Romanticism of Numbers: Hamilton, Jefferson, and the Sublime

My title comes from Max Weber's assessment of the peculiar American obsession with quantities that constitutes the "spirit of capitalism." In the US, Weber explains, "When the imagination of a whole people has once been turned toward purely quantitative bigness … this romanticism of numbers exercises an irresistible appeal to the poets among business men" (32–33). Weber famously turns to Benjamin Franklin as the archetypal example of this businessman-poet and to his aphorisms from The Way to Wealth (1758) as the perfect expressions of the "essential elements" of the "peculiar ethic" that is the increase of "capital … as an end in itself (123, 17). Franklin is exemplary for Weber not only because his pithy sayings have saturated the lexicon of American life, but also because he proves the larger thesis that the idiosyncratic spirit of capitalism is distinct from its material conditions. Franklin possesses the spirit long before he holds any capital.

Weber's rejection of historical materialism perhaps explains why he has no interest in the founding father credited with establishing the legislative infrastructure by which capitalism and finance could flourish in the US. Alexander Hamilton's reports on public credit, the national bank, and manufacturing may have formed the tripod for US economic and financial policy for over 200 years, but Hamilton did not possess the spirit. As Woodrow Wilson mused in 1904 (the same year that Weber toured the US), when considering the eighteenth-century politician he would identify as the essence of American ingenuity, "I would name Benjamin Franklin rather than Alexander Hamilton … for Hamilton, much as I admire him, was a transplanted European … but Franklin was the man for the frontier" (qtd. in Scaff 180). Yet I propose that we consider Hamilton as exemplifying Weber's "poet among business men"—not because Hamilton embodies the spirit of capital accumulation, but because of how he tries to imagine capital exchange. My ambition is not to refurbish Hamilton as a Franklinian self-made man who "get[s] the job done" (Miranda and McCarter 121), but to consider the resonances of Weber's term "romanticism" to describe the work of someone whose actual task was to count the enormous sums of the new nation's credits and debts.¹ Hamilton, I will argue, crafted the nation's economic policy through a comprehension of the sublimity of capital and finance. By reading Hamilton's own analysis of the sublime character of the economy, we might better conceive the immeasurable force of the financial and commercial markets that dominate our lives. And in turning to the language of aesthetics to analyze the debates about federal economic policy in the 1790s I also aim to interrogate the larger theoretical question posed by this issue of American Literary History regarding what might be gained by integrating the discourses of literary history, literary analysis, economic history, and economic theory.

I begin by proposing that we should understand Weber's "romanticism of numbers" as similar to what Immanuel Kant terms the mathematical sublime, a quantitative assessment of the immeasurably large numbers that move through a capital economy. Consider the appeal of our contemporary National Debt Clock, which identifies the trillions of dollars of federal debt, revenue, interest, etc. that shape the national economy (Figure 1). The clock may have been designed to inculcate in its observers a feeling of parsimony, but the absurdly large numbers instead produce much the same experience as trying to count blades of grass or grains of sand: cognitive inadequacy in the face of quantitative bigness. "Romanticism of numbers" also seems to invoke Kant's second category, the dynamically sublime. In this case, we feel overpowered by force, not by quantity: for Kant, it is the experience of pleasurable terror in the face of a thunderstorm or crashing wave. The National Debt Clock is again illustrative since our experience as we watch the dizzying array of rising sums is bewilderment in the face of the myriad variables that chart our economic lives, as well as powerlessness as we perceive the numbers taking us into the unknown future. The sublime thus becomes a potent term...