The Romance of an Enlightened Founding

Darren Staloff. Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding. New York: Hill & Wang, 2005. 419 pp. Notes and index. $30.00.

Darren Staloff's Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding joins a recent run of books exploring the founding and the founders, more particularly the latter, of the United States. The book makes a persuasive case that these three men developed their distinctive political sensibilities out of a combination of Enlightenment theories and their individual experiences in Revolutionary America. What is left unclear at the end of the book is how these visions fit within the larger patterns of social and political thought in the early American republic. Indirectly, Staloff's conclusions also raise questions about the public's and the profession's ongoing search for the foundations of modern America in a group of eighteenth-century founders.

Staloff begins the book with a welcome attempt to situate the development of American politics in the context of a broad Enlightenment tradition that encompassed science, economics, politics, and aesthetics. Staloff frames his discussion of the ideas of Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson in the context of a wide array of Enlightenment thinkers, but offers a view of this intellectual tradition slanted toward Scottish moral philosophers, particularly Adam Smith and David Hume. Staloff distills the immensely diverse and complicated Enlightenment down to three shared perspectives: the rejection of enthusiasm in favor of a diffident and skeptical empiricism; explaining human behavior as the product of the interaction of reason, passion, and interest; and privileging of urbanity—commerce, leisure, and cultivated tastes—over rustic, agrarian simplicity. These basic assumptions were disseminated through what Jurgen Habermas described as the public sphere—printed texts, learned societies, and social organizations—and influenced political, social, and economic development through the force of public opinion. The result was a style of politics dedicated to opposing enthusiasm, promoting commerce as a source of national greatness and individual morality, and establishing the rule of enlightened philosophes. Though these ideals emerged in Europe, Staloff concludes, they could only be fully realized in the context of the American Revolution, making the founding of the United States the ultimate test of Enlightenment ideas and their clearest legacy.

Staloff explores the influence of the Enlightenment on American thought and visa versa by analyzing the life, education, and political careers of Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. He begins with Hamilton, whose ideas and experiences, Staloff claims, illustrate the fulfillment of the Enlightenment. He traces Hamilton's rise to power from his humble birth in the West Indies, through his experiences in the Revolution, and finally his role as the architect of fiscal policy as Washington's secretary of the treasury. Hamilton developed his attachment to the Enlightenment at King's College in New York where he trained for a profession in law. Like most of the revolutionary elite, he entered the Revolution with high hopes for his countrymen as they set out to win independence and establish a republican government. The pettiness and small-mindedness of his fellow citizens, however, dashed these hopes. Americans, Hamilton believed, too easily discarded the national good in favor of personal profit. The greatest problem came from the unfortunate combination of interested individuals and fractious state governments and a weak federal government that lacked the power to overcome these obstacles. This experience led Hamilton to identify three pillars of effective government: controlling finances, capturing the interests of the nation's leading men, and shaping public opinion.

Hamilton's subsequent career as a politician, particularly his efforts to win approval for the Constitution and his policies as secretary of the treasury, reflected his attempt to design a national government around these pillars. In both cases he set out to establish a central government with control over the nation's finances that could promote the urbane and commercial foundations of an enlightened society. The key to this plan lay in an unabashed attempt...