Darren Staloff

An intellectual history of three Founding Fathers whose unique approaches to the Enlightenment helped shape America.

American historian Darren Staloff delves into the political and intellectual lives of Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson to reveal how they embodied the collision of Europe’s grand Enlightenment project with the birth of a young nation. These three very different men each governed their public lives by Enlightenment principles. And the struggle for American independence would forever change their relationships to the politics of Enlightenment.

Repeated humiliation on America’s battlefields banished Hamilton’s youthful idealism, leaving him a disciple of Enlightened realpolitik and the nation’s leading exponent of modern statecraft. After ten years in Europe’s diplomatic trenches, Adams’s embrace of the politics of Enlightenment became increasingly skeptical in spirit, and his public posture became increasingly that of the gadfly of his country. And Jefferson’s frustrations as a Revolutionary governor in Virginia led him to go beyond his Enlightened worldview, and articulate a new and radical Romantic politics of principle.

Staloff demonstrates how each of these approaches helped shape America’s unique political identity. Because of the influence of these towering figures, Americans demand a government that is both modern, constrained by checks and balances, and capable of appealing to our loftiest aspirations while adhering to decidedly pragmatic policies.

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