Hamilton's Virtue
BLITZ, MARK
Hamilton's Virtue How Aristotle's philosophy led to the American economy. by Mark Blitz Critics of America make endless complaints. Our liberty is selfish license that corrodes community. Our...
...It weakens communal rooted-ness and strengthens secular excitement and opportunity...
...Hearing all this, one would think that American life is solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish, and our power soon to be thankfully short...
...Aristotle's virtue seems largely secular, if not wholly so, not merely pre-Christian, and therefore friendly to pride and magnificence, but also secured without excessive reliance on the gods...
...It would serve our mutual wants, and tie manufacturing to agriculture, as long as statesmen helped citizens to see that their enlightened self-interest required such a blend...
...They make men more industrious and inventive, and expand their choices...
...But this equality is secured best as a natural truth, not a mere opinion...
...Finally, Hamilton thought that commerce would provide resources to enhance "public splendor," liberality, and national greatness...
...Hamilton also thought that national commerce would help to cement the federal union and produce "a distinctly American economy...
...Most mirror old concerns, theoretical and practical...
...Only in its rational universalism is this belief a sufficient check on—and indication of superiority to—an obedient faith whose sway, however vast, cannot accord with reason...
...So by exploring and challenging "the virtue-commerce antinomy," Chan exposes both the classical core and virulent contemporary expression of unease or distress with acquisitive liberal democracy...
...Limiting or transforming tyrannies abroad serves foreign citizens as well as our own...
...So, although the United States is a living answer to the excesses of these worries, we are successful only because our policies and principles take them seriously...
...Michael Chan's practical purpose in Aristotle and Hamilton is to defend America by showing that we are not as bad as excessive criticism makes us seem...
...I will report Chan's main points, but cannot do justice to the subtlety and intricacy of his arguments...
...He does this by showing that Aristotle was friendlier to commerce than he appears, and Hamilton friendlier to virtue...
...The Revolutionary War led him to see that "only a nation with a manufacturing base and an advanced system of public finance" would win wars, because war has been revolutionized by the modern "arts of industry and the science of finance...
...Hamilton also argued that vigorous commerce aids national defense...
...And because a commercial nation depends on sound money and banks, it also encourages "punctuality, thrift, industry, responsibility in fulfilling contracts, and prudent financial management...
...Belief in humans' natural equality provides a substantial foundation for freedom, property, and responsibility...
...Here, government needs to support institutions such as a national university where there is little prospect of immediate economic gain...
...It enters the list with which I began mostly indirectly...
...Hamilton's acquisitive, energetic, commercial, manufacturing republic is no friend to the dominance of a single religion, or the dominance of religion simply...
...Outposts of beauty and intellect stand against our encroaching wilderness...
...The excellent book he has shaped from his thesis is a bulwark against the degrading of American principles...
...Did they believe, say, that the kind of faith Tocqueville noticed would survive or grow, or would even this have surprised them...
...Chan touches on this question near the end, but does not explore it...
...Manufacturing, especially, gives the able opportunities for spirited and useful enterprise...
...To explore this question you would need to pair Aristotle or Plato with someone other than Alexander Hamilton, who, as Chan informs us, did not pretend to be philosophic...
...The one exception is national expansion, where Hamilton's reasons for opposition were good (he feared that more land would mean a continuing agrarian economy) but manifestly not good enough...
...Indeed, the American "spirit of enterprise," writes Chan, "is in itself an inexhaustible mine of national wealth...
...Freedom is enterprise and responsibility, not only license...
...Our faith is narrow-minded, irrational, priggish, and hypocritical...
...Chan discusses Hamilton's view of the link between virtue and com-merce—or, more broadly, the political goals of his economic recommenda-tions—under five headings...
...This is unclear in Chan's presentation...
...The salutary effect of Chan's work is to increase or reaffirm one's admiration for his three protagonists—Aristotle, Hamilton, and the United States of America—by showing where each is consistent with the others...
...How, in particular, did Hamilton see the effect of his economics on religion, and the effect of religion on morality...
...Although these criticisms of America are excessive, they are not altogether absurd...
...Hamilton's political sagacity is, in Chan's presentation, especially impressive, almost star-tlingly so...
...The political goals commerce serves are connected to Hamilton's belief that "commercial virtue" is "necessary for a prosperous, orderly, and just nation...
...Abstraction corrodes habit and seeks general sway, and we are based on universal principles...
...To address these matters more completely, of course, we would need to consider additional questions...
...Mark Blitz, Fletcher Jones professor of political philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, is most recently the author of Duty Bound: Responsibility and American Public Life...
...Science properly guided is beneficial...
...To fully grasp the effect of commerce on virtue, especially today, we should, in addition to other questions, examine the link between virtue and piety, or morality and faithful obedience...
...The task of closing the gap between ancients and moderns is limited not just by differences of belief and circumstance, but by the variety of natural truths among which prudence must, in practice, steer...
...The traditional view of the moral superiority of farmers is incorrect...
...Our mad consumption leaves nothing for the future...
...Beyond his own efforts through foreign policy and state abolition societies, Hamilton thought that industrial, mechanical, and commercial development is the best economic alternative to slavery, and further undermines it by "softening and humanizing" mores, especially those of masterful men...
...The chief "enlarged plans of public good" that Hamilton had in mind for the United States were to promote industry, secure the independence of the new world from the old, end slavery, and advance the arts and sciences...
...Liberality would replace the ancient republics' "excessive devotion to . . . military glory...
...Our sciences threaten to destroy or degrade us...
...The advantages of commerce outweigh disadvantages such as vicious luxury and moral licentiousness...
...Indeed, the agrarian South and West depended on slavery, an institution more corrupt than anything commerce and manufacturing fostered...
...Unchecked individual ends demand unlimited technological means, and our desires Aristotle and Hamilton on Commerce and Statesmanship by Michael D. Chan Missouri, 236 pp., $44.95 seem unbounded...
...Our equality is a fraud that barely veils vast gaps between the undeserving rich and the undeservedly poor...
...Immorality is also a major fault that Islamic religious tyrants find with the West...
...That countries devoted to commercial acquisitiveness would diminish their citizens' characters was once the chief complaint against them...
...Commerce may allow opportunity but, in time, it favors those already wealthy...
...His vehicle is to show how Alexander Hamilton believed that American commerce and manufacturing would enhance not just prosperity but also our security, union, virtue, and a liberal public good that would support the arts and sciences and end slavery...
...Moreover, their view that we are soft and weak encourages their hopes or fantasies of fundamentalist Islamic reconquest and rebirth...
...One is to recast the debate about the relative importance of liberal acquisitiveness and so-called republican virtue in the American founding...
...Hamilton believed it "easier and more humane" to arrange matters so that interest and ambition, rather than fierce courage and self-renouncing public spiritedness, are the major supports of the public good...
...He shows, through Hamilton, that commerce and virtue need not contradict, and reminds us of the slave-owning self-interestedness often disguised by Virginians' republican blather...
...Yet the problem of virtue is vital to whatever is reasonable in each of our current concerns...
...Our silly arts seek a common denominator ever lower and more vulgar...
...The crux of Chan's discussion is virtue...
...Natural rights do not tell us all that reason can about natural excellence...
...One is the problem of religion or religious toleration, especially important in light of Islamic opposition to the West...
...His other, related, academic purpose is to narrow the gap between ancient and modern (post-Machiavellian) thinkers...
...For each, the economic is subordinate to the properly political, and the properly political an arm or element of excellence...
...Is this attenuation something that liberal political Founders expected, desired, or ignored...
...Faith and reason can be generously allied...
...What's more, we spread our corruption globally through imperial might wrapped in the delusion that it is liberal justice...
...This dilutes religious attachments, even beyond the effect of legal tolerance...
...Hamilton's challenge here "was to reconcile magnanimity or the longing for splendor among great men with the natural rights of mankind, or consent...
...Farmers' agitation for debt relief and easy money shows that they are more self-interested than pure...
...Indeed, consent and affection, as opposed to fear, served "not only to limit but also to invigorate the powers of government...
...Consent based on equal rights is always in some tension with intellectual virtue...
...Commerce also provides leisure to cultivate the arts and sciences and resources to communicate enlightened opinion...
...These concerns are excessive because they project the worst possibilities as if they were actual or inevitable, and not counteracted by better ones...
...By contrast, commerce and manufacturing give regular work to many not usually engaged in business, and furnish great "scope for the diversity of talents and dispositions among individuals...
...Chan makes clear how, in Hamilton's eyes, commerce and industry serve political, ethical, and intellectual ends greater than wealth alone, and are coherent with prudence and virtue...
...I was a member of Michael Chan's dissertation committee, a fact I reveal in the hope that kind (or moralistic) readers will now attribute my mistakes to accidental prejudice rather than incorrigible foolishness...
...He summarizes his position in advance by claiming that "Hamilton recognized a need for ancient as well as modern prudence in the practice of politics...
...Today, despite a generation of discussion, the complaint (lodged in these terms) still seems slightly quaint...
...First is the contribution that commerce and manufacturing make to national prosperity, a contribution that depends on equal freedom: "True liberty, by protecting the exertions of talents and industry and securing to them their justly acquired fruits, tends more powerfully than any other cause to augment the mass of national wealth...
...Chan's discussion is a highly intelligent contribution to the theoretical and practical issues he faces, and makes telling and sometimes novel use of The Federalist, Report on Manufactures, and Hamilton's other works...
...Also connected to this problem is how Hamilton would have demonstrated the rationality of natural rights...
...Commerce also would "promote a gradual assimilation of temper and sentiments among citizens...
...It is also a safeguard against complacent patriotism...
...Commerce would allow the ambitious to "build great commercial empires" and practice liberality grounded on agreement, not slavery and plunder...
...Democracy means vulgarity, and we are democratic...
...The "moral horizon of American politics" is more than "the ceaseless pursuit of security and prosperity...
...Chan also has two theoretical purposes...
...As best one can tell, he was correct about almost every important issue...
...Equality is equality in rights whose exercise leads unsurprisingly to inequalities in wealth...
...Is this secular emphasis also true of modern liberalism...
...In addition, manufacturing would especially benefit from technology, for Hamilton believed it particularly well suited to the use and invention of machines...
Vol. 12 • December 2006 • No. 13
