Abstract
The American Lawn as a Training Ground for Civic Virtue This article seeks to refute the thesis of contemporary environmental criticism of the aesthetic origins of American lawn culture. In contrast to the prevailing view about the aesthetic autonomy of the perfect front lawn, the author traces the history of the concept back to the eighteenth-century philosophy of internal senses as reflected in the thought of Thomas Jefferson.
The author seeks to demonstrate that in Jefferson ' s processual conception of civic virtue (a foundation stone of democratic society), moral sense and the sense of beauty are entangled with the workings of cognitive capacities. Thus, the architectural and landscape designs of Jefferson (as well as of those of his successors, A.
J. Downing, F.
L. Olmsted, and F.
S. Scott) perform an aesthetic, moral, educative, and, above all, political function.
The ideas discovered in Jefferson ' s work are followed throughout the nineteenth-century industrialization and the spread of suburban housing to the emerging of post-war residential colonies, imposing 'lawn politics ' by means of legal and social pressures.