THE PURSUIT OF LIBERTY

A wide-ranging study of the tense competition between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ideas of American government.

“If American history is a struggle between power and principle, the competing principles of Hamilton and Jefferson both constrain and embolden partisans on both sides, just as they constrained and emboldened Hamilton and Jefferson themselves,” writes political historian Rosen. His narrative begins with Jefferson and Hamilton themselves, with Hamilton declaring himself to be in favor of monarchy—meaning “a strong executive, not an endorsement of hereditary rule”—and Jefferson a commitment to a limited central government that ceded most power to the states. Jefferson so feared a president who would refuse to leave office that he proposed a constitutional limit of a single term; interestingly, Hamilton, by Rosen’s account, also feared “Caesarism,” worrying that a president “might take advantage of a foreign policy crisis” to stay in power. Jefferson and Hamilton were also in agreement on the three principal tenets of the Declaration of Independence, namely “liberty, equality, and government by consent,” but they disagreed vigorously on how to express them constitutionally; indeed, Jefferson’s first draft of a constitution curtailed the presidency to a one-year term by an “administrator” appointed by the House of Representatives. Hamilton held a much more expansive view of executive power, urging that “we need to be rescued from the democracy.” If these concerns sound very modern, it is because they have been with us ever since, and with the same rather schizophrenic proportions. As Rosen notes, although the Supreme Court under John Roberts has Jeffersonian dimensions, Roberts himself invoked the “Hamiltonian doctrine of judicial deference to Congress” in upholding the Affordable Care Act, while the Trump administration seems to want both states’ rights and Hamilton’s “monarchy based on corruption.”

A lucid work of political history that affords an intriguing view of the nation both in its founding years and today.