Thomas Jefferson and the Politics of Nature. Edited by Thomas S. Engeman. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. 232p. $17.00 paper.

This volume offers, as its blurb asserts, "substantive discussions of the key issues facing Jeffersonian scholars." Beginning with Michael Zuckert's by now familiar argument that Jefferson's thought is best understood as resting in a Lockean natural rights framework, other able scholars more or less take issue with this analysis by appealing both to Jefferson's own writings and to the works of major interpreters of the political thought of the founding era. The result is a serious reconsideration of Jefferson's thought that ...