An Activist History of the American Founding

"There can be no doubt," writes Steve Pincus toward the end of this slim, polemical book, "that the Declaration of Independence was a call for the creation of a powerful state that would actively promote the welfare of the people" (p. 134). When describing the sort of government that early Americans hoped to establish, historians generally emphasize limits and constraints. Activist government was the last thing anyone wanted. Pincus begs to differ. Although they were rebelling against the greatest overseas empire of their day, it was not Britain's power to which Americans objected but the fiscal "austerity" and retrenchment that successive British ministries had pursued over the previous decade and a half. As proponents of state-sponsored economic growth, the Founders believed that rulers had an obligation to take positive steps to develop and encourage the economic prosperity of their people. The implication, which Pincus never explicitly says but apparently wants readers to accept, is that George Washington and the Revolution's other leaders were a lot like liberals and progressives today.

In making the Founders' case for activist government, Pincus leans heavily on a dichotomy of good politicians and bad. Occupying the good end of the spectrum are the so-called Patriots. The Patriots were an opposition group of Country Whig and Tory politicians who first appeared in Britain during Sir Robert Walpole's twenty-year ministry (1722–1742). During the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), they supported the coalition ministry of Patriot leader William Pitt, but they returned to the opposition once the war was over, influencing radicals on both sides of the Atlantic. During the 1760s and 1770s, John Wilkes and Sam Adams both called themselves Patriots. Because Tories in Pincus's world are bad, the book leaves out the role that Tories played in the Patriots' early rise. There is also no mention of the monarchical, authoritarian tendencies that came with this Tory lineage, nor will readers find anything about the influence that Patriot thinking had on the young George III, who came to the throne in 1760 vowing to rule as a "patriot king."¹ Instead, Pincus emphasizes the Patriots' consumer-centered political economy, their support for government-subsidized projects of various sorts, their developmental vision of Britain's overseas empire, their immigration-friendly policies, and their precocious opposition to slavery, all of which he attributes to the party's Whig roots. In each of these areas, he writes, Patriots embraced "principles that would resonate deeply in America's Declaration of Independence three and a half decades later" (p. 40).

If Patriots were proto-Keynesian liberals, the British ministers who held office under George III get to play their fiscally conservative opposites. Heading up the cast of ministerial Scrooges is George Grenville. During Grenville's two-year premiership, which lasted from 1763 to 1765, Parliament enacted the Sugar Act (1764) and the American Stamp Act (1765), along with a host of other colonial reforms. All were deeply unpopular in America. The Stamp Act, in particular, launched the colonial resistance movement that led just over a decade later to the Declaration of Independence. In explaining the origins of Grenville's reforms, Pincus describes the prime minister and his supporters as Francophiles who wanted to apply French political economy and administrative methods to America. Terrified by the ballooning debt from Britain's victories in the Seven Years' War, they attempted to balance the Treasury's books with a policy of fiscal "austerity and colonial extraction" (p. 54). Given the frequency with which he uses the term—variations of extraction recur by my count thirty-one times in the text, or roughly once every five pages—Pincus is surprisingly vague about what extractive taxation means. The phrase may refer to the way the Sugar and Stamp Acts taxed an array of consumer goods, inhibiting, rather than encouraging, consumption (p. 100). Echoing a charge repeatedly made by Grenville's critics, Pincus also claims that the main...