Thomas Jefferson republikanizmusa és a történelem progresszív felfogása
Thomas Jefferson’s republicanism and the progressive notion of history

Summary/Abstract: In this article on the most famous of the American Founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Finnish scholar, Ari Helo argues that the conventional view of Jefferson as a Lockean-inspired early modern liberal van be refuted. According to Helo, such a Lockean-liberal interpretation serves only to make Jefferson a much more inconsistent thinker than we need to believe he was. Jefferson scholarship is populated with a wide range of arguments for viewing Jefferson as a modern thinker when it comes to pluralism, the core notion of modern moral outlook. In this respect, Helo argues, some scholars have failed to distinguish the pluralism of Enlightenment thinking from a modern, if not a postmodern, understanding of the term. Asking what Jefferson’s pluralism is, then, is very much like asking what was modern about Jefferson. In order to explicate why it is Jefferson’s republicanism rather than any set of Lockean elements of his thinking that better characterizes his commitment to the modern view of history, Helo examines how republican political thought, in general, can be seen as related to modern historical thinking, and then associates it with Jefferson’s historicist view of human progress in the context of the eighteenth-century understanding of history.

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