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Reviews of Books
Power versus Liberty: Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Jefferson. By
JAMES H. READ
. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Pp. xii, 201.
$47.50 cloth, $16.50 paper.)
Reviewed by C. Bradley Thompson, Ashland University
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For much of the twentieth century, historians dominated scholarly studies of the founders' political ideas. In recent years, however, political scientists, legal scholars, philosophers, and even a few journalists have held the field. With a few notable exceptions, such as Forrest McDonald's Novus Ordo Seclorum and Jack Rakove's Original Intentions, historians of the revolutionary and early national periods have been AWOL on this important subject. Instead, they seem preoccupied with more prosaic concerns. Graduate students in some of our best history programs are more likely to study quilting than they are the political writings of Alexander Hamilton or James Madison. |
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We should not be surprised, then, that a political scientist would resurrect and extend the original themes and questions that inspired Bernard Bailyn in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. In Power versus Liberty: Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Jefferson, James Read has written the kind of book that historians once wrote but no longer do. And not only does Read keep alive the intellectual history of the founders' statesmanship, he also remains true to the historians' animating methodological premises. Like all good students of the past, Read attempts to understand America's founding statesmen as they understood themselves, according to the questions and preoccupations they set for themselves and saw as central to their thinking and political action. |
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Read recreates a four-way conversation among James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson on the question of power and its relationship to liberty. Or, as Read's founding statesmen might have posed the question: Does an increase in the power of government necessarily result in a reduction of liberty? Ultimately, Read attempts to explain why these four drew such "different conclusions about how much power to vest in government" (p. ix). |
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In Read's view, Madison, Hamilton, and Wilson agreed that power and liberty are not mutually exclusive, that power properly construed and limited is a necessary precondition for liberty. Jefferson's arguments articulating the position that there is a permanent and irreducible conflict between power and liberty serve by contrast as an intellectual control group by which to understand better the nature of the problem and the range of possible solutions. But we also learn that Madison, Hamilton, and Wilson approached the problem in very different ways and that their constitutional prescriptions varied in important respects. One of the great virtues of Read's approach is that it uncovers the wide range of theoretical and political options that were available to Americans in the late eighteenth century. |
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