Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood

This book identifies Jefferson as an American nationalist and describes his assessment of American character and democratic promise.

This book describes Thomas Jefferson as the essential teller of what he once called the 'American Story' and argues that his confidence about America's greatness was rooted less in his famously cosmic optimism and more in his extensive empirical assessment of American character.This book emphasises the centrality of nationhood to Thomas Jefferson's thought and politics, envisioning Jefferson as a cultural nationalist whose political project sought the alignment of the American state system with the will and character of the nation. Jefferson believed that America was the one nation on earth able to realise in practice universal ideals to which other peoples could only aspire. He appears in the book as the essential narrator of what he once called the 'American Story': as the historian, the sociologist and the ethnographer; the political theorist of the nation; the most successful practitioner of its politics; and its most enthusiastic champion. The book argues that reorienting Jefferson around the concept of American nationhood recovers an otherwise easily missed coherence to his political career and helps make sense of a number of conundrums in his thought and practice.