The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy

Weekly Standard senior writer Cost traces the republican beliefs of James Madison and the mercantile leanings of Alexander Hamilton, arguing that competing political philosophies in the earliest years of the United States “prefigured contemporary American politics.” Cost’s distillation of the source material—the Federalist Papers and Hamilton’s essays on government—allows readers with a basic grasp of Constitution-era U.S. history to follow along. Madison’s views vested the people with sole authority for government, with a great variety of parties and interests in “well-organized political conflict” and carefully calibrated tension. Hamilton was far more disposed toward strong executive power and favoring the wealthy. Cost’s descriptions of postindependence political wrangling and the first decades of the new United States are clear and easily grasped, but his application of the extended battle of ideas through the 19th century is less persuasive, as it is based on an out-of-date understanding of ideas: this early generation of political conflict was vital to the foundation of the country, but given ensuing conflicts such as those over the acceptability of slavery, the American ideological landscape has since become much more complex than accounted for by this work. This is more valuable as a resource on colonial political philosophy than as an explanation of the U.S.’s current conflicts. [em](June) [/em]