Enlightenment
Thomas Jefferson
1743–1826
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Thomas Jefferson was a Virginia planter, lawyer, and American statesman who drafted the . He put natural rights and government by consent into a public charter for a new republic. In letters and the he defended public schooling, local self-rule, and a natural aristocracy of virtue and talent drawn from the people by free election. His own practice left slavery unresolved. The American conversation still works in his vocabulary of equality and popular rule.
In the Conversation
1 of the Great Ideas