The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America

by Jeffrey Rosen

Overview

The bestselling author of The Pursuit of Happiness shows how the opposing constitutional visions of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton have defined our country for 250 years, influenced presidents from Washington to Trump, and continue to drive the debate over the power of government today.

In The Pursuit of Liberty, bestselling author and president of the National Constitution Center Jeffrey Rosen explores the clashing visions of Hamilton and Jefferson about how to balance liberty and power in a debate that continues to define—and divide—our country: Jefferson championed states’ rights and individual liberties, while Hamilton pushed for a strong Federal government and a powerful executive. This ongoing tug-of-war has shaped all the pivotal moments in American history, including Abraham Lincoln’s fight against slavery and southern secession, the expansion of federal power under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Ronald Reagan’s and Donald Trump’s conservative push to shrink the size of the federal government.

Rosen also shows how Hamilton and Jefferson’s disagreement over how to read the Constitution has shaped landmark debates in Congress and the Supreme Court about executive power, from John Marshall’s early battles with Andrew Jackson to the current divisions among the justices on issues from presidential immunity to control over the administrative state.

More than ever, the clash between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian ideals resonates today in our most urgent national debates over the question of whether modern presidents are consolidating power and subverting the Constitution—the very threat to American democracy that both Hamilton and Jefferson were determined to avoid. The Pursuit of Liberty is a compelling history of the opposing forces that have shaped our country since its founding, and the ongoing struggle to define the balance between liberty and power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668053768
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	10/21/2025
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448

About the Author

Jeffrey Rosen is President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts We the People, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He is the author of nine books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Pursuit of Happiness and Conversations with RBG. His essays and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; on NPR; in The New Republic, where he was the legal affairs editor; and in The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer.

Editorial Reviews

An exciting and authoritative book tracing the ways our politicians have used the principles of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton throughout our history. . . . It’s the kind of honest and impartial history we desperately need.

Gordon Wood

Jeffrey Rosen brilliantly illuminates a core division that has shaped American life from the start. A must-read for anyone looking to make sense of the American story.

Yuval Levin

An invigorating, marvelously cogent tour of democracy and its limits.

Stacy Schiff

Jeffrey Rosen has given us another great gift: a wise, searching, and illuminating study of the tumultuous dawn of American politics and partisanship. This book is at once an important work of history and a clarifying lens on our own time.

Jon Meacham

Rosen’s clearly organized synthesis of American life and history, along with well-placed references to the musical Hamilton, offers a useful context for his assessment of Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian influences on the Supreme Court. And his biographical sketches of justices past and present are detailed and vivid, bringing the law to life.

Booklist (starred review)

Jeffrey Rosen’s writings are invariably timely because of his unequaled ability to trace the pedigree of current controversies to timeless subjects the Founders addressed.

George F. Will

There may be no more important argument in American history than the one between Jefferson and Hamilton over the role of government in the new republic. Jeffrey Rosen has written a powerful and timely account of this foundational debate.

Ken Burns

2025-07-16
A wide-ranging study of the tense competition between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ideas of American government.

“If American history is a struggle between power and principle, the competing principles of Hamilton and Jefferson both constrain and embolden partisans on both sides, just as they constrained and emboldened Hamilton and Jefferson themselves,” writes political historian Rosen. His narrative begins with Jefferson and Hamilton themselves, with Hamilton declaring himself to be in favor of monarchy—meaning “a strong executive, not an endorsement of hereditary rule”—and Jefferson a commitment to a limited central government that ceded most power to the states. Jefferson so feared a president who would refuse to leave office that he proposed a constitutional limit of a single term; interestingly, Hamilton, by Rosen’s account, also feared “Caesarism,” worrying that a president “might take advantage of a foreign policy crisis” to stay in power. Jefferson and Hamilton were also in agreement on the three principal tenets of the Declaration of Independence, namely “liberty, equality, and government by consent,” but they disagreed vigorously on how to express them constitutionally; indeed, Jefferson’s first draft of a constitution curtailed the presidency to a one-year term by an “administrator” appointed by the House of Representatives. Hamilton held a much more expansive view of executive power, urging that “we need to be rescued from the democracy.” If these concerns sound very modern, it is because they have been with us ever since, and with the same rather schizophrenic proportions. As Rosen notes, although the Supreme Court under John Roberts has Jeffersonian dimensions, Roberts himself invoked the “Hamiltonian doctrine of judicial deference to Congress” in upholding the Affordable Care Act, while the Trump administration seems to want both states’ rights and Hamilton’s “monarchy based on corruption.”

A lucid work of political history that affords an intriguing view of the nation both in its founding years and today.

Kirkus Reviews