Aristotle and Hamilton

Michael D. Chan: Aristotle and Hamilton on Commerce and Statesmanship. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 36, Number 1, Fall 2008.

Republished with permission.

 

Michael Chan would bring Aristotle and Alexander Hamilton closer together than most previous scholars have done. Without “claiming that Hamilton was an Aristotelian,” he wants to show that Aristotle esteems commerce more than many Aristotelians say, and that Hamilton “endeavored to harness commerce not only for the narrower ends of prosperity and national defense, but also for the wider—indeed classical—ends of forming the character of citizens, especially harmony and justice, and [pursuing national greatness” (8). Both find in prudence the essence of statesmanship.

Chan devotes the first quarter of his argument to Aristotle’s treatment of economy and of what later writers would call ‘political economy.’ “The practice of virtue requires equipment,” and “furnishing the equipment of virtue constitutes one of the most necessary and difficult tasks of statesmanship” (13). Whereas the first two chapters of the Politics seem rather sternly to subordinate acquisition to economy proper—that is, the right use of the things acquired—chapters four, five, and six unbend a bit, “giv[ing] commerce ‘two cheers’ of praise” (13).

Chan distinguishes Aristotle from Francis Bacon; “Aristotle does not pursue the possibility of improving the arts and sciences for the sake of the relief of man’s estate” (15). Human life by nature aims at action more than production; “man is better understood as a political animal than a tool-making animal” (15). Production is always instrumental, aiming at an end beyond itself, whereas the distinctly human virtues manifest themselves in activity. Mere production of possessions might succeed too well, clogging our lives with too many things, the sheer amount of which “becomes a hindrance than a help to the practice of virtue” (16). More, the spirit of production is a spirit of innovation, potentially injurious to the steady rule of law, which requires habituation and reverence; steadiness of soul in turns inclines one toward prudence, the virtue that “concerns itself with the whole rather than the partial human good”—unlike any production can do (17).

This notwithstanding, Chan observes, Aristotle stands closer to Bacon than he does to Rousseau, who attacks the cultivation of the arts tout court. In Politics VII.11 Aristotle “relaxes some of his strictures against technological innovation because of certain economic, political, and moral considerations which no actual (and even the best) regime can ignore,” such as “military necessity” (20). A statesman who ignored the need for fortifications in the face of such current innovations as missiles and siege machines fails in prudence, fails to adapt to new circumstances, clings to old-fashioned ways of life at the expense of the well-being of his polis. “[T]echnology can and does affect the conditions for the practice of virtue, which is among the reasons why all natural right is changeable” (20). It is to be noted, however, that this example commends only a prudential response to innovation, not a spirit of technological innovation itself, a stance not necessarily so Hamiltonian.

Chan argues that Aristotle questions “nature’s beneficence” (25). If piracy—that is, theft—is among the natural forms of acquisition, how beneficent can nature really be? And he praises Carthage more than Sparta—that is, the regime of commerce more than the regime of war. He therefore claims that the argument in Books I and II of the Politics for the natural limits of acquisition amounts to edifying rhetoric. In so arguing, he does not consider that if war is a form of acquisition, then Sparta is more, not less violently acquisitive than Carthage.

Chan devotes the beginning of his second and final chapter on Aristotle to Book II’s discussion of the ‘best regime’ as envisioned by philosophers and political reformers. Chan cites Aristotle’s commendation of private property as the indispensable precondition for liberality. He rightly notices Aristotle’s criticisms of Phaleas of Chalcedon, that resolute egalitarian who ignores the honor-loving dimension of the human soul and can therefore imagine a faction-less polis of merely economic equality. A regime animated by liberal property-holders will more likely cohere than a regime of economic equals set free to quarrel over a straw when honor’s at the stake.

On precisely this issue of faction, and returning to the real regimes of Sparta and Carthage, Chan refers to Aristotle’s account of Carthage as a regime with neither serious factionalism nor tyranny, in contrast to the Spartan regime, wracked by periodic slave revolts. Carthage “provide[s] for its people while maintaining harmony by sending out a part of them to subject cities where they are able to become wealthy” (49), unlike democratic but non-commercial Athens, threatened by poverty-stricken urban mobs. An economy of commerce, of deal-making give-and-take, lends itself better to politics—the activity of ruling and being ruled, reciprocally. Carthage is commercial but it is no oligarchy, the regime animated by “the political opinion that wealth ought to be the title to rule” (51). In fact, Carthaginians love honor; Aristotle classifies Carthage as a timocracy. “Sparta and Carthage are similar in the most important way: both are aristocratic polities. Yet for the most part, they represent polar opposites, which can be attributed to their different modes of acquisition. At one extreme is Sparta: agrarian, rooted, homogeneous, prone to slave revolts, and warlike. At the other extreme is Carthage: commercial, seafaring, heterogeneous, harmonious, and less warlike. In creating a kind of continuum of modes of acquisition for cities, Aristotle seems to be expanding the options of statesmen so that they may choose the mode(s) of acquisition that best fits their particular circumstances…though he warns them that their regime’s mode of acquisition will be prone to characteristic excesses. In this way, the best regime need not hinder statesmen from establishing good regimes.” (52-53) Aristotle’s “ultimate aim” is “to deflect narrow economic ends toward the more comprehensive and higher ends of harmony, justice, moral virtue, and cultivated leisure” 953). Thus in the end Chan does preserve the distinction Aristotle insists upon in Books I and II of the Politics, namely, the superiority of use over acquisition. Chan’s Aristotle is less a modern liberal than Montesquieu, more a modern liberal than Rousseau.

So is his Hamilton. While not claiming that “Aristotle influenced Hamilton directly,” Chan rather “mean[s] to show that Hamilton recognized a need for ancient as well as modern prudence in the practice of politics” (55). By “modern” prudence he means a practical wisdom that does not seek so much to improve men intrinsically but to channel “their opinions, passions, and interests through institutions so as to make them serve the common good” (55). “Ancient” prudence “seeks to make men as they ought to be by directly educating and forming their opinions, passions, and interests” so as to enhance their ability to “deliberat[e] well about the best thing to be done under the circumstances in light of what is good and just for man” (55-56). Hamilton learned examples of such prudential statesmanship from Plutarch. The “three major components” of such ancient prudence are close attention to particulars, the direct formation of public opinion, and guidance by “considerations of morality and virtue” (57). “Hamilton chose not to follow the path of Machiavelli” but justified his economic policies in accordance with a hierarchy of five goods, ranging from “the lower to the higher: prosperity, national defense, the national union, cementing Union, commercial virtue, and national greatness” (63). Chan devotes a chapter to each of these.

Chan understands that Machiavelli propounded a politics of acquisition, which the ‘liberal’ wing of the Machiavellian movement—its most extreme representative being Bernard Mandeville—transformed into “economism” (66). Under contemporary conditions, the middle-class regimes Aristotle favored could no longer adhere to the stern frugality commended by many of Hamilton’s contemporaries who advocated regimes of liberty animated by an austere refusal of commerce and luxury and by suspicion of any but the most local government. The prudential statesman in modernity must recognize that such virtuous poverty and political modesty will fall to the opulent, militarily powerful statist monarchies. Within this constricted circumstance, however, Hamilton continues to insist that virtue, not Machiavellian virtù, remains “the only unmixed good which is permitted to [man’s] temporal condition” (Hamilton, quoted p. 79).

With respect to the second good, national defense, Hamilton similarly conceded that “America would have to emulate much of British military and industrial policy if it was to remain free and secure” (80). Standing, professional armies and navies are indispensable to survival in the modern world; ‘ancient’ citizen militias simply will not do. Indeed, the ancient militias rested on the social foundation of slavery, which alone allowed the citizens of the polis the leisure to engage in serious military training. Without slavery, sunshine soldiers and summer patriots will be all too common. In this, Chan observes, Hamilton concurred with the judgment of no less a critic of modern statism than Adam Smith (87). Only a country with such modern systems of finance and manufacturing could fund modern militaries, and in this he departed from the Scottish philosopher, who, with Hamilton’s bitter rival Thomas Jefferson, advocated the rapid retirement of modest war debts. To such thinkers Hamilton replied that not modern economics but “man’s domineering passions” were the true “cause of wars” (97). Chan rightly remarks that Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures urges its well-known policies not primarily for political-economic purposes but in order to strengthen American military (and therefore political) independence from foreign suppliers. For this purpose, mere commercial agrarianism would fail, first of all on economic terms, as the vagaries of crop yields and European policy would incur poverty and debt in a predominantly agricultural New World. Contra Jefferson and Smith, manufacturing—really the economic locus of the technological inventiveness of the human mind and the industriousness of the human spirit—would generate the true wealth of nations.

Strengthening the American constitutional union, Hamilton’s third good, required a commercial economy in which citizens saw that agricultural and commercial interests formed “part of a whole with a common aim” or aims, namely, civil-social peace and justice. Strong nationwide commerce would not only incline the American states less to war with one another; manufacturing and urbanization would reduce the number of poor citizens, another source of faction. Hamilton’s program for the assumption of the states’ war debts by the national government aimed at satisfying both the citizens of the most heavily indebted states and their creditors. He saw that the threat to American republicanism arose not only from ‘democracy,’ the many who were poor whom Daniel Shays exemplified, but also from the few who were rich, from creditor-oligarchs, who might enjoy “greater success” than poor Shays, “since public creditors tended to be men of superior talent and ability” (132). Against both of these revolutionary prospects, federal debt assumption “would unite the interest of public creditors and tie them to the federal government” while relieving the states and the many poor citizens now bearing the financial brunt of the Revolutionary War (137).

By commercial virtue, his fourth good, Hamilton referred to a character and way of life animated by constant and regular work, self-help, and opportunities for diverse talents and inclinations to make their way; a commercial manufacturing political economy will “call into activity the whole vigor” of each citizen’s “nature” (152). It will also call into activity each part of the individual soul—most obviously the appetitive part, but also the spirited, enterprising part and the reasoning, inventive part. The “true politician,” Hamilton wrote, will “favor all those institutions and plans which tend to make men happy according to their natural bent, which multiply the sources of individual enjoyment and increase those of national resource and strength” (154). A political economy that did not deploy government support to spur manufacturing in an agrarian society such as America would fail to take account of the decidedly unfree markets in all other countries. Its statesmen would depend too much upon what’s now called ‘rational choice theory,’ which at least in its more ‘economistic’ manifestations assumes that human beings will nicely calculate actions for material advantage in abstraction from timidity and ingrained habits. Not only rational calculation to satisfy appetites but spirited ambition to dare to invest and innovate must begin to overcome agrarian ‘rootedness.’ Even a seemingly trivial thing like the introduction of circulation coin would “accustom the poor and middling elements to handling [money], inducing them to become ever-more industrious and sagacious” (159). A large-scale commercial society requires more laws, too, and at least gives statesmen the opportunity to inculcate a greater respect for law, and therefore greater reasonableness among citizens (182).

Chan associates Hamilton’s final good, national greatness, with the Aristotelian virtues of liberality and magnanimity. Chan argues that Hamilton eschews Machiavelli’s (as it were) mean-spirited liberality, the Florentine’s advice to be liberal with other people’s money. The “liberal or enlarged plans of public good” envisaged by Hamilton (189) included federal assumption of state war debts, compensated emancipation of slaves, and endowments for a military academy and a national university. Such uses of taxpayer-derived revenues avoid Machiavelli’s illiberal liberality because they depend upon a principle of republicanism, namely, the consent of the governed. Further, in an important sense such liberality excels the liberality of the ancients, grounded as it is on free commerce and industry rather than on slavery and plunder.

Beyond liberality, Hamilton approaches magnanimity or greatness of soul. Although he does not seem to know Paul Eidelberg’s similar argument in his 1974 study A Discourse on Statesmanship, Chan offers much the same assessment: “Hamilton, by way of Hume, seems to have synthesized the active political virtue of the moderns and the magnanimous virtue of the ancients in his concept of ‘the love of fame,’ which is the ‘ruling passion of the noblest minds,’ and which prompts statesmen ‘to undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit'” (191). Politically, Hamilton needed to find ways to reconcile magnanimity with republican consent. For this effort the project of emancipating slaves with compensation to their owners afforded a wide field for the exhibition of political courage and the other soul-strengthening and soul-enlarging activities conducive to a genuinely magnanimous statecraft. One might add that Hamilton had before him the example of Washington, a great-souled man if every there was one, and a man who did in fact emancipate his slaves—with compensation to them—in his Last Will and Testament.

If, as Aristotle contends, all natural right is changeable—a matter of prudent and morally sound adjustment to circumstances—and not a set of permanent laws, that is commands, then Hamilton might be thought of as a kind of Aristotelian statesman acting in a Machiavellian world of commerce and statism. Chan concludes his study by observing that the owners of American slave plantations, by arguing for the positive good of slavery, depart from Aristotle quite sharply; Hamilton, that proponent of commerce and industry in part as counters to the slave economy, comes closer to the Aristotelian standard of justice. This is particularly true in light of the character seen in prominent members of the mercantile class in Hamilton’s day; Robert Morris was no Philadelphia equivalent of a fig peddler in ancient Athens. The great financial and commercial men of America were statesmen in their own right, and often (as in Morris’s case) statesmen simply. This is not to claim that the commercial way of life seen in America and supported by Hamilton would produce a way of life conducive to liberality and magnanimity in the Aristotelian sense. “Hamilton wished to carve out a sphere in which a few choice spirits like himself could take full advantage of virtue’s equipment to pursue magnanimous enterprises for the public good, but America’s devotion to equality guarantees that such choice spirits have to swim against the tide of American politics” (216). Then again, as a later statesman of republicanism observed, character is “the virtue of difficult times.”