Is America Simply Jefferson vs. Hamilton?
Herbert Butterfield in his The Whig Interpretation of History argued that assessing the past in light of the present, what we call “presentism,” is the source of all historical errors. Our tendency to do so results from a very real problem: How do we impose some sort of narrative order on the complex, disparate, and voluminous material presented in historical reflection? We retrospectively make sense of our own lives by imposing on memory some sort of narrative structure by which individual events become not only intelligible but meaningful when referenced to that narrative arc. The historian faces an even more arduous task not only because of the surfeit of material but also because the psychic demands differ. Individuals have to impose some interpretive order on the events of our lives to maintain personality, but history is not integrally structured in the same way. Narrative impositions tend to tell us more about the concerns and prejudices of the historian than they do of history itself.
Philosophers seek to impose order on historical events, typically positing some sort of cyclical or linear system, as that created by Augustine, who was the first to claim that the movement of history toward its finale resulted from conflict and reached its conclusion in the resolution of that conflict. Be it the heavenly versus the earthly city or democracy versus aristocracy or the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, the anticipation of that historical conclusion is what made historical events intelligible in the here and now. The temptation to shrink the whole of history into the history of a particular people or nation often proves irresistible. Part of Augustine’s genius was to place the cyclical history of nations and empires in relief against the linear history of the City of God. Often, however, the latter gets collapsed into the former. That tendency has been especially pronounced in the American context.
It’s hard to do historiography without some philosophy of history. What if one maintains the idea that binary conflict is what drives the historical narrative forward but leads to no apparent conclusion? This, I think, is part of what makes Jeffrey Rosen’s recent effort, The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America, both an interesting and frustrating book. He studiously attempts to avoid the presentist error but often at the cost of attributing no meaning to American history. The problem resides in the method itself: Reading all American history as a conflict between Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism might make sense if we knew where it was all headed, but in the absence of such knowledge the framework comes across as forced. It’s not as if there isn’t something to the claim; the question is whether the claim results in heavy-handed interpretations and oversimplifications.
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Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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