History isn't just history. When we try to understand the relationship between the past and now, a lot depends on what we think the 'now' is like, and what we'd like it to be like. The example I'm thinking of is the emergence of capitalism in America, and the role of the revolution and the founders. Part of that is also the idea of modernity: in what sense is modernity defined by capitalism, and vice versa? And so in what ways did the revolution and founders help create the modern world?
Last year the newest volume of the Oxford History of the United States came out: Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty: a history of the early republic, 1789-1815. So it's not unreasonable to say that Wood's position (still) represents the historiographical orthodoxy. What is that position? For him, the early republic is all about the triumph of Jeffersonianism, and moreover, Jeffersonianism means capitalism. He deals with the state-interventionist Jefferson, the Jefferson of the Louisiana Purchase and the Embargo Act, as a paradoxical contradiction to the true Jefferson, who represents the individual pursuit of happiness, through competitive commerce, without government interference. My review of the book is here.
The Federalists, in this picture, are aristocratic stick-in-the-muds dedicated to clawing back a hierarchical and deferential society from the teeth of revolution. This is a bit different from the story in Wood's earlier book, The Creation of the American Republic, when he gave the (Madisonian) Federalists the triumph: their constitution was 'the end of classical politics' and the beginning of modernity. In the 1980s, Wood's tune shifted subtly away from this constitutionalism towards a celebration of the market. I would suggest that he had two major influences in that shift: Joyce Appleby and Ronald Reagan.
Wood and many others see a pretty straightforward link: freedom, to laissez-faire, to market capitalism. It works forwards and backwards, each element standing in for the others. Since we have market capitalism, it seems to follow, then we have freedom; and since we have those things, the Jeffersonians won, and the Federalists lost.
But it doesn't work if we don't see capitalism in the same rosy way. What if we see it as, instead, a system of rules that protect and entrench certain priorities? Capitalism isn't a question of non-interference with the individual, it's not a question of autonomy. It is, just as much as any system of power, a continual series of interferences: it creates and enforces ownership, labour, and finance contracts, which ultimately rely on the power of law and the state. It has to be continually propped up, stimulated, and bailed out. They were doing those things in the 1790s just as much as they are now.
Historians like Wood and Janet Riesman, following E. James Ferguson, point out that while the Federalist opposed paper money emissions in the 1780s, now we take paper currency manipulation as the sine qua non of financial capitalism. But they miss the point that the Federalists themselves made: the market can't work when currencies are controlled democratically. Capitalism is fundamentally at odds with democracy. It runs on rules that can't be broken by popular majorities, because the majority are always losers under capitalism: they get left in the dust by the concentration of wealth.
If we see capitalism this way, it's the rule-making Federalists who matter more in the making of modernity. They were the real founding fathers of American capitalism - and, in that sense, of the modern world.
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