With The Jeffersonians, Kevin Gutzman has written a rare and welcome kind of book, one that will satisfy academic historians (insofar as academics can be satisfied), whom he engages across several highly salient scholarly questions. Students will benefit from his considerable body of research, scrupulously documented and organized in the volume’s references and indexes. But, most importantly, and impressively, Gutzman does all this heavy lifting behind a brisk and accessible, even colloquial style of writing. Combined with an exciting pace, and a keen eye for evocative detail and exemplary yarn, these make Gutzman’s account as enjoyable to the casual or hobbyist reader as any narrative history or biography on the market—and all without sacrificing any rigor whatsoever. That is a rare achievement, indeed.
Substantively, Gutzman makes a necessary intervention on behalf of Jeffersonianism as political philosophy. Too many historians reduce the Jeffersonian program to a cult of personality or a coalition-building program. It was, of course, both, and Gutzman ably unspools the details of the political and personal bulwarks of Jeffersonian power. But as Gutzman shows, Jeffersonianism was also a set of political principles, taken seriously by their adherents and exponents, and made concrete in policy across a quarter century of American history for better and often worse.
