Thomas Jefferson's Ethics and the Politics of Human Progress

The Morality of a Slaveholder

Häftad, Engelska, 2015

Av Ari Helo

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Could Jefferson claim any consistency in his advocacy of democracy and the rights of man while remaining one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia? This extensive study of Jefferson's intellectual outlook suggests that, once we fully acknowledge the premises of his ethical thought and his now outdated scientific views, he could. Jefferson famously thought the human mind to be 'susceptible of much improvement ... most of all, in matters of government and religion'. Ari Helo's thorough analysis of Jefferson's understanding of Christian morality, atheism, contemporary theories of moral sentiments, ancient virtue ethics, natural rights, and the principles of justice and benevolence suggests that Jefferson refused to be a philosopher, and did so for moral reasons. This book finds Jefferson profoundly political in his understanding of individual moral responsibility and human progress.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2015-08-06
Mått152 x 230 x 18 mm
Vikt460 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieCambridge Studies on the American South
Antal sidor298
FörlagCambridge University Press
ISBN9781107687721
UtmärkelserChoice Outstanding Academic Title 2015

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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