Herbert Butterfield in his The Whig Interpretation of History argued that assessing the past in light of the present, what we call “presentism,” is the source of all historical errors. Our tendency to do so results from a very real problem: How do we impose some sort of narrative order on the complex, disparate, and voluminous material presented in historical reflection? We retrospectively make sense of our own lives by imposing on memory some sort of narrative structure by which individual events become not only intelligible but meaningful when referenced to that narrative arc. The historian faces an even more arduous task not only because of the surfeit of material but also because the psychic demands differ. Individuals have to impose some interpretive order on the events of our lives to maintain personality, but history is not integrally structured in the same way. Narrative impositions tend to tell us more about the concerns and prejudices of the historian than they do of history itself.
Philosophers seek to impose order on historical events, typically positing some sort of cyclical or linear system, as that created by Augustine, who was the first to claim that the movement of history toward its finale resulted from conflict and reached its conclusion in the resolution of that conflict. Be it the heavenly versus the earthly city or democracy versus aristocracy or the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, the anticipation of that historical conclusion is what made historical events intelligible in the here and now. The temptation to shrink the whole of history into the history of a particular people or nation often proves irresistible. Part of Augustine’s genius was to place the cyclical history of nations and empires in relief against the linear history of the City of God. Often, however, the latter gets collapsed into the former. That tendency has been especially pronounced in the American context.
It’s hard to do historiography without some philosophy of history. What if one maintains the idea that binary conflict is what drives the historical narrative forward but leads to no apparent conclusion? This, I think, is part of what makes Jeffrey Rosen’s recent effort, The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America, both an interesting and frustrating book. He studiously attempts to avoid the presentist error but often at the cost of attributing no meaning to American history. The problem resides in the method itself: Reading all American history as a conflict between Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism might make sense if we knew where it was all headed, but in the absence of such knowledge the framework comes across as forced. It’s not as if there isn’t something to the claim; the question is whether the claim results in heavy-handed interpretations and oversimplifications.
The idea of reading America as a conflict between the ideas of Jefferson and Hamilton has a long history. Going back at least as far as Martin Van Buren, historians have posited the ideas of those two as the “either/or” that helps us understand political action. Henry Cabot Lodge argued that all American history could be understood as a battle between these two titans, and Claude Bowers wrote that “the struggle of these two giants surpasses in importance any other waged in America because it related to elemental differences that reach back into the ages, and will continue to divide mankind far into the future.” Rosen’s book is in that tradition, and while it may not add anything to that historiography conceptually, it does add something in terms of material and an updating to the present.
According to Rosen, Jefferson favored a weaker central power and Hamilton a strong one; Jefferson celebrated democracy and Hamilton was skeptical of it; Jefferson defended local government and state sovereignty and Hamilton opposed “local attachments” and favored the “intire [sic] subordination” of state sovereignty; Jefferson defended the interests of the yeomanry and Hamilton those of merchants and manufacturers and financiers; Jefferson opposed government debt and Hamilton embraced it; Jefferson believed in the perfectibility of human beings and Hamilton in their inherent corruption; Jefferson feared a standing army and Hamilton not only wanted a powerful military but inclined toward its use; Jefferson preferred a narrow interpretation of the Constitution and Hamilton a broad one. All subsequent politics, Rosen argues, has been determined by these binaries, with some leaders on team Jefferson and others on team Hamilton, although he allows that sometimes politicians might toggle between the two.
The first problem with the interpretive framework should be an obvious one: By locating the dynamism of American history in the conflict between Jefferson and Hamilton, Rosen elides the entire 150 years of history that preceded the Declaration, a history that cannot be understood apart from religion. Rosen largely ignores religion throughout the book; in one telling section, he refers to his “teacher” Sacvan Bercovitch’s book The American Jeremiad and then proceeds to miss the point of the book’s central thesis while applying the concept of a jeremiad in a very odd way. This suggests a weakness in an interpretive framework that takes as its principals two of the least religious members of the constitutional era.
The validity of Rosen’s hermeneutical approach rests on how well he reads Jefferson and Hamilton, as well as their role in the formation of the American project. I learned more about Jefferson than I did about Hamilton by reading Rosen’s book, but I’d say he does a more-than-competent job with both figures. This is a book of serious scholarship that is also well written. Here’s my problem, however: I don’t think the so-called American founding can be understood simply as a debate between Jefferson and Hamilton, and if that period cannot be so understood, how could the rest of American history? I’ve already mentioned Rosen’s ignoring the central role of religion in forming American history, and while he nods toward figures such as Washington and Madison and Adams, he barely mentions the Anti-Federalists, tending to lump all of them in with Jefferson. In other words, Rosen offers up Jefferson and Hamilton as Weberian “ideal types,” simplified models of reality that are never found in pure form. Types have their uses, but they often sacrifice nuanced understanding to the interpretive framework.
Because ideal types are abstractions, extrapolated from particular characteristics, they pose a danger to historians who will miss important contravening data. The hermeneutical principle can become tendentious in two ways: first, if it excludes figures or events that do not advance the thesis; and second, if it forces all figures and events into the thesis. The first is the lesser of the two problems because historians must always make decisions about what to include or exclude; the second is a serious problem because it creates misunderstanding. The historian can avoid such heavy-handedness only by proving that the Jefferson-Hamilton distinction was operative in the thinking and actions of the figures he discusses.
Rosen does this with some success, and where successful the book is quite illuminating. The success of the framework results from Rosen’s careful detailing of how subsequent historical actors, such as James Garfield, carefully read Hamilton and Jefferson and self-consciously cast their lot with one or the other. This is where Rosen is on his surest ground. At other times, however, it feels as if Rosen forces figures into one camp or another. At still other times, the framework gets in the way of understanding a historical figure, perhaps nowhere more pointedly than in his perplexing interpretation of Franklin Roosevelt. The payoff has to be whether the interpretation helps us understand historical figures better or whether it helps us understand the interpretive framework better. If it is the latter, then that is a problem, and too often that is the case with Rosen’s book. When it works, it works well; where it fails, it fails miserably.
In a challenge to his own thesis, Rosen frequently shows how these figures misappropriated those historical figures. The conclusion one draws is that it mattered little to those figures whether they were acolytes of either Hamilton or Jefferson; in other words, they weren’t promoting legacies other than their own. In one of the most telling passages of the book, Rosen observes: “The debate that followed in Congress set the stage for those that would follow through American history: both parties abandoned their constitutional principles and embraced those of their opponents for partisan gain.” I think Rosen, to his credit, does an admirable job of highlighting those moments, but such highlighting also brings the whole framework into question.
Rosen spends a great deal of the book concentrating on issues of slavery and race, and here too the interpretive framework can occlude as much as illuminate. Obviously Hamilton’s views on slavery and race are much closer to contemporary sensibilities than are Jefferson’s (and this too is a kind of presentism), but it sometimes doesn’t help our understanding of either an actor or that person’s views of race to drag Jefferson into it, nor does it help our understanding of Jefferson. Rosen’s attentiveness to the issue is occasionally gratuitous and is the area where he is most likely to violate Butterfield’s dictum. Rosen writes that “I’ve tried to avoid taking sides in the initial clashes between Hamilton and Jefferson,” but with some issues he can’t help himself.
Undoubtedly race is a big part of the American story, but so is war. If Rosen is (perhaps) overly attentive to the issue of race, I find him insufficiently attentive to the persistence of war. This, too, divided Hamilton and Jefferson, and Rosen does a good job showing how quickly Hamilton reached for a gun whenever the people got uppity. Jefferson’s embrace of democracy and Hamilton’s skepticism of it became most apparent in their responses to popular unrest. Jefferson endorsed the people’s taking up arms against the government, and Hamilton was quick to call up the militia to suppress. Hamilton’s militarism and desire for glory on the field of battle is on full display, but I don’t think Rosen does a fair job tracing how that impulse recrudesces in later figures.
The other big issue that recurs throughout the book is the debate about banking and financing. I think Rosen does a better job with this, expending effort on Jefferson’s and Hamilton’s initial debates about the national bank and how the terms they set forth have remained to this day. Most importantly, Rosen traces how issues in the banking system work to the advantage of some and to the disadvantage of others and can often lead to populist revolts. Public credit and debt and war are the two main engines that have driven the growth of the federal government, and Hamilton gave both legitimacy.
Rosen does, for the most part, avoid viewing the past through the lens of Trump’s presidency, although since the book is an overview of American history, it does conclude with Trump. I think the author maintains a decent balance, trying to understand the Trump phenomenon without being overly condemnatory. The tension between ordinary people and elites is a centerpiece of the Jefferson-Hamilton debate, and so Rosen locates Trumpism—smartly—within that long-standing tension. In that sense Trump is an heir to figures such as Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, and Huey Long, and his followers like those who participated in the Shays’s and Whiskey Rebellions (although I think Rosen mischaracterizes both events). Just as Hamilton seized those rebellions as opportunities to consolidate coercive power, so too have modern apologists for federal power used that roiling anger to political advantage. All that talk about “defending democracy” seems false in the face of that Hamiltonian suspicion about democracy itself, which Hamilton described as “the real disease” of our polity, “the poison” that infected the body politic. Rosen’s most compelling comparison for Trump is to former Louisiana governor Henry Clay Warmoth, who tried to consolidate the power of subordinates to overthrow the 1874 election results. When that did not work, he had his followers resort to violence. Rosen’s book is filled with interesting stories such as Warmoth’s.
For the most part Rosen remains true to his word, not obviously taking sides between Jefferson and Hamilton. The reader will walk away with an impression, however. While not insensitive to Hamilton’s flaws, Rosen seems extremely sensitive to those of Jefferson. Undoubtedly their differing views of race are a big factor here, but perhaps more important are their competing views of constitutional interpretation. Rosen clearly has little patience for any restrictive hermeneutic, declaring, “There is no single original understanding of the Constitution, and no single original public meaning of the constitutional text.” I think there is much to that view, but in my experience such critics seldom offer up an alternative hermeneutical principle that enucleates the text’s meaning in a sensible way. Neither does Rosen, other than repeating the well-worn Hamiltonian principle, summarized by Chief Justice John Marshall, that if the end is legitimate and the means related to the end, and those means are not specifically prohibited by the Constitution, then the action is constitutional.
Rosen’s tendency to take Hamilton’s side results, I think, from the author’s own carefully hidden political beliefs. I cannot say that, based upon reading this book, I have a clear view of what those are, but I think they more nearly track Hamilton’s than Jefferson’s: a confidence in elites, a suspicion of ordinary persons, a view toward national greatness and the underlying principle of union, speculative financial machinations rather than a productive economy, an activist court (whatever that is), and a firm commitment to equal rights. Rosen tips his hand in a comment he makes toward the end of the book: “Hamilton, in the end, had sacrificed his life to keep Burr from destroying American democracy because he agreed with Adams that the goal of a constitution is to temper politics with principle to prevent America from descending into civil war.” I’m not suggesting that we build a statue to Aaron Burr, but neither am I inclined to see Hamilton as a martyr. Even if I were, I would want to know in what cause. I don’t think Rosen gives us a good answer to that question.
