Interpreting Jefferson Today

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From the course by University of Virginia

Age of Jefferson

243 оценки

University of Virginia

Age of Jefferson

243 оценки

This course provides an overview of Thomas Jefferson's work and perspectives presented by the University of Virginia in partnership with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Together, UVA and Monticello are recognized internationally as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

From the lesson

Thomas Jefferson, American Icon

Thomas Jefferson is an American icon. He has also been one of the most polarizing and controversial figures in American history. In this introductory module, we’ll explore how Jefferson’s reputation has changed and evolved over the last two centuries. We’ll discover what Jefferson considered to be his most important contribution to the “Age of Enlightenment” in which he was living. We’ll discuss why some people in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have viewed Jefferson and his ideas with skepticism or worse while others have embraced Jefferson. Overall, learning about how people from many different backgrounds and perspectives have interpreted Jefferson throughout history will help us understand why it’s so important to think critically and honestly about Jefferson’s life and legacy today.

Jefferson’s Reputation from the Civil War to the Cold War18:31

Interpreting Jefferson Today10:52

Meet the Instructors

Professor Peter S. Onuf
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
Corcoran Department of History

But Jefferson's reputation keeps oscillating.

It goes up and down.

Now there's been a powerful revival of the idea, that Jefferson

discredits his own ideas, and that we need a new iconic figure.

Somebody else, who would better symbolize, epitomize,

the meaning of American Democracy.

I'd say that Jefferson remains important to us, precisely because

we can't make up our minds about him. Because he is so controversial.

But because he represents in that one visionary

extreme all that we imagine that America stands for.

All of its possibilities.

On the other hand, we see, well, what are we really up

to after all? Oh, profit seeking.

Taking care of ourselves.

Well, this is incredibly ambitious agenda for us to talk about.

These ideas of care freshen as a filter, as the

lens is awake, to try to recover the real man.

Is that possible?

Is it possible to put him in his world? Well,

I'm going to suggest a couple of ways we do that.

And I think we might learn something about ourselves as we do this.

Well, the first thing to keep in mind is, as a,

an English novelist once put it, the pat is a foreign country.

Jefferson lived in a different world.

Jefferson's world is not our world, it's connected.

In fact, that's the challenge, what is the nature of that connection.

Some of that connection is through

the very idea that we keep talking about him.

Here we are, spending an entire course, the whole

world has to look on and learn about Jefferson, why?

Why is he so interesting and important?

Why do we need Jefferson?

Well, before we come up with some answers, and maybe by the end

of the course we'll do that, let's start by thinking about Jefferson's house.

Jefferson's

Monticello.

And think about his claims to have discovered, and made real implement.

These new enlightened ideas about politics.

Is Jefferson really a new world visionary?

Well, that's a rhetorical question, the answer is no.

And let's look at that house. That house, for Jefferson, represents

his personal effort to finally build a decent building in Virginia.

What does Jefferson say about Virginia

architecture, there's not a decent building

including, forgive me my friends at William and Mary, the Wren building.

The so-called Wren Building at William and Mary in Williamsburg.

It's like a brick kiln.

At least it's bricks.

But maybe there's a downside to a

brick building, because they can't burn down easily.

The great thing about Virginia architecture is planned obsolesence.

Now, there's an American idea.

When you look around in three or four years, half of the

buildings that had been standing wouldn't be standing anymore, because it's trash.

Jefferson's building for the ages, maybe that's a

nice image of what Jefferson thinks he's doing.

And what

is he building for the ages?

He's building an example of the best

possible architecture, drawing on classical prototypes ideas.

Because, you know, what's really good in architecture is not historically dated.

It's not like rock and roll. It's forever.

You go back,

with Palladio, the Italian architects to the classical models or prototypes.

You go to Paris, and we'll go to Paris with Jefferson in due course.

You go to Paris and you see one of the good things about all the

great wealth that the old regime, that is

the old aristocratic monarchical world of France, produces.

This enormous wealth that leads to the patronage of the arts.

That leads to building great buildings. And Jefferson's Monticello

will be a great building, but it will be not like the kind of just of Newport.

It will be a modest, self-deprecating, republican with a

small r, house. That makes a statement about how,

Americans can promote the progress of architecture and

everything else. Follow my example, my fellow Virginians.

Build your courthouses according to my design.

Build the capital according to my design.

Build the Virginia capital according to the model of the [UNKNOWN].

Do these things and you will show the rest of the world, that civilization's

progress was not interrupted with the American Revolution, it was accelerated.

And here perhaps, is a good place for us to begin this course with an

idea that Jefferson is simultaneously starting something new as he imagines it.

A new world,

but he's also promoting the progress of something old, even timeless.

This is the paradox at the heart of that whole universal natural rights program.

It's a story that plays itself out across history in time.

But, takes us back in the biggest cycle of all to the eternal verities of creation.

A sort of sublimated, deistic vision of what

God intended, nature's God intended in creation itself.

God is not interested in these little cycles.

God is a big picture kind of guy.

God sees the trajectory, the arc.

Of American and world history moving forward.

In order for Jefferson

to believe this, he has to identify profoundly

with a very old world that he repudiates.

There's a real tension here, and these are my concluding comments today.

A real tension between that progressive, forward looking Jefferson.

You might say there are two varieties of exceptionalism in this notation.

That this is a chosen people, this is a chosen

land that the American experiment is unique in World History.

The one version looking forward progressively with Jefferson,

is one that appeals profoundly to peoples everywhere.

That's the, the Jefferson we and Franklin Roosevelt memorialized.

That's the inspiring icon of democracy.

Even in Jefferson himself, there's a counterpoint to this.

A more regressive vision.

A vision

of a lost paradise, of a better time. For Jefferson, ironically

it's July 4th, 1776. That was a moment when Jefferson

could look around and imagine that Virginians, all Virginians.

All Americans were rallying to the cause, of liberty and freedom and justice.

And it's because the

feeling is his feeling is of a lost of virtual.

That Americans are not attending to the Republic, to

the public thing of all Americans and of the world.

Of setting an example for the world.

So even in the 1780s, Jefferson imagines that

we've fallen from grace, or might fall from grace.

This is the cycle of Jefferson's psychic political life, hopes

for the future, fears that those hopes would be squandered.

And as he fears, for backsliding Americans not

living up virtuously to the promise of the revolution.

Increasingly, he begins to focus on that one moment,

that moment when the American promise seems so real.

And was even fulfilled, the promise of the declaration of Independence.

And this leads us to what I would call a regressive

or reactionary exceptionalism, when we look back to a golden moment,

to a golden age, what does America need, my fellow

Americans.

America needs to return to that moment, that primal foundational moment.

We need to live up to our ancestor's high standard.

Here's a nice, concluding paradox.

Jefferson tells us that the world belongs to the living.

That would be you, young people.

Dead hand of the past, fades away.

You living people are going to make the future.

Yet he also tells us, that the fathers. He

and the fathers created this great country, and we must

never lose sight of the fundamental principles on

which our democracy is built. In other words, it's up to you folks.

Create the kind of world you want. Only it better be just like mine.

That's two different kinds of exceptionalism.

I distinguish them in order to make clear

these tendencies, but I would suggest to you.

That these exceptionalisms are inextricable.

That they exist simultaneously in the American mind.

Or I should say American minds. And that's why Americans need therapy.

[MUSIC]

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