By GEORGE STADE
Erik Erikson's new book, an amplified version of his Jefferson Lectures of 1973, is not so much an argument as a series of preparatory hems, transitions, digressions, excurses and recapitulations in search of an argument. Had he found it, were it not always just appearing around the curve of his psychohistorical and psychoanalytic thought, it might have turned out to be about "this once-in-history chance for self-made newness" that was and is "the singular significance of the phenomenon of the United States."
As it is, Erikson keeps bumping into the multiform aspect of Thomas Jefferson, who as the representative case among "the founding personalities in the emergence of a new identity" has left his monuments at every turn. The paths around Jefferson unwind "from case history to history," from "the inner economy of a person" to "the whole ecology of greatness." We arrive finally at the vista that reveals how "the inner economy of single person is really (or also) an ecology of interrelations" -- with a particular historical situation, a local epistemological set, a concrete social scene. We are what we see, where we see it, and with whom.