Thomas Jefferson got his ideas most certainly in part from his own genius. But that genius was fed by being an avid reader. The Internet opens Jefferson’s ideas and his reading globally. The image of his books shown here is from the Thomas Jefferson Library online exhibition at the Library of Congress website. The Library at Monticello, Jefferson’s Virginia home, provides more of his reading and thinking. To learn from a scholar of how Jefferson built his ideas on the shoulders of giants, you can sit in on a lecture by Yale University’s Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science Steven B. Smith. Videotaped from a course on Introduction to Political Philosophy the lecture describes the influence of Locke and other political thinkers on Thomas Jefferson:
John Locke had such a profound influence on Thomas Jefferson that he may be deemed an honorary founding father of the United States. He advocated the natural equality of human beings, their natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and defined legitimate government in terms that Jefferson would later use in the Declaration of Independence. Locke’s life and works are discussed, and the lecture shows how he transformed ideas previously formulated by Machiavelli and Hobbes into a more liberal constitutional theory of the state.
