The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America

Rating:
Summary: Good and Easy read--Religio-Philosophial gloss on US history
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: This is a book to hang on to.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Illuminating
Review: In the young United States existed a prevalent notion of the link between political economy and national character. Jefferson and his coterie felt the virtue of the young republic largley depended on its survival as an agrarian society.

McCoy starts with an ambitious (if simple) goal: to explicate and illustrate the Jeffersonians' attitudes toward political economy, and the ways in which those attitudes (namely, the desire to build a large, agrarian society) evolved and changed with time and political necessity. Most importantly, McCoy seeks to show how the Jeffersonian quest for agrarian republicanism guided many of Jefferson and Madison's most important political decisions.

Without doubt, McCoy's book is a success. McCoy aptly demonstrates the subtle evolution of Jeffersonian ideals, while emphasizing their underlying stability. While the book is dense, and at times difficult, by the end of the book the reader develops an strong intuitive understanding of the Jeffersonians' views on political economy (even if many examples are lost to the memory), and a strong understanding of how these views molded our nation's growth in the early 19th century.

Rating:
Summary: This is a book to hang on to.
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Bringing Jefferson to life
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Good and Easy read--Religio-Philosophial gloss on US history
Review: to a very complex topic. Not that it is a mere summary--McCoy has many ideas of his own--but he does, very successfully, present a summary of Republicanism and liberalism.

This is a fabulous book, very well-written and full of interesting ideas. I'd say it's the best introduction to the early republic and Jeffersonian America.

If some readers were stumped by this one, I'd love to see their reaction to J. G. A. Pocock's _Machiavellian Moment_. Hehehe.

Rating:
Summary: Where have all the political economists gone?
Review: 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?