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Book Reviews: American Politics
When political parties structured our political thought, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson symbolized the poles of our theoretical and constitutional possibilities. "Hamiltonian" represented psychological, political, and economic realism anchored in the executive and judicial powers of the Constitution. The short title of a book on Hamilton is The Effective Republic (Harvey Flaumenhaft, 1992). "Jeffersonian" represented both strict readings of federal constitutional powers represented by the Bill of Rights and a democratic civic republicanism whose natural home was the state governments. The short title of a book on Jefferson is The Elusive Republic (Drew McCoy, 1980). Merrill Peterson's classic history, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1960), can also be read as its opposite, a study of the Hamilton image. American political time itself was marked by Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian epochs. Even as the Civil War, Progressivism, and the New Deal quite confounded these neat divisions, we persist in calling upon their contending legacies. As the two books reviewed here make clear, the difficulty in attempts to enlist either figure in today's hyper-partisan political environment is, symbolically and literally, constitutional. When in deep doubt regarding the American prospect, we seem fated to return to our founding.
Michael Federici's analysis of Hamilton's constitutional, political, and economic writings has two main elements: situating his thought within the larger traditions of political philosophy and canvassing the vast and contending literatures on Hamilton during his life and ever after. The latter literatures were facilitated because few of his contemporaries (especially Jefferson) were as willing as Hamilton to go public with their views--and few were as eloquently candid and pugnacious in clarifying hard public choices, so much so that he was branded an un-American agent of monarchy and aristocracy. The former element calls upon a host of political philosophers and statesmen in whom Federici sees kindred spirits in Hamilton's political thought and practices: Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith are prominent, but it was the English Whig Edmund Burke who stands foremost. Burke was a fiscal and constitutional reformer and an implacable enemy of French revolutionary ideology, and he hated slavery.
Animating Hamilton's choice of philosophical antecedents and his political reasoning is what Federici terms a realist philosophical anthropology...