The Elusive Republic

Name: The Elusive Republic
Author: Drew R McCoy
ISBN: 0807846163

by Drew R McCoy

Drew McCoy is a brilliant writer, and this is a period that is absolutely essential to understand if you want to grasp the Jeffersonian tradition, which continues to shape our values on everything from aid to farms, to support for housing and small businesses today. You really cannot understand the thought of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and the other opponents of Hamilton and his successors, in these early years of the republic, without realising they did not understand that the industrial revolution would radically transform everything. For them, a factory was a sweatshop. What were called manufactories in the 18th century were sweatshops where the most miserable of the urban poor who had lost their land – or the children of farm families that had too many mouths to feed – would go and and mostly make luxuries for the European upper class. So American republicans like Madison and Jefferson, even though they were slave holders, essentially did have genuine republican values – this vision of a society of independent freeholders. They could not conceive of a democratic republic in which the majority was not independent farmers, because the wage-earning working class of their day was destitute and miserable. They were simply wrong. Now, thanks to technology , less than 2% of the American population works directly in agriculture. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean the nightmare of Jefferson has come true and that we all are destitute, landless proletarians – although there are problems with the increasing polarisation of incomes and the US does have a disgracefully large population of poor people. What happened was that we shifted as a result of productivity growth in agriculture from having most jobs in agriculture to having most jobs in wage-earning sectors without having the proletarianisation that Jefferson and his contemporaries feared on the basis of pre-modern history. So agrarian republicanism turned out to be wrong, but even though it was wrong in its very pessimistic view of the future, which McCoy describes brilliantly, nevertheless these legacies continue to shape American values. So, for example, in the United States the term “big” is a pejorative word. “Big” business, “big” government, “big “ labour – there is something sinister about it. I’m a progressive myself in my politics, but it does amuse me when progressives go after “big oil” and “big pharma” – the oil and pharmaceutical industries are, by their nature, capital intensive industries with increasing returns to scale. I have no idea what “small pharma” is. But it’s because of this Jeffersonian legacy that “big” is just a swearword in the United States. This book is the best guide to one of the two traditions in American history, the Jeffersonian tradition in its early phases. It’s a very close reading of the thoughts of Jefferson and also of Madison – his close ally – about political economy. It goes beyond the usual notions that they were in favour of decentralisation against centralisation and in favour of small business against big business. They actually had very sophisticated views about demography and the demographic future of the US, which, as I have said, turned out to be wrong. But they were quite brilliant men and it’s fascinating to read this book.

Recommended by

Michael Lind

"Drew McCoy is a brilliant writer, and this is a period that is absolutely essential to understand if you want to grasp the Jeffersonian tradition, which continues to shape our values on everything from aid to farms, to support for housing and small businesses today. You really cannot understand the thought of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and the other opponents of Hamilton and his successors, in these early years of the republic, without realising they did not understand that the industrial revolution would radically transform everything. For them, a factory was a sweatshop. What were called manufactories in the 18th century were sweatshops where the most miserable of the urban poor who had lost their land – or the children of farm families that had too many mouths to feed – would go and and mostly make luxuries for the European upper class. So American republicans like Madison and Jefferson, even though they were slave holders, essentially did have genuine republican values – this vision of a society of independent freeholders. They could not conceive of a democratic republic in which the majority was not independent farmers, because the wage-earning working class of their day was destitute and miserable. They were simply wrong. Now, thanks to technology , less than 2% of the American population works directly in agriculture. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean the nightmare of Jefferson has come true and that we all are destitute, landless proletarians – although there are problems with the increasing polarisation of incomes and the US does have a disgracefully large population of poor people. What happened was that we shifted as a result of productivity growth in agriculture from having most jobs in agriculture to having most jobs in wage-earning sectors without having the proletarianisation that Jefferson and his contemporaries feared on the basis of pre-modern history. So agrarian republicanism turned out to be wrong, but even though it was wrong in its very pessimistic view of the future, which McCoy describes brilliantly, nevertheless these legacies continue to shape American values. So, for example, in the United States the term “big” is a pejorative word. “Big” business, “big” government, “big “ labour – there is something sinister about it. I’m a progressive myself in my politics, but it does amuse me when progressives go after “big oil” and “big pharma” – the oil and pharmaceutical industries are, by their nature, capital intensive industries with increasing returns to scale. I have no idea what “small pharma” is. But it’s because of this Jeffersonian legacy that “big” is just a swearword in the United States. This book is the best guide to one of the two traditions in American history, the Jeffersonian tradition in its early phases. It’s a very close reading of the thoughts of Jefferson and also of Madison – his close ally – about political economy. It goes beyond the usual notions that they were in favour of decentralisation against centralisation and in favour of small business against big business. They actually had very sophisticated views about demography and the demographic future of the US, which, as I have said, turned out to be wrong. But they were quite brilliant men and it’s fascinating to read this book."

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