The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America

by Drew R. McCoy

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807846163
• ISBN13: 9780807846162
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and Unc Press
• Length: 278 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

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 h

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 Mad

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.

This is a very easy to read introduction

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.

Illuminating

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.