The Jefferson Rule, David Sehat
The Jefferson Rule, David Sehat
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The Jefferson Rule
How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible

Author: David Sehat

Narrator: Tom Perkins

Unabridged: 8 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/05/2015

Synopsis

Beginning with the debate between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over the future of the nation and continuing through the Civil War, the New Deal, the Reagan Revolution, and Obama and the Tea Party, many pols have asked, "What would the Founders do?" instead of "What is the common good today?" Recently, both the Right and the Left have used the Founders to sort through such issues as voting rights, campaign finance, free speech, gun control, taxes, and war and peace. They have used an outdated context to make sense of contemporary concerns.

This oversimplification obscures our real issues. From Jefferson to this very day we have looked to the eighteenth century to solve our problems, even though the Fathers themselves were a querulous and divided group who rarely agreed. Coming to terms with the past, David Sehat suggests, would be the start of a productive debate. And in this account, which is by turns informative, colorful, and witty, he shows us why.

About David Sehat

David Sehat is an associate professor of history at Georgia State University. His first book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.

Reviews

Goodreads review by victor on August 17, 2015

Although modern ideologues and demagogues have hijacked the "Founders" for their own less than honorable designs, Sehat goes to great pains to show that there was no monolithic thought among those Founders, and hardly any consistency in their thinking. They were very much pragmatists and this was p......more

Goodreads review by Vince on May 19, 2015

[URL not allowed] Cue the broken record. From now until November of next year, we’re going to hear a lot about the Founding Fathers, the Constitution and its authors’ intentions. You can be sure that Thomas Jefferson will be cited a time or two million. But be they coming from......more

Goodreads review by Socraticgadfly on June 24, 2015

Sehat has a nice thesis, but it's relatively weakly developed, even for a pop history book, which is what this is. And, it's got some modern history "definitions" issues. On the first, he fails to distinguish between Declaration of Independence & Constitution founders, or to follow Lincoln down that......more

Goodreads review by Justin on August 14, 2017

A fantastic and easily accessible book! It takes little effort in showing the nearly endless, but very contradictory ways the "Founding Fathers" have been used in order to defend ones political ideology. Historical figures have always been torn away from any true historical setting, but just as with......more

Goodreads review by Rick on April 20, 2019

Great overview of how we got to where we are: pretty much a divided nation, with everyone pointing to early days of our nation for backup for views, and an unwillingness to actually work together and move forward. Question is: How do we solve this, move beyond it?......more

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