Introduction to the morality of a slaveholder; 1. History, progress, and politics; 2. Progress in natural and moral sciences; 3. Progress and the wise man's virtue; 4. The perfectible rights of men; 5. Progressive politics; 6. Conclusions: the Jeffersonian ethics of the living.
This extensive study suggests that, despite being one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia, Jefferson was consistent in his advocacy of human rights.
Ari Helo is currently a University Lecturer in History of Science and Ideas at the University of Oulu. He earned his PhD at the University of Tampere in 1999 with a doctoral dissertation examining Thomas Jefferson's political thought. He has taught intellectual history, American studies and cultural studies at numerous universities since 1996, and worked as a visiting researcher at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for three years. Helo's articles, mainly in American intellectual history, have been published in Britain, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, The Netherlands and the United States, among them the widely noticed 'Jefferson, Morality, and the Problem of Slavery' with Peter Onuf in The William and Mary Quarterly (2003) and a survey article on Jefferson's political thought in the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson (2009).
'This is an extraordinarily important and challenging work of
scholarship. There is nothing like it in the literature: no
previous writer has offered such a comprehensive, coherent, and
compelling account of Jefferson's political, social, and ethical
thought. The thrust of Helo's argument is that the conventional
parsing out of Jefferson's thought among philosophers, political
theorists, and historians has failed to grasp its broad contours.
In place of the many Jeffersons who have proliferated in the
literature - and in popular (mis)understandings - Helo gives us a
single Jefferson who was first and foremost a political actor and
thinker and for whom wide-ranging reading always served the
interests of his fundamental political and moral commitments.'
Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor
Emeritus, University of Virginia
'… one of the richest portrayals of Jefferson to date and a welcome
contribution to Jeffersonian scholarship … highly recommended …'
Choice
'[I]n Helo's careful retracting of Jefferson's reading, his
political positions, and his correspondence, a substantially
revised - and decidedly intriguing - portrait of Jefferson as a
practical politician and a pragmatic moralist emerges … commendably
careful and thorough …' John Michael, Journal of American
History
'Helo explores the rich labyrinth of Jefferson's ethical thought,
albeit with the awareness that Jefferson was a politician, not a
philosopher … [T]he book also surveys much of the entire firmament
of Jefferson's mind, from religion and cosmology to epistemology
and metaphysics. Along the way Helo sheds fresh light on
Jefferson's various political actions, choices, and principles.
Enlivened with a sprightly, occasionally feisty, tone, this work
combines impressive learning and erudition with analytic rigor and
is consistently guided by its central methodological imperative, to
see Jefferson's thought as he saw it, in its broadest contours and
on its own terms. It is an exhilarating intellectual ride, one that
no student of Thomas Jefferson should miss.' Darren Staloff,
American Historical Review
'[A] thorough and complex contribution to Jeffersonian scholarship
… The book's five chapters walk the reader through a thicket of
Jeffersonian texts, philosophical theories, and historical facts …
[Helo] also challenges the commonly held Jeffersonian commitments
to agrarianism, constitutions, and small-government … certain
sections should certainly be parsed out and explored in other
disciplines and classrooms, especially American studies, history,
political science, and philosophy. Anthropologists of ethics and
cultural critics bent on the Foucauldian notion of self-governance
should especially consider the value of this text in terms of its
analysis of American leadership as ethical subjects in practice, in
private, and in policy production.' Casper G. Bendixsen, American
Studies
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