For his part, while Hamilton favored a more active role for government in promoting commerce, his ultimate aim was almost the same as Jefferson’s: securing the rights proclaimed in the Declaration. But by enhancing commerce, Hamilton aspired to enable ordinary Americans to emulate his path of rising to prosperity through their own initiative and industry.
Both men would surely have been horrified by the enormous and intrusive bureaucracy that the progressive movement bequeathed to us. As Rosen puts it, “in the name of Jefferson’s commitment to equal economic opportunity, Roosevelt had buried Jefferson’s commitment to limited government” (though Rosen surely errs in calling his program “Hamiltonian”). Rosen does cite Ronald Reagan’s “Jeffersonian criticisms” of the Great Society “antipoverty” program of FDR’s successor Lyndon Johnson for undermining welfare recipients’ incentive to work, while also noting how the articles of impeachment that Congress drew against Richard Nixon, drawing on Federalist no. 69, finally “refuted” Jefferson’s charge that Hamilton had been a monarchist
Finally, in the area of constitutional interpretation, Rosen quotes Justice Antonin Scalia’s embrace of “the interpretative approach of the Hamiltonian justice Joseph Story” according to which the Constitution’s words should be construed neither broadly nor strictly, but rather taking them “in their natural and obvious sense” (though that phrase obviously leaves considerable room for dispute in particular cases). But Rosen departs from Scalia by insisting that “the central dispute on the Supreme Court” since the Founding “has not been between originalism and non-originalism, but between liberal and strict construction of federal power”: how would that distinction apply to decisions applauded by “living constitutionalists” like Roe v. Wade, which have no grounding in the Constitution’s text at all?
Whatever one’s judgment of these controversies, it is impossible to differ with Rosen’s concluding judgment that “the greatest threat to the American Idea” throughout our history has come not from those who inconsistently apply Hamilton’s or Jefferson’s principles, but “from those who have rejected the principles entirely,” from Calhoun and others who renounced the claim of natural human equality as “a self-evident lie” to “progressive and conservative ideologues today” who would replace the Constitution entirely with a “resort to violence.” Taken as a whole, Rosen’s book offers a learned and sober account of the relevance of Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s principles to America’s past, present, and possible future.
Read it all.
