“Hamilton” on television put our founders in the public view at a critical time. As good as the Broadway production is and as valuable as Ron Chernow’s biography is, there is more valuable guidance available to us.
Alexander Hamilton played a critical role in designing and explaining our government’s structure. His many writings still serve as resources for political scientists and legal scholars and practitioners. Hamilton understood, perhaps better than other founders, that the national government structure had to be expansive enough to adapt to changing circumstances.
As confident as Hamilton was in the government he helped design, he understood that there were dangers embedded its structure. His writings include a warning that a republican form of governance such as ours could be subverted by “flattering the prejudices of the people and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.”
Our greatest governmental crisis, the Civil War, was preceded by the conditions Hamilton described. Those conditions are with us again. Hamilton is worth knowing for more than entertainment.
Richard Hesse
Hopkinton