January
14th 2009
Posted under Academia & Lincoln & Sovereignty and Secession & The South
I am inclined to take Patroon’s wise advice and stay out of this. I hate to see two people who are normally allies going at it like this.
I will also let Gutzman’s response stand pretty much on its own.
I do think saying DiLorenzo’s Hamilton book wasn’t worthy of a review was a bit unnecessary. I agree with Weaver below.
… folks must be able to distinguish between personal attacks and academic criticisms.
If it’s possible for a Muslim and a Christian to befriend one another while believing each other en route to eternal damnation, then political … differences shouldn’t be any more divisive.
Amen to that.
T. Chan on 15 Jan 2009 at 12:31 am #
I only note that both men have explicitly rejected the claim that they are neo-Confederates in the past. Does anyone know what either believes about the Southern culture, its political tradition (apart from its understanding of the Constitution and the sovereignty of the states), and so on?
Rob on 14 Sep 2009 at 6:01 am #
Frankly, I think Gutzman’s reply to DiLorenzo is pretty devastating. One does not produce evidence simply by citing hearsay. But I’m not surprised. Though I haven’t read DiLorenzo’s books, I did read him debating the Civil War issue and felt that his citations were highly selective and mis-leading. He is not a historian. He is an economist, and I think that he is out of his depth writing about the Civil War. I’m no expert on the War, but if even I can see that he has misunderstood or deliberately mis-represented the context then it is hard to take his work seriously.
I’m sure there are many things that one could criticize about Alexander Hamilton, but a serious historian does not criticize simply over ideology. After all, Jefferson prosecuted more people under the Alien and Sedition Acts than Adams did. Like Obama and the Patriot Act, he didn’t object to the power so much when it fell into his hands. And while he opposed the creation of the Bank of the United States, he did not abolish it even though his party had a majority in the Congress.
And it is surely important to keep in mind that Hamilton’s Bank of the US did not have nearly the kind of power that the Fed has today, and Hamilton was at pains to point out that the bank would not be able to create inflation because of the gold standard. The Fed can accept bonds as well as gold to satisfy the reserve requirement. That makes a huge difference. Hamilton wanted to assure liquidity to the economy, but he was not an inflationist.