Recent scholarship has approached Thomas Jefferson's thought in a multitude of ways, characterizing him variously as a Lockean liberal, a classical republican, a representative of the Enlightenment, and a radical Whig, to name only a few. This study argues that Jeffersonian thought was at once foundational and antifoundational, at once elevating liberty as the highest human value, and searching for the foundations for both liberty and moral self-government. The synthesis effected by Jefferson was inherently fragile. This study first examines Jefferson's effort to liberate the individual from existing forms of authority, and his corresponding embrace of nature as a foundational support for his most deeply held principles, then charts the fortunes of key Jeffersonian concepts over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention paid to the unraveling of the original Jeffersonian synthesis. Here the writings of a number of American thinkers are investigated, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Jackson Turner, William Graham Sumner, Allen Tate, John Dewey, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty and Edward O. Wilson
