Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding

by Darren Staloff

Overview

An intellectual history of three Founding Fathers whose unique approaches to the Enlightenment helped shape America.

American historian Darren Staloff delves into the political and intellectual lives of Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson to reveal how they embodied the collision of Europe’s grand Enlightenment project with the birth of a young nation. These three very different men each governed their public lives by Enlightenment principles. And the struggle for American independence would forever change their relationships to the politics of Enlightenment. 

 

Repeated humiliation on America's battlefields banished Hamilton's youthful idealism, leaving him a 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 skeptical in spirit, and his public posture became increasingly that of the gadfly of his country. And Jefferson's frustrations as a Revolutionary governor in Virginia led him to go beyond his Enlightened worldview, and articulate a new and radical Romantic politics of principle. 

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429929868
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	437
Sales rank:	50
File size:	634 KB

About the Author

Darren Staloff teaches history at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Background of the Enlightenment     5
The Features of the Enlightenment     9
The Forms of the Enlightenment     18
The Politics of Enlightenment     28
Alexander Hamilton: The Enlightenment Fulfilled
The Enigma of Hamilton     44
The Turning     56
The Hamiltonian Vision: The Enlightenment Fulfilled     78
The Practice of Hamiltonianism     89
"Mine is an Odd Destiny" - The Legacy of Alexander Hamilton     125
John Adams: The Enlightenment Transcended
An American Curmudgeon     132
The Turning     144
The Adamsian Vision: The Enlightenment Transcended     177
The Adamsian Practice     194
"Monuments will Never Be Erected to Me"-The Legacy of John Adams     228
Thomas Jefferson: Romantic America
The Statesman as Artist     234
The Turning     248
The Jeffersonian Vision: Romantic America     280
The Practice of Jeffersonianism     309
"Take Care of Me When Dead" - The Legacy of Thomas Jefferson     358
Notes     363
Acknowledgments     403
Index     405

Editorial Reviews

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.

Publishers Weekly

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.

Library Journal

A lucid argument, usefully extending the intellectual history of the American Revolution by interrogating three great revolutionaries.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Thoughtful, infectious in its enthusiasm, and briskly argued.” —Leslie Kitchen, History News Network

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