The Irish politician and writer who died Friday has been widely lionized. Although O’Brien was quite the liberal both in his career with the Irish Labour Party and in his work for the United Nations — under whose auspices, but without any real authorization, he waged a war against anticommunist secessionists in Katanga — a number of American conservatives venerate him for his books on Edmund Burke (The Great Melody) and Thomas Jefferson (The Long Affair). But as David Gordon showed in the Mises Review a few years back, O’Brien’s take on Jefferson — as a fanatical supporter of the French Revolution even in its bloodiest excesses — is highly inaccurate. As Dr. Gordon writes:

Conor Cruise O’Brien lets the mask drop on p. 274 of his deplorable new book. Praising another writer on Jefferson, O’Brien remarks: “What is most impressive in Miller’s book to my mind is his intuitive capacity to penetrate through Jefferson’s verbiage into Jefferson’s mind. This is the kind of capacity that tends to be held in low esteem by academic historians and indeed there are obvious reasons for a degree of skepticism concerning such a capacity” (p. 274).

Our author here perfectly epitomizes his own method. In this long tirade against Thomas Jefferson, O’Brien follows a simple course. He first dredges up a passage from Jefferson that he believes suitable for his intuitive powers. Disregarding what the text says, he enters Jefferson’s mind. Not content with enjoying his mystic powers, O’Brien feels impelled to communicate his findings to those less psychically gifted than he.

Read on for a carefully argued dismantling of O’Brien’s Jefferson book. O’Brien’s entire life and oeuvre needs to be approached with a similarly critical mind.