Thomas Jefferson's Ethics and the Politics of Human Progress

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).

• 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 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