トマス・ジェファソンの「自由の帝国」 : 共和政の帰結か？

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine whether Thomas Jefferson's expansionist “Empire of Liberty” was a logical consequence of his conception of the republican constitution. As is well known, since the September 11, 2001 attacks in America, the origin of the expansionist-militaristic tendency of the “imperial” United States has became one of the most widely discussed issues; and some have argued that the tendency should be interpreted as natural product of its “republicanism”, an ideological basis for many Founding Fathers in building the new nation around the end of the eighteenth century. In this inteipretation Jefferson and his term “Empire of Liberty” have often been cited as a symbol that stands for this correlation. This is because this most eloquent defender of the republic was also one of the keenest to expanding American territory both in his policy and his ideology. The author however claims that Jefferson's expansionism has in his own thinking only indirect, if important and somewhat crucial, relations with his conception of the republican constitution. He took the republican America generally as a peaceful force in an international sphere, particularly in comparison with monarchical/despotic governments in war-prone Europe. Also, Jefferson's passion for expanding the “Empire of Liberty” was mostly justified by his following three aims, none of which proves a logical correlation between his conception of the republican constitution and his expansionism: (1) to remove the threats of European powers; (2) to obtain more lands as well as to secure commercial routes in order to achieve the economic prosperity of Jefferson's ideal “agricultural” republic; and (3) to spread to the Western Hemisphere, or even to the whole world, the civilization that was embodied in America. The origin of America's expansionist empire was actually very complex, to say the least; it is thus inappropriate to ascribe its cause to a single factor, the form of its constitution.