Political Philosophy and Rhetoric: A Study of the Origins of American Party Politics (review)

120 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY John Zvesper. Political Philosophy and Rhetoric: A Study of the Origins of American Party Politics . Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Pp. vii + 237. $16.95. The subject of this book, as indicated by its subtitle, will attract political scientists and historians who have a special interest in the origin and nature of American political parties. However , the book deserves the attention of students of philosophy and political philosophy as well, for Professor Zvesper argues that the first American political parties, and the "'party government" to which they gave birth, can be adequately understood only in terms of the very real philosophical dispute which characterized the American regime's first generation and which cyclically informs American politics to the present day. Taking issue especially with those historians and political scientists who either deny or discount the philosophical distance between the Federalists and the Republicans, Zvesper argues that the rise of the Jeffersonians must be understood as a principled and idealistic reaction against the starkly realistic principles of the Hamiltonian program . Beneath Jeffersonian idealism and rhetoric ultimately lay the principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and beneath Hamiltonian realism and rhetoric lay the principles of Thomas Hobbes (pp. 13-14, 43). The pitched battle between Federalists and Republicans was thus no mere battle of interests, nor was it merely a temporary and unwarranted ideological aberration within a "theoretically perfect system" (p. 5): that battle was the practical equivalent of a fundamental conflict within modem political philosophy. Thus, according to Zvesper, a study of the origins of American party politics is both a study of the nature of the American regime and a study of modern political philosophy in practice. Zvesper's Federalists, including of course the Madison of The Federalist Papers, unabashedly built their new government upon the foundations of popular economic self-interest and official political ambition. Popular and official virtue were too unreliable to be the building blocks of a truly modern republic, and although political ambition represented a more elevated defect than economic self-interest, neither even approached the moral demands of "republican virtue," to say nothing of classical or Christian moral virtue (pp. 23-25). In its most "idealistic" moments, Federalism looked to the governors rather than to the governed for guidance or for political "virtue," and energetic and productive Federalist policies always spoke to the people's "self-interested acquisitiveness" rather than to their "Spartan patriotism" (p. 44). Such "virtue" as the people needed would be engendered, according to the rhetoric of Federalist orators and divines , by the pursuit of economic interest itself: the policies of the energetic governors would create a system in which the growth of "virtuous materialism" (p. 44) would guarantee continued prosperity in this world and salvation in the next (pp. 59-62). However, in Zvesper's account, Federalist rhetoric about "virtuous materialism" was undermined by the spectacle of self-interested passion and the orgy of speculation ~t off by Hamilton's financial and commercial policies (pp. 83-84). Attributing the display of public vice to the governors ' corruption of the governed, Jefferson, joined in 1791-92 by Madison, now celebrated popular republican purity and denied that a virtuous people needed to be governed so energetically . Adhering to his belief in man's natural "sociality" while conceding that man was not naturally political (p. 103), Jefferson railed against Federalist policies because they divided the people, promoted corruption among the legislators, and set the wealthy few and the corrupted governors over the many. Jefferson's charge that the Federalists were "monarchists" was the rhetoric of neither a deceitful firebrand nor a deluded partisan; rather, that charge expressed in its most effective form the Jeffersonian-Madisonian perception of the thrust of governmental policies which denied popular virtue and served to create artificial wealth and influence. The Republican challenge represented, then, both a recoiling against the harsh realism of a Hobbesian regime and a recalling of the necessary linkage between true republicanism and real morality. In Zvesper's view, thus, the recurrence of Jeffersonian rhetoric in the successful campaigns of Jackson, Lin- BOOK REVIEWS 121 coin, and Franklin Roosevelt testifies to the ongoing tension...