ABSTRACT
As a political and economic project, Jeffersonianism derived from its founder an original set of ideas that combined a strong sense of national identity with a cosmopolitan cultural approach. This approach to shaping the American spirit rested on the new way Jefferson linked politics with economics, reinforced also through his lifelong intellectual and personal contact with the French economists. In the context of the bitter political opposition of the 1790s, the Physiocratic arguments used by Jefferson’s Republicans against Hamilton’s Federalists were aimed at demolishing the reasoning of their opponents.
