Thomas Jefferson's Use of the Past
1958; Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1918708
ISSN1933-7698
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoT o the intelligent if casual observer, American preoccupation with Jefferson must prove utterly bewildering. No other revolutionary figure looms so large on the historical horizon, and certainly no other has received so frequent and so constant a testimonial to his varied talents and achievements. Thomas Jefferson has been examined as an Architect, Classical Scholar, Philosopher, Humanist, Tourist, Apostle of Americanism, and even as Himself.' Yet despite the abundant attention accorded Jefferson, the very fragmentation of scholarly studies has tended to produce a biographical portrait lacking in the firmness of line necessary to understanding. Too often Jefferson has been presented as a philosopher without a context, or a politician without consistent principles, and he is entitled to a more generous presentation: namely as an intellectual product of the Age of Reason, a Lockian idealist with a naive belief in the perfectability of man. But this, too, is only a part of the real Jefferson, and the incompleteness of the portrait has been due largely to an omission of the Jefferson historical perspective. As an American philosopher Jefferson shared with certain European contemporaries common attitudes toward history and its uses, and both his ideas of the past and his employment of those ideas contribute substantially to our understanding of Jefferson and his revolutionary generation. In 1764 Lord Chesterfield told his godson: You cannot imagine how much credit and reputation you will get in the world by knowing history well.2 But the eighteenth century had its uses for history that went
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