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Presidents Above Party: The First American Presidency, 1789-1829 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American Hist)

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The past resists our attempts to simplify it. It is the task of a great historian to complicate things- to point out that many causes were at work, that many influences were felt, that many things were possible. The present is not the result of a logic but of choices made, of actions taken and, yes, of books read.

Ralph Ketcham in this insightful and erudite study does all of the above. He complicates our sense of influences on the Founding Generation, especially on the first six presidents. He reveals some hidden influences and makes sense of how someone like Jefferson or Monroe or my boys, Jimmie Madison and J.Q. Adams thought that they could be at one and the same time responsive to the voice of the electorate and a leader able to distill that voice to a sense of the common good.

Ketcham's books is divided into three parts. The first is a study of the political thought of Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift and especially Bolingbroke. The focus is on the ideal of the Patriot King- the rightful leader who will rule for the good of all the people and who is immune to the corruption of faction or self-interest. Not only is the Patriot King immune to corruption but he is a moral and patriotic paragon for the whole nation. He rules in such a way as to maintain the virtue of the people so that they understand his actions as being based on the common good and are supportive of those actions.

These writers Ketcham opposes to thinkers like Defoe and Mandeville and to political leaders like Walpole and later, the elder Pitt.

This first section is the strongest part of the book for me. It gave me a whole new way to read say, Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe (as being representatives of opposite sides of political reactions to the Enlightenment). Ketcham also is good at something that few intellectual historians are good at and that is getting you to feel how very shocking some books were in their time. Mandeville's Fable of the Bees was such a book. It message that Private Vices can lead to Public Good overturned thousands of years of moral thinking by people like Aristotle, Polybius and Plutarch.

As I said in my first paragraph, Ketcham is good at complicating things. Many of the early American leaders were men influenced by both Swift and Defoe, Bolingbroke and Locke, by Aristotle and the Enlightenment, by the Bible and by Deism. Ketcham's second section is to show how these mixes were creative tensions in the thought and Presidencies of Washington, Adams (the father), Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Adams (the son). This section could have been expanded. Ketcham devotes only about 10 pages to each. But he has a lot of insight to offer on all of them, particularly Washington, Jefferson and J.Q. Adams. The organizing theme is the reaction of all of these men to the idea of a political party. They all believed parties to be evil, to be the result of the factionalism caused by focus on narrow or particular interest. Yet, especially after the first Adams, parties were also seen as an expedient that could be used to counter factionalism. That expedient would be temporary and would disappear with the defeat of faction and corruption.

The gift of Martin Van Buren was to begin to think of parties as something permanent that could weld different factional interests into a more or less coherent national program. The common good was no longer unitary but a guidance of faction. The Patriot King as Power Broker. Bolingbroke would have hated Van Buren.

The third section deepens our understanding of the early American reaction to the idea of parties by studies on Franklin and Hamilton. Each of those two approached Ketcham's central tensions differently. And again, anyone who has studied those two men at all will find much to thing about in this part of the book.

Finally, Ketcham ponders a little on the relevance of the idea of rising above party and faction in our own time. Here I think he misses the mark a little.

To me, there is a great history book waiting out there to be written. It should use the framework of a Pierre Hadot or a Leo Strauss in that there is a central concept in Western political thought that has never received anything like a definition. It is more of a creative tension or a problem complex than an idea. I am referring to the idea of 'the common good'. The only clear definition of this idea that I know of is derived from Machiavelli by Harvey Mansfield. Mansfield says that Machiavelli would define the common good as what you and I can share after taking it from another group of people.

Obviously, this is not what Bolingbroke or Jefferson or Lincoln thought. But until we have some idea about how we can ground our political leadership in a vision of the common good that isn't purely personal then we must rely on as rational a discourse as we can generate (not much) as we contest our particular interests in the political arena.

In the meantime, Ketcham has given us some ideas about where we can go to do the research for that grounding. He raises the hope that in reflecting on the debates between Bolingbroke and Walpole, Defoe and Swift and on the actions of a Jefferson that we may find our own source of creative tension. It is worth the thinking on it.