The
Fifteenth Annual Series (2003-2004)
of the LeFrak Forum
and
Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy:
Christopher
Hitchens
on
JEFFERSON
AND ‘AMERICAN EMPIRE’
Lectures
were held on
January 21&22 and February 11&12,
2004
Christopher
Hitchens, one of our most distinguished, prolific, and
provocative public intellectuals, delivered a series
of four
lectures on Jefferson and America's role in the world.
The lectures were based on a book in progress.
“All
honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete
pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single
people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce
into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth,
applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it
there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be
a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of
re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” —Abraham
Lincoln (1859)
According
to Lincoln, Jefferson “was, is, and perhaps will continue
to be, the most distinguished politician of our history” (1854).
Mr. Hitchens argues that Jefferson, like the country he
helped found, is a paradox. On the one hand, he was an
apostle of the Enlightenment, a committed revolutionary
(in 1789 as well as 1776), an impassioned critic of religious
orthodoxy, and a champion of the Ordinance of 1787, which
prohibited slavery in the Northwest territories. On the
other hand, he was a slave owner who chose not to emancipate
his slaves, a defender of states’ rights and sometimes
apologist for the interests of the South, and the architect
of the Louisiana purchase and a tacit defender of the extension
of slavery into the Louisiana territories. According to
Mr. Htichens, this paradox finds its fullest expression
in Jefferson's conviction that America ought to be a “superpower” dedicated
to the promotion of “an empire of liberty,” a
paradoxically imperial expression of the original revolutionary
impulse. Throughout the lectures, Mr. Hitchens will employ
Thomas Paine, Jefferson’s ally and critic, as a witness
and commentator. |
