The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America | Drew R. McCoy

The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America | Drew R. McCoy | The founding fathers lived in a very different world.

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The Elusive Republ...

	The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America Drew R. McCoy The University of North Carolina Press, 1996 - 278 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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By investigating eighteenth-century social and economic thought?an intellectual world with its own vocabulary, concepts, and assumptions?Drew McCoy smoothly integrates the history of ideas and the history of public policy in the Jeffersonian era. The book was originally published by UNC Press in 1980.

Where have all the political economists gone?

We tend to forget that up until the late nineteenth century most economists saw their field as a branch of politics and/or ethics.
The purview of this altogether brilliant book is the Federalist period thru the Monroe administration. McCoy elucidates the main theories of political economy in the early Republic and examines how practical politics forced the likes of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and many others to change or adapt their views.
What these men were concerned with was the longevity of our country. A republic required a virtuous citizenry. In order to maintain such a citizenry, the republic must be run in such a way as to produce such paragons.
It is important to keep in mind that this was a period of time that tended to see republics as doomed in the long run. Accelerating that decline was the development of the manufacture on non-essentials or luxuries that were typified by the advanced economies of Europe. The manufacturing of these luxuries seemed to inevitably lead to the sort of personal and governmental corruption that every good American saw in Great Britain.
What came to be seen as the Jeffersonian solution to this issue was the idea of the yeoman republic- that we would be largely a nation of independent farmers. Such men were beholden to no one so they would naturally be more inclined to look to the public interest. They would eschew luxuries and live a reasonably simple life. They would be busy enough to be free of the debilitating effects of indolence (it is evident from McCoy's pages that the fear of the Great Unwashed wandering without occupation thru the streets drove many a founding father to researching and writing about political economy). Yet our yeoman farmers would have enough time to read and study the great issues of the day. Since we had an enormous frontier for future population growth to claim and cultivate it would be decades before we would have to deal with the economic consequences of population growth.
It is easy to mock such a viewpoint (and I admit to a wee mockery above). But it would be impossible to mock the scholarship that is used to develop the history of this viewpoint.
The first two chapters of the book set up the rest of the history. In these chapters, McCoy examines assumptions about luxury, indolence, mercantilism, and foreign trade in the writings of Mandeville, Ferguson, Adam Smith, Hume and Franklin among others. The chapters are gems of compression of exposition.
To me, however, the book gets more interesting in the later chapters as the above Jeffersonian synthesis emerges and the successive administrations of Jefferson and Madison attempt to use it to guide us in our foreign and economic policies. Here we are dealing with the thoughts of Albert Gallatin and Alexander Hamilton as well as numerous lesser writers. And here our ideological assumptions are battered by the stubbornly self-serving policies of Britain, France and Spain.
The main result was that to one degree or another both Madison and Jefferson were forced to eventually come to terms with the necessity of developing our own manufacturers and developing an internal market for their goods.
This is a thoroughly enjoyable extremely well written book which elucidates one of the earlier examples of an ongoing American tendency to confuse our ideological assumptions with the bones of reality (as it were). It is an important lesson to keep in mind that the assumptions about human nature that any one economic theory make are usually among the most naïve and the most political aspects of that economic theory. So I guess the title of my review should be: Does anybody else realize that we are still doing political economics?

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The founding fathers lived in a very different world.

This book shows that in the years of American independence, it was the vision of America's ruling class leaders including Franklin, Jefferson and Adams that the United States be predominantly a nation of small independent farmers. These farmers also according to this vision would engage in very small scale manufacturing of household essentials from dishes to clothing and trade such products with one another. Manufactures that could not be obtained from the domestic market could be imported from Europe in return for American agricultural produce.

Franklin and Jefferson were horrified by the extreme inequality in wealth in Great Britain. British urban areas featured hideous slums and workers enduring horrific conditions in manufacturing establishments whose owners made huge sums of money off the virtual slave labor. Most American leaders were deeply concerned about preventing the development of a European style elite class of multi-millionaires who, under the mercantilist system, used the government to get special favors and subsidies as they lived lives of effeminate laziness and corruption. This fear took an extreme urgency for Jeffersonians during the reign of Treasury Secretary Hamilton who attempted to adopt the British mercantilist system to the United States and its Democratic republic.

America's leaders, the author shows, believed that the development of an urban proletariat that a large manufacturing economy entailed was incompatible with a Democratic republic. The Aristotles at the University of Chicago often quote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, on the supreme efficiency of the Division of Labor. However the author quotes some passages from that book, strangely missed by those Aristotles, which declared that the Division of Labor transformed workers into drudges as stupid and ignorant as it was possible for human beings to be. If a person was an independent farmer, no matter how poor, he at least was able to exercise his creative and intellectual capacities as he operated his farm. However the factory worker did the same thing over and over again and had no opportunity to develop what Marx called his "species being." Gradually the intellecual and creative capacities of the worker became so degraded as to be barely distinguishable from that of an animal. Smith more or less called for the government to institute social programs to mitigate these effects on the factory worker. Jefferson and Madison shared these same fears.

But such a factory system as that which had developed in Britain would not develop for a very long time in the United States Jefferson thought. Because there was such a massive supply of arable land available, the United States could establish itself as a predominantly agricultural nation and prosper as it exported its food surpluses to Europe. Jefferson argued that a minimum of 50 acres (from unowned land of course, not from land already owned) should be distributed to all males who did not have property.

However after the peace of 1783, the British refused to lift trade barriers to American exports to the British Isles or the West Indies. American food exports still had to go through very intricate expensive mercantilist channels to reach British markets, making employment American agriculture a precarious enterprise and the specter loomed of having to turn to large create manufacturing to compensate for the loss of employment. James Madison believed that only strong national government control over commerce which was missing in the Articles of Confederation government, could peaceably coerce the Europeans to remove trade barriers to American exports. Madison by the early 1790's fervently argued for temporarily banning all imports and exports with Britain in order to force open British markets to American goods.

The British and French harassment of American shipping and the failure of Jefferson's trade embargo on Britain and France, led to the War of 1812. Some Jeffersonians supported government protection and subsidies of the manufacture of raw materials vital for national defense and agriculture. However, Madison and Jefferson still believed the U.S. could be a predominantly agricultural republic. Madison greatly feared for the future of the republic as the specter of large scale manufacturing and extreme inequality of wealth, loomed. Jefferson in the last years of his life believed that the manufacturing economy of the Northeast was conspiring to undermine what he conceived to be a virtual agricultural utopia in the South and West of the U.S. as the borders of it were defined in his day. Jefferson supported the extension of slavery into the Southern territory covered by the Missouri compromise of 1820 on the ground of encouraging the settlement of slave owning agriculturalists. He apparently convinced himself that this extension of slavery would somehow help peacefully whither that horrific institution away. However in reality it became even more consolidated and Jefferson's virtuous independent landholder slave owners drove their slaves harder and harder accumulated even more massive wealth and lived in decadent effeminate luxury.

The author does not really analyze how close to reality this vision of independent small farmers ever was--the composition of the property of these small farmers, how many slaves they owned, etc. Indeed ownership of slaves somehow diluted Jefferson's idyllic vision of the self-reliant small farmer which he apparently believed himself to be in spite of his innumerable slaves. The author does not talk about white supremacy. However the latter was obviously a big part of the Jeffersonian vision given the presence of slavery and also of course related to the Native Americans who were living on the land that Jefferson & co. wanted for the settlement of their expanding white population.

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This is a book to hang on to.

In The Elusive Republic, Drew R. McCoy presents a compeling work on the development of America's political economy. After walking away from this book I felt that I had a good grasp on an area of Jeffersonian republicanism that I had not been exposed to. This is a book to hang on to.

Good and Easy read--Religio-Philosophial gloss on US history

Excellent survey of how the founders idealized the future of America as contraposed against the "old world" as well as how, even in the early stages of the Country, the founder's time was idealized as a kind of ever receeding eden to which the country aspires to return to. You can hear the echos of this today in family values rhetoric, the contining (if anachronistic) idealization of the family farm and "main street." McCoy sets up the American experience as a continuing striving to re-create that idealized world of the founders that never really existed. Central that idealized conception was the idea of "virtue" among all of the citizens that the founders saw as a pre-requisite of a lasting republic. That is a republic could only work if its citizens were "masters and slaves of none"--this is where the ideal of the single yoeman farmer of Jefferson comes in. Only with this economic self-sufficiency, the founders thought, could citizens act for the common good. This is why it is often said that the founders didn't like or anticpate poltical parties--they felt that in this ideal republic, the citizens would always abandon their self interest. McCoy also talks about how important it was to inculcate this vision of the way that the repulbic "should be" throough educational exhortation and poltical economics (open land in the west)so that future generations would both understand their vision and be able to take care of it.

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Bringing Jefferson to life

This was a successful chronicle of Jefferson's policy and his role in building a new republic. A wonderful read that brings history to life!

reviews: page 1, 2

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