In Search of Jefferson's Moose, by David Post

This is a book that might have passed me by if the Cato Institute hadn't invited me on to a panel today to talk about it. Subtitled "Notes on the State of Cyberspace", it is a quirky and improbable work, and evidently a labour of love: reflections on Jeffersonian ideas of freedom interwoven with an essay on the law, culture and politics of the internet. A difficult book to summarise, but a remarkably successful one, I think. I loved it.

The moose in the title is the preserved animal, seven feet tall at the shoulder, that Jefferson had shipped over to Paris when he lived there to rebut the popular notion that the New World's creatures were smaller than (thus inferior to) their Old European counterparts. I refute it thus. Jefferson had seemingly limitless intellectual interests, but was much preoccupied with the awesome spaces beyond the frontier. The moose was partly meant to jolt his European visitors into thinking about the limitless possibilities of the new. To start with, Post wants to do something similar for modern readers: look at the internet afresh, and be amazed.

The book then thinks through Jefferson's ideas about law and the prospects for an "extended republic" of free self-governing societies, and finds applications to the internet. What would Jefferson have made of it all? Seeing the questions reframed in this way is enlightening. Post, a law professor at Temple University, has classical liberal leanings, but doesn't offer cut-and-dried answers to questions about privacy, anonymity, free speech, private and public regulation, and all the other legal and political issues that cyberlaw specialists engage with, but he gets you thinking about them in a new way. I recommend this strange and absorbing book very warmly.

Here is a fuller review.