[An American historian, political theorist, novelist, journalist, and lecturer, Kirk was one of America's most eminent conservative intellectuals. His works have provided a major impetus to the conservative revival that has developed since the 1950s. In The Conservative Mind, Kirk traces the roots and canons of modern conservative thought to such important predecessors as Edmund Burke, John Adams, and Alexis de Tocqueville. In the following excerpt from the seventh (1986) edition of that work, Kirk discourses on Hamilton's thought and stature as a conservative statesman.]

"In the commencement of a revolution, which received its birth from the usurpations of tyranny, nothing was more natural than that the public mind should be influenced by an extreme spirit of jealousy." So Alexander Hamilton spoke to the Convention of New York, in 1788. "To resist these encroachments, and to nourish this spirit, was the great object of all our public and private institutions. The zeal for liberty became predominant and excessive. In forming our Confederation, this passion alone seemed to actuate us, and we appear to have had no other view than to secure ourselves from despotism.… But there is another object, equally important, and which our enthusiasm rendered us little capable of regarding. I mean a principle of strength and stability in the organization of our government, and of vigor in its operations."

Both the virtue and the weakness of Hamilton as a conservative thinker may be detected in this brief passage. His political principles were simple: he distrusted popular and local impulses, and he believed that salvation from the consequence of levelling ideas lay in establishing invincible national authority. He would have liked a central government; perceiving this wholly unacceptable to America, he settled for a federal government, and became its most vigorous organizer and pamphleteer. To him, with Madison and Jay, the United States owe the adoption of their Constitution. Such was Hamilton's wisdom and such were his achievements, and they have kept his memory fresh even in this generation, celebrating the Constitution's bicentenary, which in many ways badly misunderstands Hamilton. But General Hamilton was not vouchsafed the gift of prophecy, the highest talent of Burke and (in a lesser degree) of Adams. It seems hardly to have occurred to Hamilton's mind that a consolidated nation might also be a levelling and innovating nation, though he had the example of Jacobin France right before him; and he does not appear to have reflected upon the possibility that force in government may be applied to other purposes than the maintenance of a conservative order. Even in political economy, he was a practicing financier rather than an economic thinker, and he ignored the probability that the industrialized nation he projected might conjure up not only conservative industrialists, but also radical factory-hands—the latter infinitely more numerous, and more inimical to Hamilton's old-fashioned idea of class and order than all the agrarians out of Jefferson's Virginia. Now Hamilton's scheme for stimulating American industry was neither narrow nor selfish, it ought to be said; he looked forward to benefits truly general. "Hamilton asked for protection, not to confer privilege on industry, or to swell its profits, but to bring the natural occupation of a free country, namely, agriculture, into the stream of cultural advance," writes C. R. Fay. Still, his splendid practical abilities had for their substratum a set of traditional assumptions almost naive; and he rarely speculated upon what compound might result from mixing his prejudices with the elixir of American industrial vigor.

Vernon Parrington, though now and then guilty of using the terms "Tory" and "liberal" in a sense hardly discriminating, is accurate when he remarks that Hamilton was at bottom a Tory without a king, and that his teachers were Hume and Hobbes. All his revolutionary ardor notwithstanding, Hamilton loved English society as an English colonial adores it. His vision of the coming America was of another, stronger, richer eighteenth-century England. To the difficulties in the way of his dream, he was almost oblivious. American hostility to his proposal for a more powerful chief magistracy, preferably hereditary, grieved and rather surprised him, and with pain he relinquished this plan. As England was a single state, its sovereignty indivisible and its parliament omnicompetent, so should America be: he shrugged impatiently away those considerations of territorial extent, historical origin, and local prerogative which Burke would have been the first to recognize and approve.

"It is a known fact to human nature, that its affections are commonly weak in proportion to the distance or diffusiveness of the object," wrote this "bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar" (Adams' epithet) from Nevis; he had none of those local attachments of ancestry and nativity that caused leaders like Josiah Quincy and John Randolph to love their state with a passion beside which nationalism was a feeble infatuation. "Upon the same principle that a man is more attached to his family than to the community at large [he wrote in The Federalist, No. 17], the people of each State would be apt to feel a stronger bias toward their local governments than towards the government of the Union; unless the force of that principle should be destroyed by a much better administration of the latter." But Hamilton's very exoticism, which enabled his patriotism to ignore local distinctions, tended to conceal from him the obdurate resolution which was latent in the several state governments and local affections. Despite his remarks above, generally he mistook these profound impulses for mere transitory delusions; he thought they could be eradicated by the strong arm of national government—by the federal courts, the Congress, the tariff, the Bank, and his whole nationalizing program. In the long run, his instruments did indeed crush particularism to earth; but only by provoking a civil war which did more than all of Jefferson's speculations to dissipate the tranquil eighteenth-century aristocratic society that really was Hamilton's aspiration. Hamilton misunderstood both the tendency of the age (naturally toward consolidation, not localism, without much need of assistance from governmental policies deliberately pursued) and the dogged courage of his opponents. A political thinker of the first magnitude possesses greater prescience.

Similarly, that industrialization of America which Hamilton successfully promoted was burdened with consequences the haughty and forceful new aristocrat did not perceive. Commerce and manufactures, he believed, would produce a body of wealthy men whose interests would coincide with those of the national common-wealth. Probably he conceived of these pillars of society as being very like great English merchants—purchasing country estates, forming presently a stable class possessed of leisure, talent, and means, providing moral and political and intellectual leadership for the nation. The actual American businessman, generally speaking, has turned out to be a different sort of person: it is difficult to reproduce social classes from a model three thousand miles over the water. Modern captains of industry might surprise Hamilton, modern cities shock him, and the power of industrial labor frighten him: for Hamilton never quite understood the transmuting properties of social change, which in its operation is more miraculous than scientific. Like Dr. Faustus' manservant, Hamilton could evoke elementals; but once materialized, that new industrialism swept away from the control of eighteenth-century virtuosos like the masterful Secretary of the Treasury. Indeed, Hamilton was contemplating not so much the creation of a new industrialism, as the reproduction of European economic systems which the spirit of the age already was erasing:

To preserve the balance of trade in favor of a nation ought to be a leading aim of its policy. The avarice of individuals may frequently find its account in pursuing channels of traffic prejudicial to that balance, to which the government may be able to oppose effectual impediments. There may, on the other hand, be a possibility of opening new sources, which though accompanied with great difficulties in the commencement, would in the event amply reward the trouble and expense of bringing them to perfection. The undertaking may often exceed the influence and capitals of individuals, and may require no small assistance, as well from the revenue as from the authority of the state.

This is mercantilism. Hamilton had read Adam Smith with attention, but his heart was in the seventeenth century. The influence of government, in his view, might properly be exerted to encourage and enrich particular classes and occupations; the natural consequence of this would be an ultimate benefiting of the nation in general. Had America left fallow what Hamilton took in hand, her industrial growth would have been slower, but no less sure; and the consequences might have been perceptibly less roughhewn. Hamilton, however, was fascinated by the idea of a planned productivity: "We seem not to reflect that in human society there is scarcely any plan, however salutary to the whole and to every part, by the share each has in the common prosperity, but in one way, or another, will operate more to the benefit of some parts than of others [he wrote in 1782]. Unless we can overcome this narrow disposition and learn to estimate measures by their general tendencies, we shall never be a great or a happy people, if we remain a people at all." Burke—who, despite his reforming energy, would have delayed indefinitely any alteration if it menaced the lawful property and prerogative of a single tidewaiter—was extremely suspicious of such doctrines in their English form. To excuse present injustice by a plea of well-intentioned general tendency is treacherous ground for a conservative; and in this instance the argument is suggestive of how much more familiar Hamilton was with particularities than with principles.

For the rest, Hamilton gives small hint as to how this mercantilistic America is to be managed; he appears to have thought (since he had a thoroughgoing contempt for the people) that somehow, through political manipulation, through firm enforcement of the laws and national consolidation, the rich and well-born could keep their saddles and ride this imperial system like English squires. These are the hopes of a man who thinks in terms of the short run. Seven years before, the shrewd young John Quincy Adams had written from Europe to his father, "From the moment when the great mass of the nations in Europe were taught to inquire why is this or that man possessed of such or such an enjoyment at our expense, and of which we are deprived, the signal was given of a civil war in the social arrangements of Europe, which cannot finish but with the total ruin of their feudal constitutions." Those powers which Hamilton was so ready to bestow upon the state eventually would be diverted to ends at the the antipodes from Hamilton's; and the urban population that Hamilton's policies stimulated would be the forcing-ground of a newer radicalism. The conservative side of Jefferson's complex nature frowned against this arbitrary meddling with populations and occupations, and presently Randolph, and after him Calhoun, denounced with impotent fury the coming of the new industrial era, more hideous in their eyes than the old colonial condition. In several respects, they were sounder conservatives than Hamilton: for he was eminently a city-man, and veneration withers upon the pavements. "It is hard to learn to love the new gas-station," writes Walter Lippmann, "that stands where the wild honeysuckle grew." But Hamilton never penetrated far beneath the surface of politics to the mysteries of veneration and presumption.

For all that, one ought not to confuse Hamilton with the Utilitarians; if he erred, it was after the fashion of the old Tories, rather than that of the philosophic radicals. He remained a Christian, in the formal eighteenth-century way, and wrote of the follies of the French Revolution, "The politician who loves liberty, sees them with regret as a gulf that may swallow up the liberty to which he is devoted. He knows that morality overthrown (and morality must fall with religion), the terrors of despotism can alone curb the impetuous passions of man, and confine him within the bounds of social duty." Burke's vaticinations had stirred him here, as they affected John Adams, J. Q. Adams, Randolph, and so many other Americans; but the influence of Burke went no deeper. Hamilton was a straggler behind his age, rather than the prophet of a new way. By a very curious coincidence, this old-fangled grand gentleman died from the bullet of Aaron Burr, friend and disciple of Bentham.