O IDEALISMO DEMOCRÁTICO DE THOMAS JEFFERSON
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25192/issn.1982-0496.rdfd.V.31.II.3065Abstract
This article examines Thomas Jefferson’s democratic idealism, challenging the conventional view that enshrines him as the enlightened democrat par excellence. It argues that Jefferson was not, strictly speaking, either a democrat or a republican as those terms are understood today, and that the tension between his romantic, agrarian side and his Enlightenment rationalism reveals a paradoxical relationship with democracy. Four central dimensions of Jeffersonian thought are reexamined: agrarianism, presented not as mere conservatism but as the expression of a romantic vision detached from the historical reality of agricultural life; his philosophy of education, aimed at forming a natural aristocracy of the knowledgeable capable of guiding the people; the project of the University of Virginia, whose idealism collided with funding constraints and class privilege; and the “empire of liberty,” whose territorial expansion revealed exclusionary and ambiguous policies, particularly toward Native Americans. The article concludes that Jefferson’s democratic idealism tends to favor the will of an enlightened elite over the real, historically expressed popular will, helping illuminate persistent tensions within contemporary democratic thought itself, divided between the desire for direct popular government and the competing desire for government by experts.
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