Abstract
This chapter argues that the nationalist state-building ideology was a constant and coherent political presence throughout the revolutionary period. It had its ideological, political, and economic sources, and it had not been “transformed” in any significant way in the period 1773–1787. Those sources are best understood as an American attempt at creating a centralized, European-style nation-state with the economic apparatus of mercantilist control. What is usually understood as a “transformation” of the American revolutionary experience in the 1780s was just a change in the balance of power between the two, by and large, watertight philosophies, localist-liberal and nationalist, the latter gradually advancing and former retreating. Alexander Hamilton’s mercantilist program which was widely advertised in the 1780s and used as the strongest argument against the Articles of Confederation was widely shared among the proponents of the new Constitution and implemented in the 1790s. The significance of this process is that federalists-nationalists created the basis for modern American state in the highly hostile intellectual climate, skeptical to both economic and political parts of their agenda.
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Notes
- 1.
I am using these two terms mindful that they represent anachronisms of the sort, but in the same time reflect the ideological assumptions accepted by the two groups, as interpreted in this work.
- 2.
- 3.
This is a uniform and extremely rarely challenged proposition, the main exceptions being Sobel (1999) and Holcombe (1991) who argue that the Articles of Confederation were a better and more liberal institutional arrangement than the Constitution, and that economic results were generally good in the 1780s. Jensen (1968, 1943), on the other hand, argues against the assumption of change in the mainstream of American political tradition.
- 4.
For the theory that federalism emerged as a consequence of constitutional deliberations about the Constitution, not as a remnant of the older decentralist tradition in America, see La Croix (2010).
- 5.
For a review of the early proposals for the creation of a national government, see Jensen (1943).
- 6.
- 7.
Even this was not always correct, since Hamilton in many occasions praised the British system as the most perfect one. American republicans by “monarchism” meant “statism.” Madison openly argued that the federal government should play a similar reconciling role of neutral arbitration among the conflicting factions the British King was performing, see, below, p. XX.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819).
- 11.
See, Jensen (1943).
- 12.
This tradition includes Daniel Webster, Joseph Story, Abraham Lincoln, and the entire later nationalist political movement.
- 13.
- 14.
See Chapter 4.
- 15.
Hamilton significantly influenced the German historical school, a major statist and mercantilist school in Europe of the mid- and late nineteenth century, see Eicholz (2014).
- 16.
“The Continentalist,” no. V, April 16, 1782, p. cliv.
- 17.
The Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Edited by Harold C. Syrett et al. 26 vols. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961–79.
- 18.
Alexander Hamilton, “Continentalist,” no. 5 18 Apr. 1782, Papers 3:75–82.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
It is particularly ironic to ascribe commercial liberalism to Hamilton when we take into account that the very notion of laissez-faire was coined as a polemical category against his idol Colbert: At one point, Minister Colbert assembled the leading businessmen and asked them what he could do for them. And one of them, named Legendre, responded: “Laissez-nous faire” (“live us alone to work”).
- 21.
This interpretation is again widely held across the ideological lines; both progressive and nationalist historians accept it, with the only difference being the evaluation.
- 22.
Forrest McDonald actually reproaches Adam Smith for neglecting this deep wisdom that Hamilton took from an English mercantilist writer Steuart: “Smith thought capital could be accumulated only by frugality, and failed to understand that by far most potent source of capital formation is public debt” (McDonald 1985: 127).
- 23.
A famous dinner that Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton had together in 1791 illustrates this. During the dinner Adams claimed that if the British government could be purged of its corruption it would have been the best political regime on Earth. To that Hamilton responded, according to Jefferson, that if the British system was purged of corruption it would have been purged of its most vital element and became “impracticable.” Jefferson commented: “Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption”; see Jefferson (1818: 216).
- 24.
This is the vision formulated by Hobbes (1651) and essentially accepted in variety of forms in modern political philosophy and practice. Hobbes himself was theoretically indifferent toward the form of government—republican or monarchical—as long as it played its role of conflict arbiter and interest harmonizer.
- 25.
See Chapter 4.
- 26.
- 27.
In so far as one accepts the findings of modern public choice theory, such as those pertaining to rent-seeking, logrolling, bureaucratic inefficiency, and so on, all of them showing the ways how the majority will could be and have been routinely subverted by cooperating “factions” at the federal level, one is very unlikely to believe Madison’s benign view of centralization. For public choice analysis, see Buchanan and Tullock (1999), Krueger (1974), McChesney (1997), Niskanen (1971).
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Jankovic, I. (2019). The Great Derailment: Philadelphia Putsch of 1787 and the Coming of the American State. In: The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03733-8_6
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