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Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia was written in answer to Queries proposed by Francois Marbois, who sought information about American states. This book consists of 23 queries, which range in subject from nature of Virginia to human institutions. Marbois asked 22 questions and Jefferson rearranged them into a new sequence. This means that the book is carefully plotted and structured to manifest the author’s plan for establishing an agrarian republic in the new land. Jefferson finds nature not arbitrary or pointless but orderly and constant. His social and political theories for a new republic are based on these natural principles. For Jefferson, American nature and land are a kind of ground where his social, economic, and political theories are formed and cultivated. The American land, therefore, becomes the ideological landscape to which farmers are central. Jefferson’s farmer whom he sets as the American character is independent and democratic. His agrarian republic is an embodiment of what Leo Marx calls the middle landscape or pastoralism. Jefferson projects order, harmony, and composure he finds in this landscape into the self-image of America, and then integral national self. Confronting social disintegration posed by social and cultural heterogeneity, Jefferson wants his republic to be homogeneous, egalitarian, and, most of all, conflict-free. This state, he believes, can keep the republic orderly, stable, and unified. Thus, to keep his republic safe, he tries to erase the heterogeneity such as slavery, immigrants, native Americans, and manufacturing, which leads to monoculturalism.

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 [Abstract]

저자

• 김은성 [ Eunseong Kim | 고려대학교 ]

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