In Democracy in America (1835-1840), the French intellectual and statesman Alexis de Tocqueville singled out the “celebrated Alexander Hamilton” for his great contributions to constitutional thought in The Federalist. For the French statesman and diplomat Talleyrand, Hamilton ranked with Napoleon as one of the “greatest men of our epoch.” In Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (1979), the great historian Forrest McDonald noted, “For many decades after the Civil War his
Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI) Academic Advisor Richard Brookhiser, author of Alexander Hamilton, American (1999), has risen to Hamilton’s defense in an article, “First Aaron Burr, Now Jack Lew,” published in the June 19 issue of The Wall Street Journal. Brookhiser describes many of Hamilton’s significant accomplishments, especially in the area of finance and banking. Hamilton, Brookhiser observes, “laid the foundations” of Americas “future prosperity . . . . Most revolutionary governments over the past two centuries have been chaotic, dishonest and poor. The U.S. might have gone that route [without Hamilton]. We would then speak, not of banana republics, but of maple or pine republics—and we would have been the first one.”
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