The Price of Greatness
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
An incisive account of the tumultuous relationship between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison and of the origins of our wealthy yet highly unequal nation
In the history of American politics there are few stories as enigmatic as that of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison's bitterly personal falling out. Together they helped bring the Constitution into being, yet soon after the new republic was born they broke over the meaning of its founding document. Hamilton emphasized economic growth, Madison the importance of republican principles.
Jay Cost is the first to argue that both men were right -- and that their quarrel reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of the American experiment. He shows that each man in his own way came to accept corruption as a necessary cost of growth. The Price of Greatness reveals the trade-off that made the United States the richest nation in human history, and that continues to fracture our politics to this day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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but his application of the extended battle of ideas through the 19th century is less persuasive, as it is based on an out-of-date understanding of ideas: this early generation of political conflict was vital to the foundation of the country, but given ensuing conflicts such as those over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.
