The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson was published by Henry Holt in 1948, Boorstin’s first book. Rather than a biography of Jefferson, it is an intellectual history of the Jeffersonian circle — Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, David Rittenhouse, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, and others — examining the worldview they shared: their understanding of nature (ordered, rational, and knowable through observation), their theology (deist, suspicious of organized religion, committed to natural law), their politics (democratic, agrarian, anti-urban), and their vision of human progress (unlimited, provided that education and reason prevailed over superstition and tyranny).
Boorstin’s method is to reconstruct this worldview not from the outside (judging it by our standards) but from the inside (understanding it on its own terms). The “lost world” of the title is not Jefferson’s Virginia but his mind — a world in which science and democracy were part of the same project, in which understanding nature and governing justly were expressions of the same rational faculty, and in which the future was guaranteed to be better than the past.
The book established Boorstin as a historian of ideas rather than a chronicler of events, and its method — reconstructing the intellectual world of a historical period from the ground up — anticipated the approach he would use throughout his career.
Collecting The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson
First edition (Henry Holt, New York, 1948): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $50–$150
- Very good/very good: $20–$60