Was Alexander Hamilton a Machiavellian Statesman

Bibliographic Data

ID6403601
AuthorsKarl Walling (corresponding author)
Year1995
Volume57
Issue3
Pages419-447
Publication date1995-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Review of Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-6705 • E-ISSN: 1748-6858
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0034670500019690
OpenAlexW2077267896
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited17

Many important scholars have seen significant similarities in the political thought of Alexander Hamilton and Niccolo Machiavelli, but the only two references to Machiavelli in Hamilton's papers suggest deep misgivings about the kinds of politics we now call Machiavellian. This essay attempts to clarify Hamilton's ambiguous relation to the sage Florentine by focussing on the problem of waging war effectively and remaining free at the same time in the thought of both statesmen. Although Hamilton understood at least as well as Machiavelli the necessity of dynamicvirtùin princes and civic virtue in free citizens, he sought to establish a new order of the ages, a republican empire, which would supply an effectual moral alternative to the genuine Machiavellian regimes of his day

Economics · Empire · Epistemology · Order (exchange · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Relation (database · Virtue · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · Computer Science · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Theory and Influence · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

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