But in a sense, a great deal of what they thought, said and did was self-evident.
I agree with much of what you wrote, Iggy, but I think this does them a disservice, though I understand what you are saying is that in a sense truth is self-evident if you shed your ideological biases and rely on the accumulated wisdom of our great thinkers. Still, their ability to foresee so much, at the level of detail, as an example, in the Hamilton quote about impeachment, goes beyond self-evident truths.
They weren't perfect. One could argue they erred with the "general welfare" and interstate commerce clauses, that ended up being invitations to tyranny. And maybe Hamilton was a bit too sanguine about a strong central government. But I bet none of them would be surprised today to see how far down we've fallen, and would perhaps only be amazed that it took this long.
Speaking of the wisdom of the founders
George Washington was strongly against the political parties. He feared their growing influence and warned of the “continual mischiefs of the spirit of party”. He thought that it would lead to “the alternate domination” of each party, taking revenge on each other in the form of reactionary political policies, and that it would eventually cause the North and South to split.
--Still, their ability to foresee so much...goes beyond self-evident truths.--
jimmy,
That's what I meant by "their particular genius". They took the West's accumulated wisdom and laid out a means by which to enshrine it in the founding documents in order to preserve liberty.
And as for them being shocked at how far we've slid and the mischief we've gotten up to regarding the commerce clause etc, that's why they knew if we didn't continue to stand on those same virtuous shoulders they did, whatever they had wrought would rot.
Our founding fathers didn't just look to tradition and ancient wisdom. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776. Eleven years after that, out constitution was signed.
We marvel our beautifully designed constitutional structure with its checks and balances. It was designed to rely on members of the three branches each defending their own turf. Or to put it another way, it was designed with the idea that men would act in their own best interests.
I think that is the greater genius -- that they designed a government that was not intended to rely on the virtue of those in charge. Very libertarian in today's sense of the word.
Shooting from the hip here, but I'm not aware of any of the national constitutions developed since ours was, that have put such a reliance on self interest as a way of promoting integrity. Nor are there any national constitutions that have been as successful as ours.
It's tempting to say that it was sheer genius to promote individual liberty as the foundation for greatest world power in history. But I really believe that our great power and wealth are really the unintended consequences of liberty.
A very articulate post. One thing I have done with my son is to make sure he understands our constitution and how it was created and why. I have always felt "the why" was more important than "the how".
In his US History class they have formed teams to debate whether creating our republic was necessary or an over-reaction. That question has never been asked as far as I know. But an intesting way for our kids to understand life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Thanks, Jack. Now there's a question that would never have occurred to me: Was creating our republic an over-reaction? I'd like to hear how your son answers that one.
Which leads me to further speculation around our founding and the founding fathers. People of their time might have thought of Adam Smith as edgy and pseudo-intellectual. Imagine thinking of our country's founding as driven by a fad. Of course, with the perspective of a couple hundred years, it's safe to say Smith's ideas didn't turn out to be a fad.
But I think it was quite a lucky thing that our founders were subject to the intellectual influence of Adam Smith right when they were drawing up their plans.
An intellectual fad i dont think so, now the french revolution and rousseau was probably closer to that. One might argue the proxinate course of the first was the debt incurred from the french indian war as the second was the american revolution, also the little cooling period wrought havoc on the harvest of 1788.
--Our founding fathers didn't just look to tradition and ancient wisdom. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776. Eleven years after that, out constitution was signed.--
We're not in disagreement. I think I noted that, unlike the Frogs, they used the best parts of The Enlightenment which Smith was one of the great thinkers of.
But the entire enterprise, including The Enlightenment was built on the framework of Western Civilization.
Adam Smith and John Locke's ideas were not ultimately antithetical to that civilization. Spinoza and especially Rousseau's, brought to their inevitable extremes in the French Republic were.
We are not in disagreement, Ig. Nor are we Narciso.
Its agood rhetorical question, the soil was ready in the colonies case, too luch water in the french case and a century later the ground was too dry in russia.
The french revolution scared catherine away from continuing reforms.
IRT discussion of the Founders. This has been on my refrigerator door for eight years, it appears from the date of publication!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703959604576152742545048826
Our Founders Were All on the Same Page
In regard to Donald Kochan's wonderful "Reading Adam Smith in Arabic" (op-ed, Feb. 17) about the importance of exposing the Arab world to the ideas of Western democracies: It is important to remember that the men who met to write the U.S. Constitution were able to do so in less than four months because they were, excepting regional and personal differences, quite literally on the same page.
They had all read the same books: Locke's "Two Treatises on Government," Montesquieu's "The Spirit of the Laws," Rousseau's "The Social Contract," Voltaire's writings and those of Adam Smith. They had read deeply, and often in Latin, the Roman writers on civil life: Virgil, Cicero and Tacitus. These books gave the founding fathers a vocabulary in which to conduct a discourse about what a government ought to be and do.
Prof. Kochan is right. These ideas are our greatest gift to countries attempting to form relations between a state and its people.
Cabell Smith
Pacific Palisades, Calif.
The discussions about the drivers behind the language of the Declaration of Independence today have been very interesting.
In the genealogy research Mrs. Buckeye has been doing, she has uncovered many documents that date to the Revolution. Historical accounts, family wills, etc.
Both of us are descendants of veterans of the Revolution that staked their claim to lands set aside in the parts of Ohio that were the Virginia military district.
The sense I have after reading these documents is that these pioneers wanted their 160 acres, thank you very much, and just get the hell out of the way. They knew they were on their own, and there was little the government could/would do on their behalf.
I suspect fighting and dying for a decade had a significant contributor to that attitude.
An interesting factoid about our constitution is that Jefferson proposed it be revised every generation. I am suprised the Progs haven't used that in all their repeal the electoral college arguments. Which tells me they are absolutely ignorant of our Constitution and its rights it bestows on Citizens.
Ignatz:
I was trying to remember the original quote touting the importance of virtue in re governance, and came across a whole page of Liberty and Virtue citations, although the background was so distracting that I copy/pasted it into a blank document to read it. It includes comments from the founders and their contemporaries, like this one from Jean Jacques Rousseau, "A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue," up to something actually worth contemplating from George Will, "Today it would be progress if everyone would stop talking about values. Instead, let us talk, as the Founders did, about virtues."
That said, I have to disagree with your assertion that, "Their particular genius was to then know how to codify those traditional virtues." I think they were rather remarkable for not attempting to do any such thing. The closest they might be said to have come was the Bill of Rights, a proscriptive list which presumes a certain lack of virtue.
I certainly believe the Founders were generally in accord over the necessity of and relationship between both private and civic virtue. Indeed the 18th century definition of happiness owed more to the Epicurean sense of civic virtue as the most gratifying ideal, than to happiness as we understand it today. In fact, Jefferson once claimed:
I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.
Then again, you can find supporting quotes from Jefferson on almost any side of almost any issue. He once looked forward to the day when we would be a country of Unitarians.
While I'm not sure exactly how dramatically we differ, I do think your assertion that, "They were men shorn almost completely of ideology," seems wildly overstated, especially considering the arguments and politicking that went into both our revolution and the Constitution which emerged from it. It was a time of great intellectual winds blowing in many directions, and I believe the Founders were fully conscious of embarking on something new. Nor were they of one accord when it came to whose shoulders they were standing on. Jefferson, it seems, was not always on the "same page" with himself:
Jefferson in many ways doubted the classical world was the original mold upon which the American experiment had to be built. He was sure the ancients knew all but nothing about revolution and, more generally, that looking backward for precedents was not suitable to the American republican character.
There were others who rejected anything that smacked of Hellenism. Jefferson quotes are just the easiest to find, but there was a real range of attitudes and philosophies among the group as a whole. Yes, they emerged from the Western Civ/Judeo-Christian tradition, but so did the revolutionaries in France who represent a different face of that shared background.
The founders were, by and large, educated, landholding businessmen (in which group I would include farmers). I would argue that that, in and of itself, is a pivotal, foundational and structural difference between the American & French revolutions, which affected the course of their histories every step of the way. By the time the French got around to rejecting religion outright, their trajectory was already well-set. Unlike the U.S., the French revolution exploded forth from a landless, initially urban, class with centuries worth of animus toward the upper, educated, landholding, entitled classes. That may be the most significant difference between the two, IMO.
We were also extremely lucky that an ocean lay between us and our Continental contemporaries. If we had been a contiguous land mass, we'd have been carved up like Poland before a Constitutional Convention was even a gleam in our founders' eyes. The French revolution was buffeted by the crosswinds of European great power interests in powerful storms we never had to weather. The post-war peace afforded us the time & space to actually argue about the arrangement of our government.
I think we all an agree that The Founder's weren't smart enough to draft the eligibility requirements without leaving a loophole for a British Subject to become Commander in Chief of The United States Armed Forces.
Or maybe they did it on purpose???
—They had all read the same books: Locke's "Two Treatises on Government," Montesquieu's "The Spirit of the Laws," Rousseau's "The Social Contract," Voltaire's writings and those of Adam Smith.—
How many have read these today? How many of our supposed leaders in government could tell you the first thing about these thinkers? I bet not one in ten. And of those, not one in ten understood them.
jimmyk, I consider anything by Rousseau to be suspect. Cite one worthwhile concept in his "The Social Contract”.
JMH, Rousseau’s "A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue" is a meaningless platitude.
And what is this "virtue" of which they speak but do not define? Far more sensible is Emerson’s better crafting of Dictionary Johnson’s “The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.”
Jefferson was a marvelous wordsmith adept at borrowing words, but what did the evidence show he believed? He proved all in for Virginia and not much for the nation.
The Constitution did not so much trust in virtue as not trust anyone. Therein lies wisdom. We are, after all, human.
Over reliance on Rousseau produced the French Revolution.
When I was in ROTC at UC even taking an Engineering curriculum I had to take the Philosophy of Democracy which included Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire. I remember all of us looking at each other shrugging our shoulders and about the 4th or 5th class it dawned on all of us. It was how we began as a country.
BTW, it was a requirement of ROTC not my engineering curriculum. Wonder how ROTC promotes the elements of democracy today?
These books gave the founding fathers a vocabulary in which to conduct a discourse about what a government ought to be and do.
Ben Franklin weighs in on the future government book club:
From Benjamin Franklin to Charles-Guillaume-Frédéric Dumas, 9 December 1775
To Charles-Guillaume-Frédéric Dumas
Reprinted from The Port Folio, ii (1802), 236–7; extracts: American Philosophical Society; Archives du Ministère des affaires étrangères, Paris; Algemeen Rijksarchief, the Hague.1
Philadelphia December 9, 1775.Dear sir,
I received your several favours, of May 18, June 30, and July 8, by Messrs. Vaillant and Pochard....
....I am much obliged by the kind present you have made us of your edition of Vattel. It came to us in good season, when the circumstances of a rising state make it necessary frequently to consult the law of nations. Accordingly, that copy which I kept, (after depositing one in our own public library here, and sending the other to the college of Massachusetts Bay, as you directed3) has been continually in the hands of the members of our congress, now sitting, who are much pleased with your notes and preface, and have entertained a high and just esteem for their author.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-22-02-0172
Yes, the same Vattel that defined a Natural Born Citizen to one who is born with attachments to only one sovereignty.
--That said, I have to disagree with your assertion that, "Their particular genius was to then know how to codify those traditional virtues." I think they were rather remarkable for not attempting to do any such thing. The closest they might be said to have come was the Bill of Rights, a proscriptive list which presumes a certain lack of virtue.--
The Constitution codifies the virtues of life, liberty, property rights, equality before the law, limited government, individual rights, religious liberty, self reliance, self defense, self governance, freedom of speech and thought and a host of others. All of those stem from our Western Civilizational heritage and the things the Founders proscribe, they proscribe precisely because they destroy the virtues and liberties they were promoting and preserving.
I didn't say they codified every virtue, large and small toted up by an army of Scholastics, but that they relied upon the great edifice of Western Civilization. They did.
--While I'm not sure exactly how dramatically we differ, I do think your assertion that, "They were men shorn almost completely of ideology," seems wildly overstated, especially considering the arguments and politicking that went into both our revolution and the Constitution which emerged from it.--
I'm not using ideology in the current unfortunate sense of any group of ideas that inform anyone's political thoughts, but in the earlier and more useful one of a systematic worldview not particularly susceptible to rational argument and usually at some level utopian in nature. As I've noted many times here James Burnham makes the critical distinction between a political philosophy such as conservatism and a dogmatic ideology like leftism.
That the Founders were one of the least utopian, least ideological [in the sense I mentioned] and most profoundly practical [and virtuous] groups of political philosophers in history seems pretty indisputable to me. That is why Edmund Burke was so sympathetic to colonists revolting against the very parliament he was a member of to establish a practical and free republic and so hostile to the idiotic ideologues in France creating a utopian republic upon a mound of severed heads of people he considered his nation's enemies.
Of course, we can recite our history lessons about the Constitution but what about how it is implemented today? Since 1913, we have been on a slippery slide away from the basic tenets of the constitution and its advice as a republic.
Who and when do we restore its original intent?
sbw, the reason to read Rousseau is to see his errors and negative influence, and contrast him with Locke and others. But my point is more general and not specific. Skip Rousseau if you like, but know the thinkers who most influenced the Founding Fathers.
jimmyk:
"How many have read these today? How many of our supposed leaders in government could tell you the first thing about these thinkers?"
Perhaps the more salient question is why are those who do understand them not running for office, or participating in a more active way than simply casting a ballot now and then?
jimmyk, I take your point.
It is important to be able to critically examine and refute the proposals of others to show how they are either impractical or they lead to unacceptable consequences.
Too many today have lost — or never gained — the ability to consider alternatives, understand them clearly, and integrate/reject them as necessary.
sbwaters:
"Far more sensible is Emerson’s better crafting of Dictionary Johnson’s “The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.”
Alas, I guess Emerson was just not around, when we needed him. Otherwise your point is basically the same one I made at the end of my second paragraph in reference to a certain lack of virtue being the operating principle behind the Bill of Rights.
A platitude is not necessarily meaningless, of course, especially in this particular case when discussing the role of virtue in governance generated by revolution.
sbw, I had to read Marx (Communist Manifesto) at some point. Glad I did, to know what pathetic garbage it is. Just a bunch of platitudes. Hard to believe anyone over the age of 16 ever took it seriously.
My concern, JMH, is that for those who insist on a role for virtue in government never seem able to explain the virtue they seek.
I'm more of a character kind of guy. Character is individual and independent of government structure.
There is no role for virtue in governance. There is a role for character in deciding for whom to vote in and out of government.
jimmyk: I had to read Marx
I read just enough to know I didn’t have to read any more.
TK:
"Yes, the same Vattel that defined a Natural Born Citizen to one who is born with attachments to only one sovereignty."
That's like your personal version of Epstein didn't hang himself!
jib: Who and when do we restore its original intent?
I’m with you. To do that we need to laugh down the postmodernists who claim:
1) history is what you cherry-pick and lie about to fashion the future you want,
2) words mean what they say they mean, and
3) you can’t say what "offends" me.
Any one or more of those points undermines civil discourse necessary to even consider restoring the Constitution to its original intent.
Those who will not engage in civil discourse have abandoned civil society for the Law of the Jungle. That is their prerogative, of course. We just have to recognize when, by their actions, they do.
As for Rousseau--anyone in college who liked that miscreant was on his way to hippiedom. Phony baloney.
I had a longstanding debate with one of my brothers in law who adored Jefferson. I regard him in some ways as another phony. Ben Franklin, however, is my favorite..I think my b-i-l is coming around to that point of view.
Did you know Hamilton's mom might well have been Jewish. Rachel taught him Hebrew and he read from the Bible in Jewish day school.. https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/189128/alexander-hamiltons-jewish-connection. I expect along with the enlightenment worthies, everyone of the founding fathers had read and studied the Bible.
In any event, many of the same tensions we see politically today between how much power to grant to the federal branch and how much should remain local, are represented in the Founding Fathers themselves.
That is a fascinating angle clarice, i suppose anyone could have channelled locke into the declaration, the revolutions partisans like tom paine was one step behind the jacobins and edmund burke was not sanguine on colonial ventures as we discovered with india.
--Otherwise your point is basically the same one I made at the end of my second paragraph in reference to a certain lack of virtue being the operating principle behind the Bill of Rights.--
The entire Constitution is an exercise in protecting citizens from the lack of virtue in human beings. That is the whole idea behind limited government and self governance.
Of course the Founders didn't believe people to be particularly virtuous. That too is from Western Civilization; "there is none who is good, no not one, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God". The Western tradition is that man is vile and not perfectable. The utopian left believes man is, given just enough force by just enough leftists with just enough power, namely absolute. The Founders, not being utopians created a Constitution of "negative rights" as Barry whined, precisely because they knew that lack of virtue is most dangerous in the collective power of the state.
But those limits on state power and the recognition of man's nature don't mean they didn't believe in virtues to strive for or that man does display imperfectly.
The great personal virtues of WC are ideals to be fostered and aimed for knowing they won't be attained. The political and institutional virtues of WC are those that name each individual as uniquely created and equally valuable and that ensure the greatest possible liberty for the greatest number while retaining the protections of a civil society.
And most importantly, as even a deist like Jefferson recognized, the triumph of WC is the notion that we are each a possession of God, not other men, and that our rights and Truth come from and are not separable from that Divine authority.
Spinoza and Rousseau believed they are separable and Robespierre demonstrated that they also separate the head from the body, even for those who sought to enforce Rousseau's defective social contract.
If men were angels, they would have no need of govt. Sadly the 1940 constitution in cuba indulgedi in too much of thid utopianism about education healthcare in the like imagine in charkes beard and harold laski had revided our constitution and you get an inkling of the problem
Ignatz:
Well, I'm not sure where the slave-holders and the loyalists fit into your idealogical equation, but I do dispute your claim with regard to the lack of utopianism. There has been an strong strain of Utopian thinking running through American political philosophy, from the 17th century's "city on the hill" to the 18th century's "great awakening" to Jefferson's "ferme ornée, and the idea of a chosen nation, later morphing into manifest destiny. Utopianism has many forms, some more sophisticated and "non-ideological" than others. Yes the Founders were practical men, but I would also point out that the Bill of Rights had the least support of any element in the Constitution, and only barely made it into the final document. Do you suppose the resistance to it was practical or ideological?
I've always taught Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud and the rest in the originals-- how else to judge them? With the exception of Locke, this is an exercise in inoculation. It often works.
Like the smallpox ampule. I remember them from a philosophy survey class and not fondly. Thise in power are unable or unwilling to often give up hence magna carta glorious revolution boll of righrd
You are truly evil, catsmeat.
--Utopianism has many forms, some more sophisticated and "non-ideological" than others.--
Well, everyone, probably even psychopaths, entertain some form of utopia in their mind. But the context is political philosophy and ideology. An ideology has as its goal creating an actual utopia, or as near as it can get.
A political philosophy OTOH, like for instance those espoused by all of the Founders, may or may not entertain the notion of some utopian ideal, but it always realizes it is not a realistic goal and therefore seeks a realistic method to minimize encroachment on liberty and rights balanced with a realistic acknowledgment government of some size must exist to guarantee against internal and external criminals and force. And a political philosophy always takes note of and makes allowance for the imperfect status of human nature, which is what renders any utopianism a fantasy perhaps to be dreamt of but never indulged.
The shining city on a hill bit is meant to reference the USA as a beacon of hope for the rest of the world mired in its misery. That's not utopian, merely anti-dystopian.
The Great Awakening[s] were religious movements which had some political repercussions but are not in the realm of political philosophy.
And Manifest Destiny was hardly some utopian dream. Dems loved it and of course people clamped all sorts of romantic gibberish to it, but it was mostly a bitterly contested, slavery and politics riddled informal concept. Lincoln and many others contested or resisted it. And despite the wooly-headed rhetoric everybody knew at some level, we weren't making a utopia, we were kicking the heads in of the Mexicans and the Indians in order to make the country bigger, get rich and for the south, hopefully expand slave territories.
Utopians are Eric Hoffer's True Believer not John Fremont or Laura Ingalls Wilder.
--Yes the Founders were practical men, but I would also point out that the Bill of Rights had the least support of any element in the Constitution, and only barely made it into the final document. Do you suppose the resistance to it was practical or ideological?--
Since they weren't ideologues it couldn't have been ideological. However IIRC there were several objections to it. The primary one I remember from the Federalists was that by enumerating our rights those not listed might be curtailed because they weren't listed. OTOH as I recall the anti-Federalists were agin the whole Constitution unless it had a bill of rights, because they wanted to make sure the states and their citizens retained their power.
As it turns out the Federalists were dead on, but in the end wrong. Because if it wasn't for the bill of rights we would have virtually no rights left.
The anti-Federalsits were dead wrong but in the end right. Once the incorporation doctrine was introduced the states were subject to the very list they had wanted only applied to the Feds. But their concern about the Feds running roughshod over the states was right on the money.
Both positions sound eminently practical and non ideological to me.
Ignatz:
You've tinkered with so much terminology that I'm afraid I've lost the thread of your argument. I can only reiterate my own impression that you've homogenized the fractious philosophical underpinnings of the Founders, and neglected a number of pivotal non-philosophical pieces of the revolutionary puzzle -- perhaps in service to the western, judeo-christian point you wish to make, which in itself, could be seen as an ideological endeavor.
Ideology is all encompassing whereas the republican form of govt was more limited, the great awakeing was a return to the fundamentals whereas the general will was aforgettimg about basic realities.
The terms I'm using are the ones you've introduced to the discussion.
The thread of my argument remains; ideology means something and what it means is an irrational worldview that denies the reality of human nature and seeks to create a new utopian reality in its place.
The Founders were not ideologues and built our Republic on the back of the truths and virtues of Western Civilization and in fact their project was to largely create a rational, practical political framework to preserve and encourage those truths and virtues.
Ignatz:
"The terms I'm using are the ones you've introduced to the discussion."
What? Virtue, ideology, utopian, Greek & Rome classics, the rock of Truth, religion, the Enlightenment where keyed on ancient wisdom... which of these were my introductions?
Last input, before calling it a night. Regardless of how the term ideology is used at present, it got off to an interesting start. Per Wikipedia:
The term "ideology" was born during the Reign of Terror of French Revolution, and acquired several other meanings thereafter.
The word, and the system of ideas associated with it, was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1796,[5] while he was in prison pending trial during the Terror. The word was created by assembling the words idea, from Greek ἰδέα (near to the Lockean sense) and -logy, from -λογία.
He devised the term for a "science of ideas" he hoped would form a secure foundation for the moral and political sciences. He based the word on two things: 1) sensations people experience as they interact with the material world; and 2) the ideas that form in their minds due to those sensations. He conceived "Ideology" as a liberal philosophy that would defend individual liberty, property, free markets, and constitutional limits on state power. He argues that among these aspects ideology is the most generic term, because the science of ideas also contains the study of their expression and deduction.
The coup that overthrew Maximilien Robespierre allowed Tracy to pursue his work. Tracy reacted to the terroristic phase of the revolution (during the Napoleonic regime) by trying to work out a rational system of ideas to oppose the irrational mob impulses that had nearly destroyed him.
Those terms were all in my very first comment on the other thread so if you lost the thread of my argument it must have been right off the bat.
You introduced a different meaning of ideology and used idealized terms like the shining city on a hill, the great awakening, manifest destiny as examples of utopianism and asked me to explain the debate over the bill of rights, because you seem to define the term virtue in a way somewhat different than I am using it as well.
If we can't agree on the definition of a fundamental term like virtue, ideology or utopianism and your argument is largely predicated on arguing your defintion of those terms without acknowledging or by ignoring that we're arguing with different understandings of basic terms then of course we're going to have a discussion mired in defining and explaining terminologies and talking past each other.
And.
And...nothing. Not sure where that came from.
Iggy and JMHanes, you remind of the quip about the US and the UK, "divided only by a common language."
My favorite founder was Alexander Hamilton. His insight that America needed industry and manufacture, not just some idealized agrarian existence, has been borne out over the years.
I'm not as familiar with the political philosophers as I am with the political economists, but I think Adam Smith had a large effect on the thinking of Hamilton and maybe some others.
The idea that wealth was "created" was a radical departure from all previous economic theory. It wasn't the result of the spoils of war or exploitation or just dug out of the ground or because of one-sided trading possibilities.
jim nj:
"[Hamilton's] insight that America needed industry and manufacture, not just some idealized agrarian existence, has been borne out over the years."
That, in and of itself, would be sufficient basis for a feud with Jefferson. As with everything else Jefferson assayed, Monticello was not just a farm, it was a philosophical, and I daresay, political, endeavor.
JM Hanes,
If memory serves correctly Hamilton and Jefferson clashed on the issue rather heatedly.
In NJ Hamilton formed SUM to take advantage of the water-power at Patterson Falls.
I think that was the first planned industrial park in America.
I think Jefferson, from his experience, thought that a self-supporting agrarian society was best.
I, like Hamilton, disagree, as it would have left us dependent on the manufacturing power of foreign nations.
The result of Hamilton winning out on that argument is well demonstrated in WWII when we became the "arsenal of democracy."
Had the Jefferson ideal won out by WWII we would have been an enormous Ukraine.
