ABSTRACT
The thinking of Thomas Jefferson was to lie always at the core of populism. He is the foremost exponent of American agrarian democracy. He did not invent it. He took it over from the Physiocrats of the French Enlightenment, who preached that agriculture was the noblest and most productive of occupations, that it was the duty of governments to protect and advance agriculture and that a nation's prosperity was directly dependent on the prosperity of her farms. People may loosely call them federalism, identified with the Constitution, and anti-federalism or populism, identified essentially with the Declaration of Independence. Essentially there are two major phases in populism: agrarian populism, which is basically eighteenth-century; and what people might call small-town populism, which belongs to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The novels and pamphlets of Populism and increasingly calling on government to regulate it in the interests of the individual, signifying the end of another Jeffersonian traditio.
