During his brief term as President of the United States John Kennedy once invited all the Western Hemisphere winners of the Nobel Prize to dinner at the White House, where he made his most famous joke, addrèssing them as ‘the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone’. This story makes a suitable point of departure in our present search for the Enlightenment in its American context for two reasons: first, because with the possible exception of Franklin, Jefferson stands as the most complete and fully representative American of the Enlightenment; and secondly because, as president – a position to which Franklin would not have aspired – Jefferson epitomises the distinctively political aspects, and one might say the political culmination, of the Enlightenment in America.

The presidential election of 1800, contested between John Adams and his old friend and colleague of the heroic years of the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, is likely to remain the only presidential contest in which the rivals were respectively presidents of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.