Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding
Author: Darren Staloff
Alexander Hamilton, the worldly New Yorker; John Adams, the curmudgeonly Yankee; Thomas Jefferson, the visionary Virginia squire—each steered their public lives under the guideposts and constraints of Enlightenment principles, and for each their relationship to the politics of Enlightenment was transformed by the struggle for American independence. Repeated humiliation on America's battlefields banished Hamilton's youthful idealism, leaving him a fervent disciple of enlightened realpolitik and the nation's leading exponent of modern statecraft. After ten years in Europe's diplomatic trenches, Adams's embrace of the politics of Enlightenment became increasingly that of the gadfly of his country. And Jefferson's frustrations as a reformer and then Revolutionary governor in Virginia led him to go beyond his previous enlightened worldview and articulate a new and radical Romantic politics of principle.
Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson is a marvelous reminder that the world of ideas is inextricably bound up in the long trajectory of historical events.
Publishers Weekly
By now it's commonplace to ascribe the principles of the American founding to the Enlightenment, and CUNY historian Staloff offers no startling new information or refreshingly original readings of this period. He contends that the epistemological turn to empiricism, the disenchantment with the metaphysical and the move toward urbanism provide the core of Enlightenment politics, and he uncritically uses these three principles as lenses through which to read the politics of three of America's founders: Hamilton, Adams and Jefferson. Hamilton "promoted rapid industrialization and urban growth fostered by a strong central government capable of projecting its interests and power in the world at large." While Adams shared with John Locke an optimism that scientific education could promote liberty, he knew too well that human nature was corrupt enough to need a political system with checks and balances. Staloff (The Making of an American Thinking Class) gives his most thoughtful readings to Jefferson, who he says fostered a Romantic sensibility in American politics. Jefferson, he says, most changed American politics by showing the need for those politics to be built on an idealistic vision. But among a continuing flood of books about these and other American founders, Staloff's provides little that is new or provocative. (July 4) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Responding to the continuing demand by the reading public for books about the Founding Fathers, Staloff (history, City Coll. of New York; The Making of an American Thinking Class) provides a biographical and intellectual comparison among three major early American statesmen. He shows how the personal experiences and regional cultural traditions of each man shaded his interpretation of the European Enlightenment. The austere, often arrogant Hamilton, born poor but manifestly upwardly mobile (he became the quintessential New Yorker), embraced a boldly realistic interpretation of the new nation's place in the world. The vain, short-tempered, but introspective and honest Adams, a New Englander from the middling farming class, held similar hardheaded views. The charming Jefferson, of the Southern landed gentry, was a Romantic visionary (and undoubtedly the most enduringly popular of this triumvirate) who opted for "enlightened compromises" in office. A scholar who has studied Northern intellectuals, Staloff here devotes most of his study to Jefferson. He prefers citing the papers of all three men to critiquing the work of those who have previously mined these same sources. Intended to be suggestive rather than conclusive, Staloff's is another, but not the definitive, contribution to the growing literature on America's original greatest generation. For a similar comparative treatment of these three (plus James Madison), see Andrew S. Trees's The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character. Recommended for all collections.-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Table of Contents:
| Ch. 1 | Alexander Hamilton : the enlightenment fulfilled | |
| Ch. 2 | John Adams : the enlightenment transcended | |
| Ch. 3 | Thomas Jefferson : romantic America |
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To Perpetual Peace
Author: Immanuel Kant
In this short essay, Kant completes his political theory and philosophy of history, considering the prospects for peace among nations and addressing questions that remain central to our thoughts about nationalism, war, and peace.
Ted Humphrey provides an eminently readable translation, along with a brief Introduction that sketches Kant's argument.
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