Nature's Man: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophical Anthropology Maurizio Valsania Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013.

Nature's Man: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophical Anthropology Maurizio Valsania Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013.Maurizio Valsania describes the central core of Nature's Man: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophical Anthropology as presenting Jefferson's "philosophical anthropology concretely, " (Chapter Two) forming the body ("Jefferson's Communitarianism") "that cannot be split, and to which two limbs are attached": theoretical (Chapter One) and (Chapter Three) consequences of communitarianism (10). Drawing on Carl Degler's image of the past as a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces yet to be added, Valsania views "the past as a series of layers and possibilities allowing multiple interpretations" (11). To understand Jefferson's moral coherence, important words, capable of being defined in many ways, "must be perfectly calibrated" (8). The book treats operative conceptual terms as "metaphors and descriptors that do not refer to an absolute" but should be treated "as containers where content and meaning have to be drawn each time from the context" (9). While the preliminary chapter examines Jefferson's modernity, individualism, and degree of his break with tradition, Chapter Two presents Jefferson's complex communitarianism, and Chapter Three complicates modern readers' negative understanding of Jefferson's "brutal system of exclusion" (151).Jefferson inherited an "extended cultural environment" that included the seventeenth century and the "intellectual hegemony" (8) of the eighteenth century. For his definition of modernity, and his understanding of communitarianism, he was indebted (47) to many for his ideas, including Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke, earning the epitaph of "trinity of immortals" by Jefferson (22), the pessimist Thomas Hobbes (21), moralists Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, Lord Karnes, and Richard Price (47), and much farther back, Jesus of the first century C.E., epistemological sens ism from many, including the Greek Epicurus, eighteenth century Condillac, La Mettrie, Helvetius, Diderot, and d' Holbach. Valsania says "culture has marched consistently toward individualism" (30), and Jefferson, framed within a society that was typically "in-between" [old and new (40)] evidences a paradox of modernity and traditionalism (6). Traditionalism held to a strong link between God and humans (13); modernity, on the other hand, "rebutted the traditional hierarchy" [humans higher than animals, man superior to women, "whites over blacks, the pope over the king, and kings and nobles over the common sort" (14)], and drove in the direction of science and naturalism, and "imbricated [human beings] in animality" (5). Jefferson, nonetheless, like other eighteenth century figures, tried "to turn the tide of the Enlightenment in the direction of a modernized, minimalized Christianity" (39). Thus, he viewed human beings as "naturalized and materialized" (39), but, at the same time, humans have "implanted in their breasts... a moral sense" (21) that becomes a foundation for morality. "The postulate of a physical-moral parallelism [a moral sense] provided the starting point to Jefferson's moral reasoning and, more generally, one basis of his modernity" (23). …