Understanding Thomas Jefferson.

The first page mentions Knight, Hayek, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, historian Elie Halevy, and jurist Wesley Hohfeld as intellectual sources. By page xxvii of the preface Burstein invokes Mozart, Charles Burney, and several members of the Bach family. The next eight chapters (and two annexes) discuss endogenous preferences, the Jefferson-Hamilton debate, public debt incidence, utilitarianism, the cliometrics of trade embargoes, the predictability of human behavior, and 100 percent reserve banking.

Miraculously, all the pieces of this book hang together and constitute a coherent whole. Meyer Louis Burstein has penned a wide-ranging treatment of political liberty, welfare economics, and American economic history, as well as offering up the best extant book on Jefferson as an intellect. Rarely has a book had an apter title than Understanding Thomas Jefferson, or succeeded more directly. Burstein illuminates not only the words and actions of TJ himself, but also the modern philosophical and economic frameworks needed to understand TJ's thought.

The book starts with Burstein's intellectual quest, his search for a patron saint to guide him through the pitfalls of liberalism. Like so many economic liberals, Burstein has looked to Burke, Kant, Spencer, and other classic philosophers. Being ultimately disappointed in their answers, if not their insights, he was finally drawn to America's Founding Fathers.

Burstein is the first to show us that Jefferson's views on money, banking debt, agrarianism, manufacturing, and foreign policy form an integrated intellectual whole. He refutes the notion of Jefferson as a "nostalgic pudding-head, obsessed with installing millions of Horatian farmers in the vast American wilderness." Burstein admits that Jefferson is not a mind of the highest profundity or creativity, compared to, say, Hume or Smith. But Jefferson nonetheless deserves our attention for his extraordinarily modern and, in Burstein's opinion, sensible views.

Burstein's TJ bears a remarkable resemblance to Milton Friedman. Not just to the Friedman who popularizes libertarian ideas, but also to what I call the implicit Friedman--a subtle and vastly underrated philosopher and social theorist.

Jefferson's economic policies, like Friedman's, are rooted in sound classical economics, such as Say's Law, and a belief in real, as opposed to monetary, theories of the interest rate. TJ and Friedman even shared an advocacy of 100 percent reserve banking. Their cynicism about power-seeking and politics runs deep, in Jefferson's case partly due to introspection. Both Friedman and TJ are utilitarians, without falling into a naive hedonistic calculus. They both leave just enough room for independent notions of liberty and virtue. Jefferson's materialistic metaphysics discarded the concept of the soul, and almost went so far as to eliminate the idea of the determinate self, a la Hume. Friedman, with his emphasis on predicting the behavior of collectives rather than individuals, generated a similar notion of micro-indeterminacy but macro-stability. Both eschew methodological individualism as a foundation for liberty, as does Burstein.

Both Friedman and TJ possess an extraordinarily rich sense of why these views make good practical sense. Friedman's essays appear deceptively straightforward but much is written between the lines. When a proper intellectual biography of Friedman is finally written, we will be awed by his power and depth. At least such a work has now been written on Jefferson.

The close connection between TJ and Milton--not noted by Burstein--should come as no surprise given this book's roots. Burstein, a Chicago Ph.d. from Friedman's heyday, finds his early teacher once again at the end of a 35-year intellectual quest. Both Jefferson and Friedman offer a highly practical view of liberty, fashionably requiring only a minimal set of potentially vulnerable philosophic foundations.

Burstein continues to write in his now-familiar style of ellipses, dash-points, and briefs. Many of the book's most interesting discussions are found in the footnotes. And often Burstein will lose all but the best-read readers (how many will realize that the offhand reference to Roger Penrose refers to a Platonic theory of mathematics, or be familiar with the eighteenth-century music criticism of Charles Burney?). Caveat emptor. But if you are up to a challenge, and seek enough food for years of thought, pick up, and finish, Understanding Thomas Jefferson.

Tyler Cowen George Mason University