in America.  He 
persuaded James Madison, rector of William and Mary, to 
make it required reading for all graduating students, and, in 
1812, wrote to Thomas Cooper—the first professor appointed 
to the University of Virginia—expressing his hope that the 
Review of Montesquieu . . . will become the elementary book 
of the youth at all our colleges” (Jefferson, 1907, 13: 178-
179). He even suggested that students prepare for the text 
with a “a mature study of the most profound of all human 
compositions, Cabanis's ‘Rapports du Physique et du moral 
de l'homme.’”(Tracy, 1803)  In 1814 Jefferson received the 
fourth volume of Tracy’s Elements, which, after much 
trouble with printers, he personally translated and published 
as Treatise on Political Economy (1817). Convinced that 
Tracy had corrected and systemized economic thought from 
Quesnay to Smith and Say, Jefferson wrote to Albert 
Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury, in 1818 offering the 
book as an antidote to the nation’s profound ignorance of the 
science.  By “simplifying principles” it brought “the whole 
subject within a narrow compass (Chinard, 1925, 105-106).”  
Taken together, the Commentary on Montesquieu and 
Political Economy, were to “become the Statesmen’s Manual 
. . . elementary books of the political department” at the 
university of Virginia (Chinard, 1925, 203).” 

In 1813 Adams wrote to Jefferson excited by his 
recent acquisition of Dupuis’ opus.  Joseph Priestly had 
rejected the work and labeled its author an atheist.  But 
Adams was more circumspect and challenged Jefferson to 
tackle the twelve volumes with him so that they could resolve 
for themselves the debate between materialism and 
spiritualism.  Jefferson praised Adams’ heroism, but reported 
his appetite for Dupuis had been satisfied by Tracy’s analytic 
review, and sent on the “pithy morsel” for his fiend’s 
edification. (Adams and Jefferson, II: 491).  This debate, 
woven out of metaphysical and theological conceptions of 
nature, mind, and spirit, was at the core of Jefferson’s 
thought.  Following Priestly’s deistic teachings, he 
formulated a vision of the universe that fused materialism 
and Christianity.  Like Much as Cabanis, Priestly believed 
that organic matter possessed sensitive properties capable of 
generating consciousness and free will.  Jefferson found this 
conjecture far more plausible than the supposed existence of 
an immaterial self.  Citing Locke’s attack on spiritualists—
that it was blasphemy to assert God could not have endowed 
matter with the power of thought—Jefferson confessed to 
Adams that it was easier to swallow “one 
incomprehensibility rather than two . . . an existence called 
spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea,” and 
which, lacking extension and solidity, “can put material 
organs into motion (Adams and Jefferson, II: 491).”  “To talk 
of immaterial existence,” he later elaborated, “is to talk of 
nothings.  To say that the human soul, angels, god, are 
immaterial, is to say they are nothings. . . I cannot reason 
otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of 
materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart (Adams and 
Jefferson, II: 491).”  (Stewart, whom Jefferson had 
befriended in Paris during the first year of the revolution, 
supported a Baconian science of mind and society similar to 
Tracy’s scheme, but tempered by a commitment to the 



41 

doctrine of innate truths.  Elie Halévy has written that 
Thomas Brown, Stewart’s student and handpicked successor 
at the University of Edinburgh, “borrowed so much from 
Destutt de Tracy and Laromiguière that, he has been  accused 
of plagiarism (Halévy, 1966, 453).” Both of these writers 
strongly influenced Jams Mill, and other philosophic 
radicals, sponsoring liberal beliefs in the nature and structure 
of education remarkably similar to those of Tracy and 
Jefferson.  Stewart, however, was no materialist.) “Why 
should the materialist be expected to explain the process by 
which matter exercises the faculty of thinking” when 
scientists are unable to account for the properties of gravity 
or magnetism?  Only “on the basis of sensation” he told 
Adams, “erect all the certainties we can have or need.  When 
this is quit all is in the wind (Cappon, 1984, 568).” Dupuis’ 
Origin showed the truth of this dictum in the history of 
religion.  A firm foundation for faith had to be established 
from the unquestionable design of the universe and the 
immutable principles of morality.  Jesus, he insisted, was not 
a living divinity, but a profound teacher of moral truths.  
Eschewing spiritualism, he confessed to being a Christian “in 
the only sense in which I believe Jesus wished anyone to be, 
sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others; 
ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing 
that he never claimed any other (Jefferson, 1907, 1122).”  
Later in life Jefferson even argued that the early Christians 
were themselves materialists, and blamed St Paul for 
infecting faith with mysticism and spirituality.  Taken up by 
the Church, these obscurities were then turned, “by artificial 
constructions into a mere contrivance to turn filtch wealth 
and power to themselves (Jefferson, 1907, 1214).”  Charging 
rational men with infidelity, religions became “the greatest 
obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, 
and do in fact, constitute the real anti-Christ (Jefferson, 1907, 
1214).”  Adams concurred.  Praising Dupuis’ history as the 
greatest fairy tale ever written, he too remained committed to 
the moral lessons of Christ.  “The Ten Commandments and 
the Sermon on the Mount,” he told the Virginian, “contained 
my religion (Cappon, 1984, 494).” 

But who was this Tracy?  “The ablest writer living 
on intellectual subjects, or the operations of the 
understanding,” Jefferson replied (Cappon, 1984, 494).” 
Describing his three volumes on Ideology and his critique of 
Montesquieu, he explained that the Idéologue was now 
completing “the circle of metaphysical sciences” with a work 
on ethics.  Tracy, he warned Adams, was a follower of 
Hobbes and adopted the principle “that justice is founded in 
contract solely, and does not result from the constitution of 
man (Cappon, 1984, 494).”  He, like Adams, believed in an 
innate sense of right and wrong, but was nonetheless 
convinced that while they differed on foundations “so correct 
a thinker as Tracy will give us a sound system of morals 
(Adams-Jefferson, 242).” Although Adams found Tracy’s 
Analysis “a feignt (sic) Miniature if the Original,” his interest 
was piqued (Adams-Jefferson, 499).  What, he asked 
playfully in his next letter, was this Ideology? 

 
When Bonaparte used it, I was delighted with it, upon 
the common principle of delight in everything we 

cannot understand.  Does it mean idiotism?  The 
science of non compass mentuism? The Science of 
Lunacy?  The Theory of Delirium?  Or does it mean 
the Science of Self-Love of amour proper? Or the 
elements of vanity? 

(Adams-Jefferson, 501) 
 
 Most of all he wanted “to see his Ideology upon 
Montesquieu (Adams-Jefferson, 501).” Jefferson promised to 
have a copy of the Critique delivered, explaining that by 
“Ideology,” Tracy understood all the subjects which the 
French term Morale.  Adams was delighted.  The following 
year when he read the manuscript of Political Economy he 
found himself skipping from proposition to proposition, 
unable to leave the book unfinished.  “It is a condensation 
into a little globule . . . of all the sound sense and solid 
knowledge of the grand master Quanay (sic) and all his 
redoubtable knights (Adams-Jefferson, 525).”  Delighted 
with this “high approbation of Tracy’s book,” he asked for 
permission to use his letter to help ensure the circulation of 
the work, and Adams happily consented (Adams-Jefferson, 
538-539).  Tracy’s moderate lassez-faire policies provided a 
theoretical justification for many of the issues Jefferson had 
struggled with in his political career.  His vehement 
opposition to government intrusion in economic affairs—to 
national banks, paper money, direct taxation, the setting of 
interest rates, and public debt—resonated perfectly with 
Jefferson’s crusade against federalism.  Most importantly, 
perhaps, Tracy helped temper the romantic image of pastoral 
life that Jefferson had presented in the Notes.  True, he 
remained committed to the political importance of the land as 
the seedbed for the development of republican character, but 
events such as the embargo of 1807 taught the importance of 
small scale manufacturing to America’s economic 
independence.  Fearing the excesses of the British industrial 
system, the debasement of labor and the attendant evils of 
urban life, he defended Tracy’s model of development 
through modest entrepreneurship  Science and technology 
would be harnessed improve the public infrastructure and the 
conditions of home and labor, but society was still to be 
agrocentric.  One nagging inconsistency in this vision that 
cannot be overlooked was Jefferson’s support of extending 
slavery to Missouri.  Given his oft repeated characterization 
of the institution as perverting the nature both of the master 
and slave, its Westward expansion—even if removing blacks 
from plantations to farms—was hardly established the moral 
basis on which to build an empire of reason. 
 

“A Child of my Old Age” 
In addition to Tracy’s political and economic writings, 
Jefferson was also extremely interested in his educational 
work.  He even wrote to Tracy in 1817 confessing that he had 
“availed [himself] of some of the leading ideas of . . . [his] 
luminous tract on public instruction” in the planning of 
Central College, at Albemarle.  Like the école centrale, this 
was to be a secondary school—it was only later, when the 
site and buildings were developed into the University of 
Virginia, that Jefferson returned to his earlier three tier 
system, albeit with much of Tracy’s curricula still intact. 



42 

Jefferson’s 1814 letter to Peter Carr, the College’s 
future principle, reveals the extent of this debt.  Every 
citizen, he explained, “should receive an education 
proportioned to the condition and pursuits of his life 
(Jefferson, 1907, 1348).”  Dividing the population into “the 
laboring and the learned,” he proposed elementary instruction 
in “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Geography,” and a 
secondary curriculum for his aristo comprising the major 
divisions of Language (Languages and History, ancient and 
modern, Grammar, Belles Lettres, and Rhetoric); 
Mathematics (Pure and applied Mathematics, Physics, 
Chemistry, Natural History, Botany, Zoology, and Anatomy); 
and  Philosophy (Ideology, Ethics, the Law of Nature and 
Nations, Government, and Political Economy).  With the 
exception of lessons in the Theory of Medicine, this was 
almost exactly the same grouping of subjects Tracy had 
proposed in his Observations for the école centrale 
(Jefferson, 1907, 1346-1342).  He even followed Tracy in 
advocating education for the deaf and the blind.  Finally, as 
in France, he proposed professional schools to extend 
technical expertise in various theoretical, scientific, and 
practical fields. 

Early in 1817 Charles Mercer’s proposal for a 
system of public schools—which Jefferson opposed as 
fiscally unsound and overly bureaucratic—was narrowly 
defeated in the state senate.  Determined to push his own 
scheme, he wrote to his political ally Joseph Cabell with two 
proposals, designed to establish elementary schools and a 
state university in Virginia.  Consolidated in A Bill for 
Establishing a System of Public Education, Jefferson’s plan 
was contained similar recommendations to his 1779 scheme, 
with the notable reduction in the number of natural 
aristocrats to be educated at public expense.  But even with 
this concession the Bill gained little support.  Instead a 
subsequent proposal to use $45,000 of the literary fund to 
support the schooling of poor children was accepted.  It was 
as a rider to this legislation that the construction of the 
University of Virginia was approved, thus setting off a four 
year struggle for financing that pitted primary and higher 
education against one another.  Scholars have debated which 
end of the educational ladder Jefferson thought most 
important.  Given his continuing petition for public 
schooling, even until his death, this seems an unfair question.  
But forced to choose, he told Cabell that it was better to 
pause primary schooling for three years and ensure the 
university properly established.  As the epitaph he chose for 
his grave stone reveals (“Here was buried Thomas Jefferson 
Author of the Declaration of American Independence of the 
Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and Father of the 
University of Virginia”), he was convinced that this child of 
his old age would be one of the most significant projects of 
his life (Jefferson, 1907, 706). 

By 1818, with the construction of Central College 
well underway, the legislature appointed Jefferson and 
twenty-three other commissioners to plan the location, 
structure, administration, and curriculum of the University of 
Virginia.  Meeting at a tavern in Rockfish Gap, the group 
weighted two other sites before settling on the facility at 
Albemarle as the most convenient for the white population of 

the state.  Written by Jefferson, the Report briefly outlined a 
plan for situating dormitories, classrooms, and faculty 
lodgings in a village-like academic campus that would 
facilitate the kind of mentoring relationships that had been so 
important in Jefferson’s own youth.  But this hardly captured 
the grandeur of Jefferson’s architectural scheme.  Convened 
that beauty was a mark of eminence, he planned stately 
auditoriums around an impressive quadrangle.  Virginia’s 
grace would attract a faculty composed of the finest minds in 
Europe, and stand as a citadel of learning for students across 
the South and West.  The legislature worried about costs and 
balked at foreign speaking teachers.  But Jefferson was not to 
be denied.  As America’s most elegant campus started to take 
shape, a promising young lawyer, Francis Glimer, was 
dispatched to recruit faculty from Britain—the second 
generation of scholars would be home grown.  As for the 
curriculum, Jefferson laid out a table of subjects that would 
develop wise and virtuous leaders with knowledge of 
government, political economy, and the scientific skills 
necessary to engineer a happy and prosperous 
commonwealth.  Structured around ten professorships, 
including a professor of Ideology, his curriculum remained 
essentially what he had advocated to Carr four years earlier.  
(In 1824, as funds became scarce, the scheme was 
consolidated to eight professorships, with ideology, general 
grammar, and ethics included in moral philosophy, 
government and political economy in the school of law.)  
Military training, gymnastics, manual arts, dance, and 
drawing were also mentioned, as was the need to preserve a 
secular foundation for studies.  The ethics professor would 
offer proof of the existence of God, “the author of all the 
relations of morality, and of all the laws and obligations these 
infer,” and from this common ground, each sect would be 
able to provide, in facilities surrounding the campus, “as they 
think fittest, the means of further instruction in their own 
peculiar tenets (Jefferson, 1907, 467).” Not only did this 
respond to the severe criticism that Virginia lacked religious 
instruction to match the useful sciences, “by bringing the 
sects together, and mixing them with the mass of other 
students,” he told Cooper, now at the University of South 
Carolina, “we shall soften their asperities, liberalize and 
neutralize their prejudices, and make the general religion a 
religion of peace, reason, and morality (Jefferson, 1907, 
1465)."  To his dying day Jefferson was resolute in protecting 
the wall of separation between church and state—Virginia, 
the nation’s first real university, would be a secular 
institution centered on the library, not the Church.  It would 
also, he told Tracy in 1820 “be based on the illimitable 
freedom of the human mind, to explore and to expose every 
subject susceptible of its contemplation (Chinard, 1925, 
203).”  Tenure, equality of rank, and the elective system, 
would preserve the precious independence of thought.  But as 
the selection of faculty continued, especially after Gilmar’s 
untimely death, Jefferson’s famed toleration hardened.  
Fearing the spread of federalism, preached in the northern 
colleges attended by so many of Virginia’s youth, he sought 
to constrain teaching, especially in the all important subjects 
of law and government.  Insisting that the legislature had the 
right to ensure future leaders were weaned on correct 



43 

republican principles, he convinced the Board of Visitors to 
mandate a curriculum structured around the works of Locke, 
Sidney, the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of 
Independence, and Washington’s Valedictory Address.  He 
also insisted that the Board only hire a professor of law who 
would adopt the Whig Coke on Littleton rather than the Tory 
Blackstone.  As for moral philosophy, he jumped on 
Madison’s former student, George Tucker: a retiring senator 
from Lynchburg who had held the Jeffersonian line on 
Missouri.  His lack of experience in metaphysics was not a 
problem, Jefferson explained, for “any person with a general 
education” could quickly master “Locke, Stewart, Brown, 
[and] Tracy (McLean, 1961, 158).” In his first year, Tucker 
even taught economics from Cooper’s text on Say until the 
professorship in law was finally filled by another member of 
Madison’s coterie, John Lomax.   

Without Jefferson’s stewardship Tracy’s science of 
the mind gradually disappeared from the curriculum at 
Virginia—Tucker, for example, gravitated to the more 
standard college digest of Scottish Common Sense Realism.  
But a more enduring Ideology remained.  For while it is true, 
as Pangle and Pangle suggest that the renewed religiosity of 
the era favored the spread of denominational colleges rather 
than the secular and scientific studies pioneered by Jefferson, 
Virginia nonetheless proved a pivotal institution in the 
political culture of the Antebellum South (Pangle and Pangle, 
1993). Party, rather than social science became “Old 
Sachem’s” legacy.  Four months before his death, Jefferson 
wrote to Madison determined to preserve his republicanism. 

 
It is in our seminary that that vestal flame is to be kept 
alive; it is then to spread anew over our own and sister 
States.  If we are true and vigilant in our trust, within a 
dozen or twenty years a majority of our own 
Legislature will be from one school, and many 
disciples will have carried its doctrines home with 
them to their several States, and will have leavened 
thus the whole mass (Adams, 1888, 139).  
 

If, as Jefferson claimed, the school of law, was the “nursery 
of our Congress,” then Virginia had many influential sons 
(Adams, 1888, 139). For, as William P. Trent chronicles, in 
the first fifty years, Jefferson’s institution trained hundreds of 
students who would take leading political and professional 
roles across the South, thus helping to legitimize the distinct 
sectional culture that would pervade the political contests of 
the next generation. 

More troubling for Jefferson’s legacy, was the Old 
Dominion’s failure to establish a system of public schooling 
until the 1870s, when the reforms pushed by Horace Mann in 
Massachusetts gradually spread across the country.  Writing 
just a decade after Jefferson’s death, Mann completely 
ignored the campaign for public schooling in Virginia.  His 
view of human nature and the social good was sustained by a 
second Transatlantic “science of man,” Ideology’s successor, 
Phrenology.  Here was a moral philosophy America could 
not resist.  In addition to political arguments for a wise and 
virtuous citizenry, phrenological principles provided a 
justification for every aspect of the educational system.  

From the physical design of the school house to the choice of 
text books and the training of teachers, Mann presented what 
Jefferson could only hint at, specific and compelling 
scientific explanations for the aims. methods, and content of 
schooling in the newly urban, rapidly industrializing world. 

In an 1825 letter to Adams, Jefferson reports that he 
had “never been more gratified by the reading of a book than 
by that of Flourens.” 

 
Cabanis has gone far toward proving from anatomical 
structure and action of the human machine that certain 
parts of it were probably the organs of thought and 
that consequently matter might exercize [sic] that 
faculty.  Flourens proves that it does exercise it, and 
that deprived of the cerebrum particularly the animal 
looses all senses, all intellect, and memory, yet lives 
in health ad for indefinite terms.  It will be curious to 
see what immaterialists will oppose to this. 

(Adams and Jefferson, 605)  
 

A youthful disciple of Cabanis and Tracy, Flourens had 
praised Gall’s efforts to identify and locate the brain’s 
various mental organs.  By 1822 his attitude had changed.  
Now under the orbit of Gall’s nemesis, George Curvier, he 
presented a series of ablation and stimulation experiments 
that supported the Cartesian conception of mind.  Dividing 
the brain into six distinct regions, he showed that each area 
performed a unique role in the overall mental economy: The 
cerebrum, for example, housed sense experience, memory, 
intelligence, and free-will.  But as he demonstrated so 
sensationally, even the removal of large sections of this 
material did not lead to the total breakdown of powers.  
Opposing Gall’s localization thesis, Flourens was able to 
argue that thought was distributed throughout the entire 
region, thus proving the existence of an all controlling a moi.  
Ironically, what Jefferson read as an empirical demonstration 
of the physical causes of thought and feeling, Flourens 
intended as a refutation of materialism and brain localization.  
It is to that theory, and the aims, methods, and content of 
education it sustained, that we now turn. 
 

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