'The deceitful dream of a golden age'

John Jay spent Federalist papers 3-5 explaining the need for American unity in the face of potential foreign aggression. In the sixth paper Alexander Hamilton returned to warn that disunity would make war among the smaller confederacies more likely. In making his argument he addressed a naive idealism still encountered in the 21st century. Opponents of the strong federal government advocated by the Framers claimed to see no reason why a number of smaller nation's, if it came to that, could not live in harmonious proximity. Their argument seems to have been that of the modern neoconservatives or neoliberals: republics dedicated to commerce rather than militarism have no reason to fight each other. Hamilton answers that "A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations" to believe that. "To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive and rapacious," he writes.

"The genius of republics (say they) is pacific; the spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men, and to extinguish those innumerable tumors which have so often kindled into wars. Commercial republics like ours, will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other. They will be governed by mutual interest and will cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord. [But] if this be their true interest, have they in fact pursued it? Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy,utility or justice? Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter?..."

Arguably, Hamilton paints himself into a corner with this line of argument. If human nature makes men warlike regardless of systems of government, what will keep a strong federal union from pursuing the same old aggressive course? All he can promise is that a strong federal government will somehow check the aggressive impulses of its constituent states toward each other by "extinguishing that secret jealousy which disposes all states to aggrandize themselves at the expense of their neighbors." How that will happen Hamilton isn't yet ready to describe. What's  interesting here nevertheless is the fact that Alexander Hamilton,  founding father of American capitalism, doesn't buy into the mythology capitalists made up for themselves, according to which homo economicus is God's innocent creature, his commerce by definition benign as the foundation (so capitalists would mythologize further) of that spontaneous order that is the best of all possible orders. Hamilton, and to an extent Madison as well, presumes something like an innate depravity in man requiring a governmental check that seems absent on both the modern right, which presumes the innocence of commerce, corrupted only by politics, and the left, which presumes the poor simply too good to get rich, but otherwise unimpeachable in their wants. From a modern or postmodern vantage Hamilton may seem misanthropic, but modern politics probably could stand a stronger dose of his realism.