Reading: "Alexander Hamilton: American"

I am going to have to go back on what I said in an earlier post. I originally planned to read Richard Brookhiser’s and Ron Chernow’s biographies and review them in one post. Unfortunately, tonight is my last night in Cincinnati, with my copy of Brookhiser’s book. So I will review them separately.

Brookhiser’s “Alexander Hamilton, American” is a detailed portrait of the Founding Father, bringing together each of the stages of his life-his childhood in St. Croix, his arrival in America and service in the Continental Army, and his political (and often legal) conflicts-in psychological and philosophical terms. Brookhiser has an interesting way of putting the biography together, by linking together the various influences on his life to paint a picture of someone whom one might say was an intellectual more than a politician, and a Platonic philosopher-king more than a general. In this way, I believe that Brookhiser’s biography stands not just as a portrait of Hamilton, but of American society itself at the time. Many of those same ideas, those same patterns of thinking, influence us as much as they did our forefathers over 200 years ago. Some thoughts I had about one specific passage:

“The inspired leader can tell a man something he did not know about himself: that he is brave, that he is willing to die. The flatterer tells him what he has already heard, and wants to hear again. Inspiration stimulates virtue; flattery induces contentment.”(p. 167)

How far you go in life depends on what you say to yourself mentally. Different experts call it different things, but in the end, it’s simply how you view yourself, what you are willing to tell yourself to keep going, and how you relate to others. I believe that what the author says here about the difference between inspiration and flattery is relevant to what’s on your mind, and not just what’s on your ballot. It’s a simple distinction: if you are willing to tell yourself the things you need to hear-that you are strong, that you are confident, etc.-then you are going to get ahead in life, at least of the people who don’t. But if you are a self-flatterer, meaning that you tell yourself what you want to hear just to silence the part of you wanting something else, this will keep you in neutral.

How do you know whether you flatter or inspire yourself through your thoughts? I believe it all depends on how comfortable you are with your assumptions, biases, and preconceived notions. If you run through the “inspiring” things that we say-that we are strong, we can get through this difficulty, we know better than to do what we’re doing-most of them are things we usually don’t want to hear. None of us want to hear that we are strong enough to get through a problem; the sinful, human side wants the mountain to go away, rather than for us to have the strength to climb over it. This is even more true when we act in opposition to what we know is right, or in indulging what we know is wrong. The “inspired” side of you tells you what is on your heart-guard your loved one’s heart with your words, take care of the people around, stay away from that addiction. We can implicitly recognize that there is something affirmatively good about the “inspiring” things of life, even when we don’t understand why.


Inspiration is the conscience, and self-flattery is the enemy of the soul.

I recognize that in the end, all of this is circular. We have traveled from the demise of the Roman Republic (Cato “resisted” the people with inspiration to a higher good, as Hamilton put it, while Caesar destroyed the Republic as he resorted to flattery) to the Founding, to today’s inner battle against darkness, and back to the days of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, some of the first men to recognize the moral implications of politics and rhetoric. I made this journey to stress two points that I think Brookhiser touched on succinctly. One, that there is a critical link between what we perceive as just and good, secular and sacred, public and private, because the normative study of political rhetoric is indistinguishable from study of the antithesis, the conflict within the soul. Two, that even though they are linked, they are apart. Our politics and our civil government can bring peace and prosperity, but they can never solve the problem of sin and bridge the gap between God’s holiness and our own depravity. Maybe this is why Jesus told us to render unto Caesar-that even though our role in public life is to externalize God’s redeeming love, that our ultimate focus should be to place ourselves at the foot of the Cross.

Overall, a decent read if you are interested in biographies on the Founders. I may comment some more after I have read another of Hamilton’s biographies, by Ron Chernow.