Understanding that the world is incoherent informs Annette Gordon-Reed’s work.

Gordon-Reed:    Well, I think, you know, one of the things that you learn in law school pretty early on is that people are incoherent.  That you can’t … people have motives that they don’t even understand on their own.  They don’t understand their lives and then your clients come in and they tell you their problems.  They may not be telling you the truth and you have to try to figure out what the truth is.  All kinds of… people are mixed up and you can’t really expect coherence from them.  And I think that people who have studied Jefferson more so than other areas maybe he’s because he’s a founding father, maybe this is something that people fall prey to when they’re thinking about founding fathers expect the kind of coherence from them that really is not realistic.  And then when he’s not coherent, they get mad at them and they’re critical of him because he’s not coherent when… I think my training as lawyer, we try to teach our students from the very beginning that people are sort of crazy by nature and you can’t expect all of this stuff to fit.  So, I think that kind of view of the world informs.  I don’t go in and say, oh, it’s impossible for this person to have felt that.  It’s impossible for this person to do that.  Nobody would ever do that because people [just thought rational] and they don’t work that way, and so that sensibility informs I think my work.