“Not just the signature on a series of essays”

William,

You may or may not be aware of this, but many active slavers, among them John Taylor of Caroline, described slavery as an "evil" while simultaneously opposing, both in their words and their deeds, all immediate efforts to end it. "Evil" is a word which has many shades of meaning, and in the 18th and 19th centuries it was far more commonly used than it is today to refer not only to deliberate acts of wickedness, but also to more generally bad conditions such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or general ignorance and folly. Many anti-abolitionists and slavers viewed slavery as an "evil" in the latter sense (in that they would rather be rid of it, but did not believe that white slavers had any immediate moral obligation to stop enslaving the black people that they held captive). Robert E. Lee, for example, was of this school of thought (the letter in which he famously described slavery as a "moral and political evil" was actually a letter primarily devoted to denouncing abolitionism as a doctrine and Northern abolitionists as a group). So was John Taylor of Caroline. So was Jefferson, at times, although at other times he made hypocritical gestures towards a more anti-slavery position. It is either pure ignorance, pure folly, or pure chicanery to try to represent this position (which recognizes no moral obligation to stop enslaving actually existing slaves, and which explicitly prefers the indefinite continuation of slavery unless and until all black people could be ethnically cleansed from their life-long homes in the American South and forced to foreign colonies in Africa) as an anti-slavery position. Real abolitionists in the 19th century were quite familiar with this position (since it was the official position of the American Colonization Society, an organization of which John Taylor of Caroline was an early supporter and officer), and they denounced it furiously. (See, for example, William Lloyd Garrison's Thoughts on African Colonization.) As well they should have, since the position is, first, racist rubbish, and, second, quite clearly calculated to ease the consciences of squeamish slavers rather than to free those held in bondage. Those who sentimentally wished for slavery to end, somehow or another, in some far-off day which they perpetually deferred in the name of some other goal that justified their keeping slaves in the meantime -- as, for example, with John Taylor of Caroline and his dreams of a Negerrein Virginia -- no more count as anti-slavery for those idle remarks than George W. Bush counts as anti-war for having said (in his speech announcing the Iraq war) that war is terrible and he longs to live in peace.

This is the necessary context -- that is, the context of John Taylor of Caroline's actual thoughts about the nature of the "evil" in question and what if anything ought to be done to "alleviate it" (short of "wholly cur[ing]" it), and what all that actually meant in practice for the many black people whose slave-labor he himself was living off of while he wrote those lines -- that your isolated use of that single quotation, and your frankly outrageous attempt to paint this active slaver as being anti-slavery, omits.

As for your accusations of plagiarism, I thank you for quoting the passages that you claim to have "caught" me plagiarizing. I'll be happy to let the reader judge whether what I wrote could fairly be described as "plagiarizing" either of the other passages that you mention here.

Uh oh...looks like we might have a case of unattributed plagiarism.

Consider RadGeek:

he was rather more explicit and consistent about his belief that the “evils” he condemned were to be remedied by ethnic cleansing, not by emancipation, and, if that wasn’t available, the lesser-evil alternative in his view was for “well managed” slaves who were “docile, useful, and happy,” and a slave-lord “restrained by his property in the slave, and
susceptible of humanity.” Taylor is widely considered to have been an important step in the ideological transition from the older Jeffersonian “necessary evil” defenses of slavery to the later Calhounian “positive good” arguments.

The juxtaposition of these two excerpted phrases and its accompanying paraphrase is illustrative in its prior familiarity...

"In Taylor’s opinion ‘slaves are docile, useful and happy, if they are well managed’ and that ‘the individual is restrained by his property in
the slave, and susceptible of humanity’. The blandishments as well as the terrors of religion indissolubly bind together the happiness and misery of
both master and slave. In this he anticipated the later arguments that slavery was a positive good." -- RW Fenn and JD Ellis. (2007) "The History of Hayfield in Caroline County in the Commonwealth of Virginia." Copyright, Bardon Hall Publishers

Of course there is also the Wikipedia rendition of this same piece of copyrighted material, itself plagiarized with a couple of words rearranged to make it look original:

Taylor agreed with Jefferson that the institution was an evil, but argued that it was "incapable of removal, and only within reach of palliation," and took issue with Jefferson's repeated references to the specific cruelties of slavery, arguing that "slaves are docile, useful and happy, if they are well managed," and that "the individual is restrained by his property in the slave, and susceptible of humanity . . . . Religion assails him both with her blandishments and terrours. It indissolubly binds his, and his slaves happiness or misery together." His approach, defending the preservation of slavery as it was and claiming that proper management could benefit the slave as well as the master, anticipated the more emphatic defenses of slavery as a "positive good" by later writers such as John C. Calhoun, Edmund Ruffin, and George Fitzhugh.

It's a seditiously simplistic art really. Take somebody else's paragraph and excerpted phrases, re-arrange a couple words, substitute a couple harsher-sounding synonyms like "slave-lord" for the dispassionate neutrality of the plagiarized original, truncate a couple of unnecessary names here and there, then post it as your own work and credit yourself endlessly for providing important "context" to the argument of others.

The only problem is when you get caught.

As for your comments on John Taylor of Caroline, again, you are taking the passage out of its context and directly ignoring the many other things that Taylor said about slavery. I quoted several of these.

What a curious claim. For comparative purposes it is sufficient to note that I provided a lengthy multi-sentence excerpt of Taylor's writings on slavery with the belief that an intelligent non-zealot could reasonably ascertain their context from the simple fact that such context is implicit to the length and completeness of the quote itself.

By contrast, Mr. "RadGeek" claims to have supplied the "context" of additional quotations from Taylor yet not one of them amounts to anything more than a brief mid-sentence phrase, allegedly excerpted from Taylor and described within the sentences of others.

Even more curious is the apparent supply of RadGeek's quotations, revealed by a moment's activity on any simple search engine: more mid-sentence phrase excerpts of Taylor described in the words of others from two sources: a 1995 essay compendium by David Thomas Konig (http://books.google.com/books?id=6p9IOsu3xXIC) and that ever-reputable repository of trivialized idiocy for stupid people who wish to pretend they are smart: Wikipedia. If you desired to add substantive "context" to Taylor and discuss it through the lens of measured historical analysis, RadGeek, it would be welcome. But don't post a litany of second-hand cherrypicked mid-sentence phrases in its place while simultaneously accusing another of the same for posting something far more extensive and substantive.

If nothing else has emerged from this exchange it is the validation of my earlier point about the tendency of zealotry to render any further rational discussion impossible. I'm content to leave it at that, as all honest attempts to reign in displays of zealotry, be they the effort of myself or others, have only elicited responses that illustrate the severity of the impediment it imposes upon conversation.

William:

Far more difficult is to consider the status of slavery in its own time ...

The "status of slavery" where and for whom?

For black people in Virginia, or for that matter for white slavers in Virginia, it was a pretty important issue.

William:

... and ask the question that all persons of moral character asked at the time: what can we do to get rid of this wretched institutional inheritance? If American history shows nothing else, it is that there was no easy answer to that question.

What do you mean by the question "What can we do?"

If it's intended to be a moral question about what those who were in positions of legal power, or who perpetrated slavery as individuals should have done to get rid of it, the answer is easy: immediate, complete, and unconditional emancipation. This is something that Garrison, Spooner, and Gerrit Smith all believed in, advocated, and acted (in different ways) to bring about. It's something that Jefferson and Taylor explicitly rejected in favor of continuing slavery, and gradual emancipation conditional on forced exile from America.

If it's intended to be a strategic question about what abolitionists ought to have done in order to get around the efforts of obdurate or unrepentant slavers to prevent or halt emancipation, then that's a more difficult question, but it's a question that is only difficult because of the difficulties inserted by slavers like Jefferson and Taylor. It's certainly not a "difficulty" that offers any reason to mitigate the judgment on Jefferson's character, or his libertarian credentials.

William:

The same may be said with equal relevance to Jefferson’s concept of decentralized republicanism. And I’ll leave it at that.

I'm going to repeat this one last time, to make sure that we are clear. Nothing that I have said concerning Jefferson's political views is a denunciation of "decentralized republicanism." I'm an anarchist, so I don't believe in any form of government, no matter how decentralized or how republican. But as it happens, I think that political decentralization is better than political centralization, and republican and democratic governments are better than monarchical governments.

The issue here is not that I'm using slavery in order to stop discussions of decentralized republicanism. This is either a careless or a deliberate distortion of what I've explicitly and repeatedly said. What I'm doing is denying that the political system actually advocated by Thomas Jefferson counts as a form of decentralized republicanism, any more than the Roman Catholic Church counts as a "democracy" on account of the cardinals voting for the Pope.

You may want to talk about decentralized republicanism more than you want to talk about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. That's fine; it's an interesting subject. But this post is, again, about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. You are the one changing the subject in order to try to redirect conversation to something other than the original topic. Not me.

As for your comments on John Taylor of Caroline, again, you are taking the passage out of its context and directly ignoring the many other things that Taylor said about slavery. I quoted several of these. Taylor was a colonizationist, not an abolitionist, and he explicitly stated that while slavery was an "evil" that continuing to enslave black people was preferable to freeing them without the condition of forced deportation to Africa. He specifically criticized Jefferson's own writing on slavery because he felt that Jefferson was too negative about it, and that "well managed" slaves were better off than free blacks in America. I gave you several direct quotations in order to contextualize your own quotation and to explain the ways in which his views were a point of transition between the older anti-abolition views of Jefferson and the later positively pro-slavery views of Calhoun, Ruffin, Fitzhugh, et al. You have simply ignored these quotations rather than engaging with them and repeated the original quotation, apparently unaffected by direct evidence to the contrary of your interpretation of it. I don't know whether or not you have any actual knowledge of John Taylor of Caroline's political writings on slavery other than the quotation you've misused here, but I do know that so far you haven't engaged with his full views in anything resembling a comprehensive or accurate way, even when the full content of those views has been directly pointed out to you.

Gil:

And I agree that it’s easy to imagine that we would have applied our modern sensibilities ...

Abolitionism is not a "modern sensibility." It already existed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Jefferson in particular was familiar with the abolitionist arguments; at times he even made some of them himself, while consistently refusing to act on the conclusions that he drew.

Zealotry in defense of liberty and against slavery is no vice, moderation no virtue…

You've mistaken zealotry for extremism, Micha. Extremism is a conclusion that may be reached by rational means and qualifies itself only by distance between that conclusion and the status quo. Zealotry, by contrast, is no more than stubborn irrational advocacy. It is not reached by rational mechanisms and it qualifies itself not by relation to an existing condition but rather by the intensity with it is voiced.

It’s “slavery, was evil, period“, full stop, no qualification with times-were-different-back-then bullshit.

Except that would be an untruthful removal of necessary context from the discussion or, as I termed it previously, a conversation stopper.

Since we have characterized slavery in terms of good and evil, it necessarily follows that this determination is a moral one. Therefore the logic of morality applies. And what does that logic tell us? It tells us that a moral wrong is determined by the act itself, but the culpability of the individual for that wrong is determined by the circumstances of its occurrence.

To put it another way, this is why the act of "killing" (a wrong in the strictest sense) renders a wide range of accompanying levels of guilt - that from a justified use of deadly force to preserve one's own person to manslaughter to premeditated homicide.

To end at the period and exclude the "but" of slavery's circumstance thus necessarily deprives you of the logical means of extending culpability from an abstract moral wrong to the particulars of the individual actor. So if you want to cut out any qualifications and state your platitudes, that's fine by me and we'll leave it at that. Just don't pretend to apply it to those you condemn, to wit: Jefferson, as you have just deprived yourself of the means to rationally do so.

I hate slavery as much as any sane libertarian.

However, I can see William's point that it isn't helpful to react to its mention so strongly as to make further discussion impossible.

And I agree that it's easy to imagine that we would have applied our modern sensibilities to major institutions if we had been alive hundreds of years ago, but I think that most people would be mistaken about that.

Sometimes "But" isn't so much a qualification as a segue into a suggestion that there might be more to say. Usually there is.

I'd much rather hear bad theories than have people too intimidated to suggest anything taboo.

Zealotry in defense of liberty and against slavery is no vice, moderation no virtue...

Yes, slavery existed, and yes, slavery was evil. But it’s always easy to sit here from your modern perch and condemn its long-dead practitioners in paragraph upon paragraph of haughty self-righteous Jacobin indignation.

See, it's statements like these that are highly problematic. There should be no "but" following the first sentence. It's "slavery, was evil, period", full stop, no qualification with times-were-different-back-then bullshit.

I do agree that it's not necessary to write such long posts to make the point, which is really quite simple:

Owning slaves is _in and of itself_ an inherently anti-libertarian thing. Nobody with the tiniest shred of decency or humanity could possibly think otherwise.

All this long, long thread has demonstrated is that John V and William are exactly the sort of people Rad Geek was addressing in his original post.

Taylor is widely considered to have been an important step in the ideological transition from the older Jeffersonian “necessary evil” defenses of slavery
to the later Calhounian “positive good” arguments.

If anything, that is a testament to widespread ignorance about both Taylor and Calhoun. For all the faults of his response to slavery, Taylor was unequivocal in his identification of its moral evil:

The fact is, that negro slavery is an evil which the United States must look in the face. To whine over it, is cowardly; to agravate it, criminal; ant to forbear to alleviate it, because it cannot be wholly cured, foolish…such a state of things is the most unfavourable imaginable to the happiness of both the master and the slave. It tends to diminish the humanity of one class and increase the malignity of the other, and in contemplating its utter destitution of good, our admiration is equally excited by the error of those who produce, and the folly of those who suffer it.

It's a hard road to follow to get from that to "slavery is a positive good."

Radgeek - You may recall what I stated previously about your apparent singular fixation on American slavery serving as an inhibition on your ability to even discuss, much less accurately contextualize, any historical topic that appears even remotely in its proximity. Thank you for ably demonstrating my point.

That you reduce a conceded evil and fault - even among its practitioners - to the "ghoulish essence" of American government prior to circa 1865 shows plainly that you cannot even discuss slavery itself in its historical context and condition without descending into polemical fanaticism.

Yes, slavery existed, and yes, slavery was evil. But it's always easy to sit here from your modern perch and condemn its long-dead practitioners in paragraph upon paragraph of haughty self-righteous Jacobin indignation.

Far more difficult is to consider the status of slavery in its own time and ask the question that all persons of moral character asked at the time: what can we do to get rid of this wretched institutional inheritance? If American history shows nothing else, it is that there was no easy answer to that question. It was a question that took a million butchered lives to imperfectly resolve!

Men like Garrison, Spooner, Smith - and yes - even Taylor and Jefferson each tried to answer it before that resolution. And for that alone they deserve credit. There answers - and they were a multitude ranging from a Somersett-style judicial ruling to emancipated colonization in Liberia - were indeed imperfect for no less obvious a reason than that they all failed. But such is the nature of a wicked and complex problem, and when you respond to any honest discussion of that problem in its context by spouting nothing more than outraged zealotry at its participants you only cheapen and trivialize its place in history.

The signs of such zealotry abound in your response. Seriously, who else but a zealot composes an jeremiad of overweened morality to state that he *agrees* with a point of condemnation of Alexander Hamilton, to say nothing of the conceited bloviations that flow from you in all points of disagreement. Who else but a zealot would flippantly deny making comparative qualifications to Hamilton's fault, only to revert to an entire paragraph of the same on the very next line?

It is literally as if the s-word, slavery, is mentioned and all rational discussion, including of slavery itself, ceases and succumbs to your fanatical exercises of the high-and-mighty. From there forward all is assessed through the rose-colored lens of slavery and your accompanying moral indignation (which, for inexplicable reasons, you seem to believe to be superior to the moral indignation that all other sane people rightfully feel toward slavery). Thus nothing else can be said of pre-1865 America, or Jefferson, or Taylor, or even Calhoun without that lens' awkward and constant imposition. It is a fundamental confusion of a particular for essence; a supplanting of the substance with its attributes.

Beyond that point it is not possible to have a conversation as any subsequent point becomes drowned in the fanatic's shrill banshee cries. When substance ceases to be and all is reduced to attribute nothing can be said which does not take on the same misapplied attribute.

Some days ago I deferred to Dr. Niskanen's assessment of this tendency in American political dialog:

“The doctrines of nullification and interposition have been criticized or dismissed by later political theorists, primarily because they were used to defend slavery and the continued denial of civil rights to blacks. Americans have an unfortunate habit, however, of evaluating a legal concept by the motivations of its advocates. Most contemporary Americans probably regard the Alien and Sedition laws, discriminatory tariffs, and slavery as repugnant.
The doctrine of nullification, however, should not be evaluated by the fact that it was first used to attack bad law and later used to defend other bad law, but rather whether it would, in general, promote law that reflects the broad consensus of the population.

The same may be said with equal relevance to Jefferson's concept of decentralized republicanism. And I'll leave it at that.

William:

What is being argued, though, is that the late 18th century system of
Jeffersonian republicanism in the U.S. (though indeed marred by the imperfection of
slavery) ...

Chattel slavery was not some minor "imperfection" marring a fundamentally humane system.
It was the central organizing principle of the law and daily life in Jefferson's Virginia.
It was a crime against humanity that sustained a thoroughly hideous cannibal-empire filled
with self-satisfied thugs and posturing hypocrites, who lived on the blood and labor of
their fellow creatures, and who passed law after law to protect their neo-feudal economic
system and fortify their prison camp plantations at government expense. In Jefferson's
Virginia, this legal cannibalism devoured the lives, property, and labor of three hundred
thousand souls, about 40% of the entire population of the state. A conversation about early
American politics that ignores such plain facts or marginalizes them as "imperfections" in
a basically worthwhile system (rather than what they were -- the ghoulish essence of the
system itself) is bullshit. And bullshit conversations like that ought to be stopped.

Me:

You forgot to add an important qualifier. What you no doubt meant to say
was "the decentralized republicanism advocated for white people by
Jefferson."

William:

Of course such a qualifier was hardly “forgotten” as I had acknowledged
Jefferson’s fault on slavery from the outset and readily contextualized that grievous
fault aside his better characteristics long before you got here. So you return to the
slavery canard not to inform the discussion, that discussion already being informed of
it, but rather for its conversation-stopping shock value.

No, the reason that I return to chattel slavery is that to describe Jefferson's slavocracy
as "decentralized republicanism" is to carelessly spread an absurd lie. What Jefferson
actually believed in, and actually practiced, was decentralized republicanism for white
men, patriarchal tyranny for white women and children, and a hereditary, invasive,
absolute tyranny accountable to none save God alone for all black people regardless of
age or gender. You may as well describe the Roman Catholic Church as a democracy, because,
after all, the Cardinals all get to vote on the Pope.

William:

First, by means of comparison between Hamilton’s “views” and Jefferson’s
“practice” it appears that you intend to cast the latter as comparatively more offensive.

No, I don't intend anything of the sort. As I've repeatedly said, I consider Hamilton
to have been perfectly loathsome, and to be directly responsible for all kinds of
political rot. I can't speak for anyone other than myself, but I've never claimed that
Jefferson is "worse," from a libertarian perspective, than Hamilton. I don't even know
how that kind of global comparison would be made -- each one was clearly much worse than
the other in some respects, and much better than the other in others, and I neither know,
nor much care, how you'd make those different respects commensurable with one another to
make the comparison.

The reason for linguistically leaning on Jefferson's practice is that, in addition to
being a slaver, he was also a posturing hypocrite, especially on this issue, so the
preferences manifest in hisd eeds sometimes need to be stressed over his idle words,
when it comes to assessing his character or his legacy.

William:

Second, why the need to constantly qualify Hamilton’s faults ...

I don't.

William:

Why is it not sufficient to fault Hamilton as Hamilton for things he did in and of themselves?

It is.

However, Wilkinson's original post was about Thomas Jefferson. It was not about Alexander
Hamilton at all. My post was about Thomas Jefferson. It mentioned Alexander Hamilton only to explain
what a dangerous creep I think he was. Wilkinson's kind notice of my post was, again, about
"Thomas Jefferson's loathsomely anti-libertarian credentials." It is only the people trying
to apologize for Jefferson who keep insisting on dragging Alexander Hamilton into the
discussion, apparently in order to try to change the subject from Jefferson's
anti-libertarian positions to something else -- e.g., Hamilton's Caesarianism, or European
monarchy, or the United States Constitution, or just about any damn thing other than
the original topic. I responded to some of these comparisons, initiated by you and not
by me, by pointing out that American chattel slavery is actually a salient issue in the
comparison you're trying to make, not something that can be waved or set aside, and now,
for my trouble, I am told that I ought to be faulting Hamilton as Hamilton rather than
comparing him to somebody else. This is really too much. If you want to know my views about Alexander
Hamilton or George Washington or the U.S. Constitution or the Whiskey Rebellion or slavery
in New York or slavery in the Caribbean or central banking or the Civil War or the Ludlow
Massacre or any number of other things, I've written about them all, on their own,
elsewhere, and I'd be happy to discuss them with you, on their own, in a forum other than
this one, but for here and now you should not be surprised that my focus is on Jefferson,
not Hamilton, in discussing an article on Jefferson; and you also should not be surprised
that if you insist on inserting a comparison with Hamilton into the discussion, I'll urge
that you consider the crime of slavery if that's one of the salient issues in the comparison.
I certainly will not waste my time "faulting Hamilton as Hamilton" in a discussion that's
about something other than Hamilton's many follies, vices, and crimes.

William:

And that is why I make the claim that decentralized republicanism is a
lesser evil than monarchy or other autocracies.

For what it's worth, I agree with you about this. What I deny is that Jefferson advocated
decentralized republicanism, if either the term "decentralized" or the term "republican"
means anything at all. What he actually advocated, and practiced, was a form of brutal
autocracy for everyone other than his fellow white men.

William:

If you doubt that ask yourself this: is a child inherently marked with evil
character if, by pure chance of his birth, he happens to inherit the plantation of his
slave-owning father?

No. However, if, as an adult, he continues to spend the rest of his life enslaving those
people, even though he had decades in which to legally emancipate them, or simply to
treat them as free men and women (by letting them come and go as they pleased,
work or not work on what they chose, distributing his unearned lands to the people his
father had forced to till, and generally treating them as his equals rather than his
servants), and did nothing of the sort for his long life, and continued to live his
life of idleness on the backs of his victims and their forced labor--well, then,
that certainly does indicate very deep and grave vice in that man-stealer's
character.

William:

But he also advanced in goodness, even on slavery, ...

Well gosh, William, that was mighty white of him. But the only way that a slaveholder
can "advance in goodness" that matters more than a tinker's cuss is to stop holding
innocent people as slaves. Jefferson didn't do that. And that's important.

William:

He called the agrarian trades morally superior to manufacturing based on
the fact that manufacturing interests at his time were using the government to subsidize
their own existence and tax their competitors abroad.

As opposed to Southern "farmers," who never
sought favors or subsidies for their interests from the United States government.

I don't know whether you actually intended to endorse this view of Jefferson's, or merely
to explain it. But whether you do or not, it's worth noting that this is just another
example of Jefferson's posturing hypocrisy. And it's certainly true that the Southern
slavocracy went on for the next three-quarters of a century demanding and getting more and
more privileges and protections from the state and federal governments (gag orders, fugitive
slave laws, etc. etc. etc.) through the same processes of political back-scratching and
log-rolling; something that Jefferson somehow failed to predict.

William:

I’m no expert on Jefferson’s correspondences, but I do know of his influence on the most prominent follower of his agrarian model, John Taylor of Caroline.

Another Virginia slaver and "colonizationist," who wrote that the abolition of slavery
without forced exile for the freed black people, would bring "miseries on both their owners
[sic] and themselves, by the perpetual excitements to insurrection," and that "the blacks
will be more enslaved than they are at present; and the whites in pursuit of an ideal of
freedom for them, will create some vortex for engulphing the liberty left in the world and
obtain real slavery for themselves," and who had the shamelessness, after a life of
man-stealing and useless slave-driving parasitism, to dare to assert that free black
farmers, when not forced into exile from their homes, are "driven into every species of
crime for subsistence; and destined to a life of idleness, anxiety, and guilt." Perhaps
less of a posturing hypocrite than Jefferson, in the sense that he was rather more explicit
and consistent about his belief that the "evils" he condemned were to be remedied by
ethnic cleansing, not by emancipation, and, if that wasn't available, the lesser-evil
alternative in his view was for "well managed" slaves who were "docile, useful, and happy," and a slave-lord "restrained by his property in the slave, and
susceptible of humanity." Taylor is widely considered to have been an important step in
the ideological transition from the older Jeffersonian "necessary evil" defenses of slavery
to the later Calhounian "positive good" arguments.

You're making things harder on yourself by bringing up John Taylor of Caroline, not easier.

"We get it. You condemn Jefferson for participating in slavery. But so does everybody else, so what’s your point?"

The point is I really don't know that you really do "get it," based on the rest of your reply.

As for my hypothetical inheritance of female slaves:

"If, on the other hand, you could guarantee their protection from the coercive power of another upon attaining freedom, then that would be the more moral course."

Yes, I would think that considering I recognize such a practice as being clearly wrong, it would be morally incumbent upon me to do what I could to provide those slaves safe passage to a place where slavery was not practiced or tolerated. Especially if I was someone of some considerable means and political influence, such as oh, I don't know, a state legislator or president of the United States.

I just happen to recognize that you cannot separate someone's actions from the "whole of a person," as you put it. It is not up to me show you the connection, William, it simply IS. If I repeatedly beat my wife, I think it would be fair to make some judgments about me based on those actions. To have come right out and speak about the evils and injustices of wife-beating doesn't in any way minimize the grave injustice I have committed against my wife. It would, in fact, be all the more damning of me considering that I understand wife-beating to be morally wrong.

And where did I say that the Barbary pirates were "aggrieved victims"??? Go back and check what I wrote, because I wrote no such thing.

"Hamilton proposed only what he thought he could get away with at the convention, and even that was seen as to extreme. What he stated to be his “private opinion” was an outright embrace of European-style hereditary monarchy."

Assuming that this is correct, I guess the salient question (at least so far as we are trying to judge Hamilton's character) is "why?" I'm less interested in calling down moral condemnation on either Hamilton or Jefferson than I am in understanding what each of them were right and wrong about, and why. Chernow (who may be spinning in Hamilton's favor on this) leads me to believe that Hamilton was essentially an exemplar of what Thomas Sowell would call the "constrained" view of human nature, while Jefferson was more the "unconstrained." Hamilton was aristocratic in the sense that he thought popular passions were dangerous (and he was one of the few in America to accurately predict the course of the French revolution) and that the people who had the intelligence and wisdom to make good policy were a minority. But it should be noted that his aristocracy was meritocratic, not hereditary.

Jefferson may well have sincerely believed in the evil of slavery, strict constitutionalism, and decentralized power, on all of which I agree with him. But when it was convenient to him he cynically cultivated the votes of plantation owners, ignored the plain text of the constitution (as in arguing with Madison that the House could scrap the Jay Treaty), and wielded executive powers greater than Washington.

As I say, I'm not so much interested in the black hat v. white hat characterization of either man. To me they were both complex, brilliant, and flawed. I wish they could have learned more from each other.

Bob - We get it. You condemn Jefferson for participating in slavery. But so does everybody else, so what's your point?

Is it that you consider Jefferson himself evil for participating in an evil, rather than merely flawed? If so, then I await your answer to my earlier question about the extension of an evil particular to the whole of a person. The fault in your attempt to make that connection is that it completely removes Jefferson from the context of his society (and while context never absolves guilt for clear wrong, it does mitigate its severity).

As to your hypothetical inheritance, I would answer that if you inherited them in a society that had existing laws beyond you control that would result in them being recaptured and forcefully enslaved by another, more cruel person than yourself if you so desired to free them, then yes. Keeping them would be a lesser evil upon them than the alternative. If, on the other hand, you could guarantee their protection from the coercive power of another upon attaining freedom, then that would be the more moral course. As you can see, context matters immensely in determining the scope of moral judgments.

Then again, I'm not exactly inclined to put much faith in the moral compass of somebody who believes the Barbary Pirates were an aggrieved victim of American commercial interests so I'm not sure discussing this further even matters.

Here's what Hamilton actually proposed:

* A bicameral legislature
* The lower house, the Assembly, was elected by the people for three year terms
* The upper house, the Senate, elected by electors chosen by the people, and with a life-term of service
* An executive called the Governor, elected by electors and with a life-term of service
* The Governor had an absolute veto over bills
* A judiciary, with life-terms of service
* State governors appointed by the national legislature
* National veto power over any state legislation

Modelled after England, yes. Too much centralization of power, yes. But not monarchy.

http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_ccon.htm...

Hamilton proposed only what he thought he could get away with at the convention, and even that was seen as to extreme. What he stated to be his "private opinion" was an outright embrace of European-style hereditary monarchy.

Chris, I was merely replying to William's statement that if "[he] find[s] it hard to give a moral edge to the man who rents the slaves of others to do his chores over the man who owns them outright," I would agree, and that neither should he give a "moral edge" to the man who owns slaves over he who "rents" them.

William, Jefferson wasn't a "child." He himself had written criticism of slavery, [i]while he himself owned slaves[/i]. This would mean that he [i]knowingly and deliberately[/i] committed acts that were unjust. The fact that he may have "inherited" them does not absolve him from perpetuating a practice that he himself admitted was just plain wrong.

If I "inherit" a group of women in bondage from my father and continue to keep them in bondage, should my perpetuation of the practice be overlooked or excused because I "inherited" them and there are others who engage in the same practice?

"But he also advanced in goodness, even on slavery, far beyond most men of similar condition in his time, to say nothing of many good and substantive things he did in other matters."

Oh, well, how mighty noble of him to "advance" some "goodness" in SLAVERY!

What "other matters" are you talking about, William? His military intervention in the Barbary States on behalf of a clique of politically privileged merchants? The Louisiana "Purchase" from Napoleon, vast tracts of land to which neither Napoleon or the U.S. gov't had any rightful claim?

William, I think when you see a pattern in which someone espouses all these fine and noble principles of liberty and equality and so forth followed by outright violations of those same principles, it's time to check your perceptions.

I'm no expert on Jefferson's correspondences, but I do know of his influence on the most prominent follower of his agrarian model, John Taylor of Caroline.

Taylor had this to say on the subject:

The fact is, that negro slavery is an evil which the United States must look in the face. To whine over it, is cowardly; to agravate it, criminal; ant to forbear to alleviate it, because it cannot be wholly cured, foolish...such a state of things is the most unfavourable imaginable to the happiness of both the master and the slave. It tends to diminish the humanity of one class and increase the malignity of the other, and in contemplating its utter destitution of good, our admiration is equally excited by the error of those who produce, and the folly of those who suffer it."

...not much for a celebratory embrace of plantation agrarianism!

Are those Madison's notes?

Again I don't claim expertise on this, but what you've quoted is compatible with what I said above. You've quoted only the rhetoric and not the concrete proposal. I don't think he proposed that our executive actually be hereditary.

As to Hamilton's advocacy of monarchy at the constitutional convention, Res ipsa loquitur:

In his private opinion he had no scruple in declaring, supported as he was by the opinions of so many of the wise & good, that the British Govt. was the best in the world: and that he doubted much whether any thing short of it would do in America. He hoped Gentlemen of different opinions would bear with him in this, and begged them to recollect the change of opinion on this subject which had taken place and was still going on...

He appealed to the gentlemen from the N. England States whether experience had not there verified the remark. As to the Executive, it seemed to be admitted that no good one could be established on Republican principles. Was not this giving up the merits of the question; for can there be a good Govt. without a good Executive. The English model was the only good one on this subject. The Hereditary interest of the King was so interwoven with that of the Nation, and his personal emoluments so great, that he was placed above the danger of being corrupted from abroad--and at the same time was both sufficiently independent and sufficiently controuled, to answer the purpose of the institution at home."

I see. And did Jefferson ever publicly point out to the plantation owners who adopted his political rhetoric that it didn't really apply to them?

Chris - Jeffersonian Agrarianism was predicated on the small yeoman farmers, not the large plantation systems of the east coast. This is immediately evident in Notes on Virginia where he stresses the association of virtue with individual small farm labor.

He called the agrarian trades morally superior to manufacturing based on the fact that manufacturing interests at his time were using the government to subsidize their own existence and tax their competitors abroad. Jefferson contended that this kind of industry led to political degradation in the legislature where favors were traded, or logrolled, between members. Insofar as that critique turned out to be completely founded for the next century and a half of tariff policy, Jefferson was correct.

I don't think it's accurate to say Hamilton advocated monarchy at the convention. What he advocated was a life term of office for the elected president. A bad idea, but not the same thing as monarchy. And I think his comment about the English government being the best in existence reflects not a love of monarchy so much as a pessimism about whether our model would hold together long term. It did not require bad faith to have serious doubts on this score at the time. Of the extant models that were well established, England's was the best. Despite his doubts, he did his best to ensure that our model would be able to hold together, against what he perceived as the two most likely sources of its downfall: reconquest by a European power or Jacobin mob rule. Unless you think either of those options would qualify as "liberty", I think you have to give Hamilton credit at least for seeking to defend liberty as he saw it. He had seen the revolutionary army nearly collapse as the states failed to support it, and reached the conclusion that unless there was a national government to command loyalty and coordinate efforts, we would remain easy pickings the next time a European power demanded submission. I don't defend his broad reading of federal power, but I think we can deplore his blindspots without demonizing the man.

Don't we also have to add to the mix the fact that Jefferson didn't merely own slaves, but actively lionized the culture and economic model predicated on slaveholding as being morally superior to that of manufacturing and commerce?

My original comments were directed at Professor Levy's claim that Hamilton's record on slavery were a "lot" better than Jefferson and the subsequent minimization of Hamilton's general offensiveness to liberty in the comments that response provoked. The discussion of monarchy etc. then grew from that.

As the present order of debate can be traced by way of its respondents directly back to that original exchange, I believe it is fair to state that I have accurately described the current subject of discussion.

As to character, it is indeed shaped by particular actions. It is not synonymous though as the actions, being particulars, are not interchangeable with the whole that is character.

It is thus possible for a good person to commit a wrong, even grievously, and yet attain good character through his cognizance of that wrong, repentance for its ills, and strength as illustrated in other acts of goodness.

If you doubt that ask yourself this: is a child inherently marked with evil character if, by pure chance of his birth, he happens to inherit the plantation of his slave-owning father? I submit that he is not, and that his culpability in the sins of his father extends only to what he makes of his condition.

Jefferson had many failings with slavery in how he acted upon his condition - that has been roundly acknowledged by all. But he also advanced in goodness, even on slavery, far beyond most men of similar condition in his time, to say nothing of many good and substantive things he did in other matters.

I claim no expertise, but Chernow at least portrays Hamilton's actions vis a vis slavery in a much better light than Bob does. I don't recall all the details, but my understanding of Chernow's gloss is that Hamilton did not own or rent slaves for his own use, but did on a very few occasions represent others (chiefly his brother in law who he was helping to move back to the US) in transactions concerning them. On the other hand, he did far more than pay empty lip service to abolitionism. He was openly in favor of John Laurens' plan to free southern blacks and enlist them to fight England; he was a member of a New York abolitionist society and was outvoted because he wanted to set specific timetables within which slaveholding members would commit to free them; he opposed the Jeffersonian demand that England should have to make reparation for slaves freed or carried off during the revolution. He was guilty like they all were of swallowing the institution of slavery in the name of achieving union, but I think it can fairly be said that every time there was a chance within the constraints of the constitution to make policy decisions adverse to slavery, he did so. And even if it is actually true as Bob says that he hired slaves on occasion, I disagree that this is the moral equivalent of owning them without knowing a lot more. An owner has the ability to set free. If it is not in your power to free another man's slave, hiring him does not worsen his lot and might improve it--indeed, weren't some slaves permitted to earn their freedom by doing such work?

You'll have to forgive me, William. I was under the impression that the discussion centered around the post:

"On the issue of Thomas Jefferson’s loathsomely anti-libertarian credentials..."

Oops. My bad. Sorry.

"[S]ome seem not to grasp the difference between the evil of the particular act of slavery and the character of the sinner who commits it."

I'm not following. Can you please explain? How can there be any difference between my actions and my character? Doesn't the former proceed from the latter?

I don’t understand this singular fixation on “comparative analysis” between slavery of the American system and that of European monarchies.

Then you've missed the point of the discussion up to this moment. The question was posited as to which system of government, or the given founders associated with its advocacy, is least offensive to liberty. The only practical means of answering that question is a comparison of their respective vices.

I asserted early on and still maintain that the statist faults of European monarchy, as advocated by Hamilton, far surpass those of Jefferson's decentralized republicanism even with slavery.

Of course, neither is ideal. But since some here have fixated upon Jefferson's faults with slavery as the basis for judging his entire character and system of thought. So comparative analysis becomes a contextual necessity to illustrate that, yes, with all its faults, Jeffersonianism still likens favorably to the many worse alternatives all around it. That is not an endorsement of Jeffersonianism's "perfection" or even a defense of its faults. But it is a statement of perspective that has otherwise been lost from this historical discussion because some seem not to grasp the difference between the evil of the particular act of slavery and the character of the sinner who commits it.

William wrote:

"Your singular fixation on American slavery to the detriment of reasoned comparative analysis has thus far inhibited you from reaching this understanding not for want of information..."

I don't understand this singular fixation on "comparative analysis" between slavery of the American system and that of European monarchies. It's like the typical statist response to a libertarian's criticism of encroaching state tyranny in America: "Well if you think THIS is bad, you should go see what it's like in Cuba/N. Korea/Zimbabwe, etc., etc..."

Is the relative demerits of another system of tyranny supposed to ameliorate the one under discussion in some way? And why would you want to do that? Or am I missing the point of the "comparative analysis" all together?

Look, Jefferson owned slaves, and contrary to whatever high-sounding, flowery, pretty words he may have written/said against it, the fact of the matter is that he condoned slavery IN PRACTICE, in that he...well, OWNED SLAVES, and did not ACT to end the practice of slavery. What really is so horrible about recognizing this simple fact and heaping the unqualified moral condemnation upon it that it deserves? Ditto the system in which slavery was allowed, regardless of the practices in other countries at the time.

Are you afraid that if you do you'll turn into a pumpkin or something? I don't get it.

"Since you insist upon comparison, simply note that I find it hard to give a moral edge to the man who rents the slaves of others to do his chores over the man who owns them outright."

You're right not to. To that I would add, "And vice-versa."

Hamilton and Jefferson both wielded some considerable power in the ruling state apparatus, and NEITHER to my knowledge ever actually DID ANYTHING to end the slave system.

Micha - Once again, I do not "advocate" decentralized republicanism as an attainable ideal. In fact, there is very little of the state that I do advocate.

That said, it is possible to distinguish between the comparative flaws of different systems of government. And that is why I make the claim that decentralized republicanism is a lesser evil than monarchy or other autocracies. Such a claim is sustained by history and requires no advocacy of either system. So I'll again choke your comment up to either intellectual slothfulness or yet another irresponsible straw man.

As opposed to American chattel slavery in the 18th century, which was just peachy.

No Radgeek, as that would be a straw man. Nobody here to my knowledge has anything other than condemnation for slavery. What is being argued, though, is that the late 18th century system of Jeffersonian republicanism in the U.S. (though indeed marred by the imperfection of slavery) was better for liberty than its contemporary European monarchies (which were also marred by slavery, often at a worse degree, not to mention a whole lot of other things).

Your singular fixation on American slavery to the detriment of reasoned comparative analysis has thus far inhibited you from reaching this understanding not for want of information - the abuses of slavery under the European colonial system are well documented and far exceeded anything that existed here - but rather want of perspective. You seem to view the word "slavery" as a conversation stopper and little more, hence your statements such as the following:

You forgot to add an important qualifier. What you no doubt meant to say was “thedecentralized republicanism advocated for white people by Jefferson.”

Of course such a qualifier was hardly "forgotten" as I had acknowledged Jefferson's fault on slavery from the outset and readily contextualized that grievous fault aside his better characteristics long before you got here. But you already know that. So you return to the slavery canard not to inform the discussion, that discussion already being informed of it, but rather for its conversation-stopping shock value. Overlooking that for the moment though, I am somewhat mystified by the following statement for two reasons:

Hamilton’s views on the Executive, in their more flamboyant monarchistic versions, were contemptible and absurd; his views on the Executive, in their more practical pseudo-republican versions, were no less despicable, and much more damaging (because they were more insidious). But the hereditary absolutist tyranny of slavery, as actually practiced (not merely advocated in speeches) by Jefferson and his fellow white slavelords was no less terrible for being inflicted by means other than formal government.

First, by means of comparison between Hamilton's "views" and Jefferson's "practice" it appears that you intend to cast the latter as comparatively more offensive. Yet as we all know, Hamilton's "views" on the strong executive were much more than that. They were actually enacted into law in several instances and carried into effect through outright tyrannical means (the alien and sedition acts and the whiskey rebellion come to mind). Second, why the need to constantly qualify Hamilton's faults (which some here have attempted to dismiss with an air of flippancy and convenience unbefitting an intellectual discussion) with the already acknowledged and uncontested matter of Jefferson's fault on slavery? Why is it not sufficient to fault Hamilton as Hamilton for things he did in and of themselves?

Of course the answer is that critiques of Hamilton are indeed sufficient when standing on their own. Furthermore, should you desire to continue his juxtaposition along side Jefferson on the matter of slavery anyway, please take a moment to inform yourself of Hamilton's own sins in sustaining this insidious practice. Since you insist upon comparison, simply note that I find it hard to give a moral edge to the man who rents the slaves of others to do his chores over the man who owns them outright.

William:

... the decentralized republicanism advocated by Jefferson ....

You forgot to add an important qualifier. What you no doubt meant to say was "thedecentralized republicanism advocated for white people by Jefferson."

The system of rule that Jefferson advocated, and personally instituted, for black people, was not "decentralized republicanism," but rather hereditary, personal, absolutist tyranny--tyranny of a form almost unparalleled in human history for its invasiveness, immiseration, and ruthless brutality against its unwilling subjects.

Indeed it does. But I am not an advocate of democracy. I find it to be a severely flawed system of government, and generally inferior to the decentralized republicanism advocated by Jefferson (which, though also flawed, is generally less intrusive upon liberty than either democracy or monarchy).

Very well then, allow me to rephrase:

The propensity of decentralized republicanism to descend into bureaucratic tyranny has extensive evidence at the time that William lives. William knows that evidence as does everyone around him, yet William is willing to overlook it and advocate decentralized republicanism anyway.

John V.,

But what I didn’t see in that entire article was something about Jefferson’s general views on governance and commerce.

Well, sure, but the post wasn't intended to be a post about Jefferson's views in general (much less to compare them to Hamilton's views, which I also think were despicable). It was intended as a post about the need to take seriously his views and concrete actions with regard to chattel slavery.

If you want a more general take on Jefferson, I'd say that, besides slavery (which is an odd start--would you try to evaluate Augusto Pinochet's record "aside from the torturing and murdering political dissidents"?) the following do deserve at least some critical attention: (1) his government-imposed Ograbme, (2) his decision to launch the first overseas war in American history, (3) his use of expropriated tax money for massive territorial expansion, (4) his government's arrogation of title over the unclaimed lands in that new territory, and (5) due to that arrogation, his repeated actions against the land rights of honest homesteaders, in favor of the politically-fabricated land claims of speculators and political jobbers, who had done nothing to earn a right to the land that they claimed, but got the power to grab it away from the people who cleared and tilled it by right of the bribes they paid to the federal government. My own view is that another one of his profoundly anti-libertarian stances, and the root of many of the others, was his belief in the legitimacy of monopoly government, which necessarily involved the willingness impose a government on unwilling subjects, together with its regulations, its imposts and duties, its wars, its claims to vast tracts of land that it had done nothing to earn, etc., even without their consent, even if they wanted nothing but to be left alone to make an honest living in peace, and to violently repress any individual person who tried to do so.

None of this is to say anything about how you ought to rank-order Jefferson, on his libertarian merits, compared to Alexander Hamilton, or any of the other American revolutionaries. As I said in the post, I think Hamilton was perfectly awful as a person and as a political figure. I also don't actually know or much care how you would go about making all the different kinds and degrees of anti-libertarian views or policies commensurable with each other so that you could do the rank-ordering. Does being for a central bank get you more or fewer or as many libertarian demerits as launching an overseas war, or a "national security" embargo on foreign trade? Or more in some respects but fewer in other respects? How do you even start to do the scoring?

Jacob T. Levy:

and is living in a monarchy– like, say, the UK, or Canada, or Australia, or New Zealand– really inherently more unfree than living in a state with widespread chattel slavery?

William:

Today in the year 2008, no. But in 18th when even the world’s most “benevolent” monarchies - i.e. George III of England and Catherine the Great of Russia - left much to be desired

As opposed to American chattel slavery in the 18th century, which was just peachy.

Hamilton's views on the Executive, in their more flamboyant monarchistic versions, were contemptible and absurd; his views on the Executive, in their more practical pseudo-republican versions, were no less despicable, and much more damaging (because they were more insidious). But the hereditary absolutist tyranny of slavery, as actually practiced (not merely advocated in speeches) by Jefferson and his fellow white slavelords was no less terrible for being inflicted by means other than formal government.

Jacob T. Levy:

As to whether Jefferson had any anti-libertarian views about government and commerce among whites– setting, as John V insists, “SLAVERY ASIDE”, the answer is yes, certainly. ... The Embargo Acts were the most radical restriction of American trade in U.S. history.

William:

They were also enacted as a genuine, if misguided, national defense policy amidst the turmoil of Europe’s Napoleonic wars, and this too was done within the full purview of the Constitution. Nor was the Embargo Act inconsistent with Jefferson’s advocacy of free trade, ....

Well, so?

As far as I can tell, Jacob was discussing libertarianism, not "national defense policy," the Constitution, or the internal consistency of Jefferson's anti-libertarian views. If his radical government lock-down on foreign trade was anti-libertarian (and it was), that suffices to show that "Jefferson had any anti-libertarian views about government and commerce among whites."

William:

That Hamilton not only proposed such a system for the United States but openly praised it as the best system of government illustrates conclusively that he was no friend of liberty.

I'm sorry, just who was claiming that Hamilton was a "friend of liberty"? My original post was explicitly about Jefferson's vices and crimes, not about Hamilton's virtues -- which, as I said, I can find very few of. As far as I can tell, nobody else in the more widely-ranging follow-up comments made the claim you're attacking here, either.

I think you're walloping a strawman.

The propensity of democracies to descend into bureaucratic tyranny has extensive evidence at the time that William lives.

Indeed it does. But I am not an advocate of democracy. I find it to be a severely flawed system of government, and generally inferior to the decentralized republicanism advocated by Jefferson (which, though also flawed, is generally less intrusive upon liberty than either democracy or monarchy). Regardless, as I am not a proponent of democracy I cannot be said to be guilty of the following charge:

William knows that evidence as does everyone around him, yet William is willing to overlook it and advocate democracy anyway.

I'll accordingly choke it up to either intellectual slothfulness or yet another of Micha's irresponsible straw men.

The propensity of democracies to descend into bureaucratic tyranny has extensive evidence at the time that William lives. William knows that evidence as does everyone around him, yet William is willing to overlook it and advocate democracy anyway.

Moving on to the asides...

1. Historical scholarship has long established that Madison was familiar with Hume's 1752 essay before the constitutional convention. Given that it influenced his actions there, it goes without saying that he is unlikely to have considered it a matter of dismissive satire.

2. Hamilton's monarchy speech was his longest and most notable contribution to the entire constitutional convention. Hamilton's known advocacy of strong executive power, the assessment of that speech by its critics is rendered credible by the detailed outlines that Madison provided (http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documen...).

As to the comparison of Hamilton's particulars, it is notable that he made analogy between his system and the monarchial electoral processes of Rome and the Holy Roman Empire. He was not silent on the British system though, stating: "In his private opinion he had no scruple in declaring, supported as he was by the opinions of so many of the wise & good, that the British Govt. was the best in the world: and that he doubted much whether any thing short of it would do in America." You obviously see no fault in that (though you did previously attempt a sleight of hand in which a very different 18th century British constitutional monarchy was intentionally confused with a 21st century figurehead in the style of Queen Elizabeth II). But again, that begs the question: why the American revolution?

3. I can agree entirely that the embargo acts were inconsistent with pure libertarianism. The point remains though that they were completely consistent with Jefferson's political economy from the earlier 1793 report - a point his detractors often fail to recognize. The issue here is accordingly a divergence between pure libertarianism and its Jeffersonian variant. In other words, if you said to Thomas Jefferson "That embargo thing isn't very libertarian" he would respond "I agree. It isn't, but I'm doing it for other reasons related to our national defense." That would be an unsatisfying answer to the pure libertarian I suppose, but it was exactly what Jefferson presented himself to be time and time again.

Professor Levy - If your sole standard of measurement is a perfectly libertarian state in the abstract form, then it is inherently an unmeetable one and thus not worth discussing beyond the abstract.

Back in the real world, any reasonable person can turn to the record of human history and find ample evidence attesting to monarchy's incompatibility with a libertarian-minded political arrangement. I also maintain that to be true in light of the "lesser measures" you offer.

Genocidal acts? History shows they tend to be accomplished by people who refer to themselves as King, Emperor, Commissar, Generalissimo, or Fuehrer.

Slavery? It was far more widespread in the colonial systems of the European monarchies than anything that ever existed in the United States.

Political prisoners? Again, this tends to be the favored domain of people who refer to themselves as King, Emperor, Commissar, Generalissimo, or Fuehrer.

Taxation? Well, that's pretty much the only one of your four measures where things get blurry. But then again, have you not been arguing all this time that it is improper to consider taxation analogous to slavery, which you seem to maintain to be the worst thing a state could ever do (it is not of course - death by the state is a worse infringement upon the liberty of the individual than slavery to the state).

All of that is not to say that republican systems of government are perfect in the first three regards. They are obviously not on many counts. But the simple record of history tends to show that the abuses associated with each category (save taxation, which is apparent in both) tend to be more pronounced among monarchies and their autocratic heirs.

I don’t see the difference between your definition and my definition of libertarianism’s primary concern.

You defined libertarianism's primary concern as being placed in the interaction of people in a political context, such interaction being unspecified in any further way. Such a definition could theoretically extend to any political philosophy as it is not qualified by the basic premise of the individual.

I defined it as being placed in the rights and liberty of the individual, with all interactions being an *extension* of the original principle of individual liberty.

That is the difference between our definitions.

That might be a good argument for Hamilton’s naivety about history, if not his libertarianism, if it didn’t happen to be the case that at the time Hamilton lived, the long-term stability of democracy did not have much evidence in its favor.

Indeed it did not, but at the same time the propensity of monarchies to descend into autocratic tyranny DID have extensive evidence at the time Hamilton lived. He knew that evidence as did everyone around him, yet Hamilton alone, at least among the more notable founders, was willing to overlook it and advocate monarchy anyway.

No Micha. Libertarianism’s primary concern is the status and liberty of the *individual.* It is from that status that *all* other relationships stem, including the relationship between the individual and the state.

I don't see the difference between your definition and my definition of libertarianism's primary concern.

Recognizing that to be the case, the simple study of history strongly attests to the fact that some systems of state are inherently less conducive to the preservation and exercise of individual liberty than others. And monarchy just so happens to be one of those systems, hence my characterization of it (and its proponent Hamilton) as generally incompatible with libertarianism.

That might be a good argument for Hamilton's naivety about history, if not his libertarianism, if it didn't happen to be the case that at the time Hamilton lived, the long-term stability of democracy did not have much evidence in its favor. You are criticizing Hamilton for failing to grasp history that had not happened yet.

Again, I would be much more critical of minarchist libertarians and would have a much stronger case against them as libertarians for supporting democracy if there currently existed a functioning, thriving, stable society of ordered anarchy.

But such a society doesn't (yet) exist, and the few functioning, thriving, stable anarchist societies that have existed in the past existed under conditions that were sufficiently different from our present circumstances for it to be excusable for minarchists to discount these examples as unconvincing.

Monarchy:Democracy::Democracy:Anarchy

"some systems of state are inherently less conducive to the preservation and exercise of individual liberty than others. "

Please show your data.

Number of perfectly libertarian republics in human history: 0
Number of perfectly libertarian monarchies in human history: 0

For any lesser measure (states that have directly turned into totalitarian regimes, or states that have committed genocidal acts against parts of their population, or states that have practiced widespread domestic slavery, or states that have imprisoned people for speaking against the state, or states that have raised taxes over X level, or...) this'll be a tricky exercise, not one for which republics will obviously dominate the results.

While I'm not an anarchist anymore, I'm with Micha on the forms of government question. The American in me stirs to patriotic stories of the triumph of republicanism against monarchy, but the libertarian as well as the historian of political thought in me has to shrug a bit as between forms of government until I know something about the policies they enact and the stability they engender (i.e., not just 'does this government adopt good policies?' but 'does this government have a tendency to collapse into a much worse form of government?')

[aside #1: I'm perfectly well aware of the debate over large-state republics-- really!-- but Madison's contribution to that debate was still in the future when Hamilton spoke, and Hume's essay was widely perceived as a work of satire since it was so incompatible with everything he had ever written about the British constitution. In the time before the Philadelphia convention, there was not actually much debate on the question.]

[aside #2: Hamilton's "enthusiastic courtship" of monarchy consisted of *one* speech to the Convention-- presumably reported on by Madison to Jefferson and enthusiastically used by the latter as a political charge during the nasty politics of the 1790s. And, since his advocacy was for a monarchical *executive* in the context of the rest of the constitutional order being considered, yes, I do think that constitutional monarchies like 18th c. Britain, not absolutist monarchies like Russia or France, are the relevant point of comparison.]

[aside #3: The question to which the Embargo Acts were an answer wasn't "did Jefferson act hypocritically?"-- for that I would have pointed to the Louisiana Purchase instead-- but rather "did Jefferson espouse anti-libertarian views" as regarded how white people should be governed. That the Embargo Acts were consistent with his stated views doesn't help the cause of claiming him as a pure-as-the-driven-snow-except-for-black-people libertarian hero.]

Libertarianism is primarily concerned with how people act towards each other in a political context, namely: when and how violent force can be justifiably used in society.

No Micha. Libertarianism's primary concern is the status and liberty of the *individual.* It is from that status that *all* other relationships stem, including the relationship between the individual and the state.

Recognizing that to be the case, the simple study of history strongly attests to the fact that some systems of state are inherently less conducive to the preservation and exercise of individual liberty than others. And monarchy just so happens to be one of those systems, hence my characterization of it (and its proponent Hamilton) as generally incompatible with libertarianism.

The problem with monarchy is the centralized power structure of monarchy itself, which exists inherent to a monarchial system of government regardless of the individual attributes of the persons who happen to temporarily hold its office. Hamilton’s enthusiastic courtship with monarchy is accordingly anti-libertarian in and of itself.

Your misunderstand what libertarianism is. Libertarianism is primarily concerned with how people act towards each other in a political context, namely: when and how violent force can be justifiably used in society.

Only secondarily is libertarianism concerned with which particular political system of monopoly government, if any, is mostly likely to lead to the most libertarian outcomes.

From my perspective as an anarchist, the problem with any form of government is the centralized power structure of government itself, which exists inherent to government regardless of the individual attributes of the persons who happen to temporarily hold its office. Minimal-statist libertarians' enthusiastic courtship with democracy would be accordingly anti-libertarian in and of itself, if and only if we understood libertarianism to be primarily concerned with choosing between which particular form of government is THE BEST POSSIBLE WAY of achieving liberty.

Luckily, libertarians are free to disagree with each other over which form of government, if any, is best, because the primary concern of libertarianism is broader than specific institutional arrangements. When two or more libertarians are judging between what all agree are second-best, non-ideal systems, libertarian theory alone does not provide us with clearly-defined ordinal rankings with which to correctly place monopoly, democracy, aristocracy, dictatorship, and anarchy in relation to each other. Creating such ordinal rankings requires looking beyond strict libertarian principles and turning instead to the empirical sciences of economics, historical analysis, game theory, and time-preferences.

He supported state-level slander cases against newspapers that criticized his party or administration– his free-press theory was kind of limited to the federal government and to no-prior-restraint.

That's a bit of an oversimplification of the issue, but granted it was so it was also entirely consistent with the original scope of the 1st Amendment per the application of the constitutional rule that was correctly stated in Barron v. Baltimore. As originally designed, the Bill of Rights' freedom of the press provision applied exclusively to the policies of the federal government. State policies were to be governed by the individual and varying stipulations of their respective constitutions. Though an imperfect application of libertarianism on Jefferson's part, his tolerance of state-level suits was not inconsistent.

The Embargo Acts were the most radical restriction of American trade in U.S. history.

They were also enacted as a genuine, if misguided, national defense policy amidst the turmoil of Europe's Napoleonic wars, and this too was done within the full purview of the Constitution. Nor was the Embargo Act inconsistent with Jefferson's advocacy of free trade, as he stated as early as his 1793 response to Hamilton's overtly protectionist Report on Manufactures that the use of trade restrictions for military purposes was a legitimate and constitutional exception to the rule that commerce should be free. Jefferson was misguided in this belief as he overestimated the strength of an embargo as a negotiating point abroad vis-a-vis its domestic harm, but his policy was not inconsistent with anything he espoused prior - in fact it was exactly what he espoused in 1793.

William, I think, seriously misunderstands the state of British government in 1787– not least because slavery on British soil was illegal.

Professor Levy's strawmen aside (as I made no such claim to slavery's 1787 legality in Great Britain proper), it is worth noting that slavery would continue to exist in the British colonial system until 1833 - some sixty years after the Somersett case.

As to monarchies, my point has similarly been sidestepped by the respondent. The particulars of the reigns of George and Catherine (who I simply offered as an example of a "benevolent" monarch, faults included) are simply an illustrative example of the greater point: strong monarchies tend to be so fundamentally incompatible with basic libertarian principles government that even the most "benign" (Catherine) or hapless (George) examples of them are replete with a heavy dose of autocracy.

I'm not sure what to make of the following, aside from the incredible ignorance it demonstrates:

The dominant view of the day was that republican governments could not survive in large states for very long and were likely to degenerate into Cromwellian or Caesarian military dictatorship

Far from being subject to a "dominant" small-state argument, the relationship described was very much an open debate among the late 18th century's political theorists. Furthermore the "large republic" side of that debate had some very prestigious names associated with it, not the least among them being Madison and, before him, David Hume (http://www.constitution.org/dh/perfcomw.htm).

it’s not as though Hamilton was longing to replace an obviously thriving and successful republic (he and many of the other Founders thought the U.S. was in crisis and that Shay’s Rebellion was the beginning of the end) with czarism.

Again Professor Levy misses the point. Hamilton needed not to espouse the reign of Ivan the Terrible to bring himself into active courtship with a fundamentally non-libertarian principle. The problem with monarchy takes no more essence in its worst examples than its best. The problem with monarchy is the centralized power structure of monarchy itself, which exists inherent to a monarchial system of government regardless of the individual attributes of the persons who happen to temporarily hold its office. Hamilton's enthusiastic courtship with monarchy is accordingly anti-libertarian in and of itself. Though it is indeed likely he never envisioned an American version of Ivan the Terrible (although his embrace of the Alien and Sedition Acts gives plenty of cause for wonder), neither is it even remotely likely that he envisioned his monarch as a 21st century figurehead with little to no policymaking power.

Hamilton's embrace of monarchy is entirely consistent with his subsequent advocacy of a strong executive and his constant work toward the centralization of federal power. Both were different means to a similar goal; neither were even remotely consistent with liberty.

As to whether Jefferson had any anti-libertarian views about government and commerce among whites-- setting, as John V insists, "SLAVERY ASIDE", the answer is yes, certainly. He supported state-level slander cases against newspapers that criticized his party or administration-- his free-press theory was kind of limited to the federal government and to no-prior-restraint. The Embargo Acts were the most radical restriction of American trade in U.S. history. And the views on the French Revolution left something to be desired...

Jefferson was a brilliant visionary and sometimes a hero-- but sometimes pretty profoundly not a hero.

William, I think, seriously misunderstands the state of British government in 1787-- not least because slavery on British soil was illegal. George III was a bad occupant of a constitutionally limited monarchy with an elected parliament and an independent judiciary; Catherine the Great was a good occupant of a tyrannical and despotic office. The dominant view of the day was that republican governments could not survive in large states for very long and were likely to degenerate into Cromwellian or Caesarian military dictatorship; *if* one thinks that military dictatorship is a likely outcome, a British-style monarchy is a pretty attractive alternative. As it turned out, Hamilton and the dominant view were wrong about the possibility of a continental republic-- but it's not as though Hamilton was longing to replace an obviously thriving and successful republic (he and many of the other Founders thought the U.S. was in crisis and that Shay's Rebellion was the beginning of the end) with czarism.

I've got as much libertarian lifetime dislike of Hamilton as anyone. He leaves me cold, whereas I like Adams and Madison and feel all the usual conflicts between admiration and dismay at Jefferson. But to be "among the most statist and anti-libertarian members of the founding generation" is not actually to be very statist in absolute terms-- whereas chattel slavery *is* a tremendous violation of freedom in absolute terms.

My last two paragraphs above lead to an interesting question:

If the 2008 election were between Hamilton and Jefferson, who would you vote for?

I think there, the answer should be obvious for most people here. Does anyone believe that the absence of slavery would bother Jefferson or be part of his campaign platform? LOL. Of course not. But I think the issues he would be campaigning on would make us all smile.

Anyone disagree?

Yes, William. Good clarification. That's what I was trying to convey in my first post above...I simply didn't think it would get so obtusely misunderstood.

Jefferson had his failings on slavery...no doubt. He lacked the conviction to stand against it in real time and in practice....his deploring of it in rhetoric and the abstract, though nice (I suppose), was simply an near empty gesture.

But my point was that, SLAVERY ASIDE, Jefferson's general views in abstract and in political battle against the Federalists were in favor of less government and decentralization. His philosophy of government and society was far more libertarian than Hamilton...this is so obvious it shouldn't even be debated.

If not for the likes of Jefferson and his cohort, there's no telling what kind of government we would have had had it been left to the Hamiltonians to decide.

When I asked my question above, I was serious and seriously curious to know of Jefferson's anti-libertarian views in terms of government, commerce and society. Did he have any? Perhaps. I would just seriously like to know what they were.

What would Jefferson be in the modern world? What would he think of our parties and government?

I think it's safe to say that Hamilton would be smiling and thinking up ways to expand power even further and look for areas where his monarchical leanings could "improve" society even more.

Jefferson, OTOH, would be as distressed and disillusioned as most of us are...and seriously doubt the abolition of slavery would be a reason as to why...

It is also worth mentioning that the major monarchies of the world in 1787 - the time when Hamilton proposed a monarchy for the United States - all had some form of slavery in them. Many (France, Portugal, Spain) had far worse slave systems in their American and African colonies than the United States ever had as an otherwise free non-monarchy nation.

So I stand by my original point: Hamilton was in no way a friend of liberty, and all things considered he was still worse than the otherwise libertarian founders who failed in their practice of slavery.

and is living in a monarchy– like, say, the UK, or Canada, or Australia, or New Zealand– really inherently more unfree than living in a state with widespread chattel slavery?

Today in the year 2008, no. But in 18th when even the world's most "benevolent" monarchies - i.e. George III of England and Catherine the Great of Russia - left much to be desired (not to mention that embracing them as an example of a tolerable monarch would effectively negate the entire premise and act of the Declaration of Independence and subsequent revolution...not that you would want that to be so, would you?), and the far more typical monarchies could go toe to toe with your run-of-the-mill murderous autocratic 3rd world dictator of the mid 20th century, yeah. I'd say it's a lot more unfree on the whole than an otherwise free nation-state that enslaved a minority of its population as bad as that may be.

The history of monarchies in the world, to put it frankly, stinks. The bad ones are little more than little Hitlers and Stalins for their own time and country and the far more infrequent good ones are still far too autocratic. That Hamilton not only proposed such a system for the United States but openly praised it as the best system of government illustrates conclusively that he was no friend of liberty. When a tyrant is in power with unbridled autocratic authority all his subjects are slaves, central bank or no central bank.

But it’s too easy to take the Hamilton-Jefferson debate about the Bank (for example) and say “Hamilton anti-freedom, Jefferson pro-freedom,” and neglect the magnitude of slavery’s offense against freedom.

Assuming your eyes are keen you'll notice, Professor Levy, that I did no such thing though. Rather, I provided a whole litany of faults with Hamilton's policies and views which, taken in addition to his own personal shortcomings on slavery, illustrate him to be among the most statist and anti-libertarian members of the founding generation. And yes, included in that comparison are those who like Jefferson opposed slavery in the abstract though they fell far short in practice.

and is living in a monarchy-- like, say, the UK, or Canada, or Australia, or New Zealand-- really inherently more unfree than living in a state with widespread chattel slavery?

I don't *like* Hamilton; I agree that his political instincts were constantly to push the new republic in undesirable directions. But it's too easy to take the Hamilton-Jefferson debate about the Bank (for example) and say "Hamilton anti-freedom, Jefferson pro-freedom," and neglect the magnitude of slavery's offense against freedom.

Considering that Hamilton actively participated in the return of fugitive slaves, purchased slaves at auction as a proxy bidder for a family member, and rented out slaves from other people to do his housework, he was not a *lot* better by any means. Perhaps in rhetoric he was anti-slavery, but in practice Hamilton was pretty horrible.

Furthermore, Hamilton was indeed a *lot* worse on just about everything else: trade, taxation, military power, central banking, centralization of power, and strengthening the executive branch.

Hell, the guy openly advocated a MONARCHY at the constitutional convention!!!

There was not a single more anti-libertarian member of comparable prominence in the "founding fathers" generation than Hamilton, and anybody who thinks otherwise is expressing only self-denial or an appalling level of historical ignorance.

Well, no. On both race and slavery, Hamilton and Adams were a *lot* better than Jefferson; Franklin and Paine were better still. It's not held constant. Jefferson contributed to the birth of 'scientific' racism in the US; Franklin worked for abolition.

Jefferson *hoped* for the end of slavery. But he never directly worked toward it, and he did directly argue in favor of racist conclusions that his contemporaries denied.

Ii think that there's an understandable tendency to discount slavery because, after all, it eventually ended anyway. By contrast, Hamilton's victory over Jefferson on the 'necessary or proper' clause seems to have been the first step in a constant and still-ongoing process. So people who are concerned with 2008 can decide that Jefferson's moral demerits no longer matter and Hamilton's do-- and this, fallaciously, encourages them to think that Hamilton's offenses were inherently worse.

As far as I knew all those old white bastards were slaveowners and white supremacists. Since that is held constant, we can analyze them on their remaining libertarian (or not) elements.

It's not an absurd statement. I was being serious and I think it's a valid point.

"I was hoping to see laws or views he supported/held that showed an anti-libertarian POV.

There, slavery aside, I see very little to nothing."

Reading this absurd statement reminded me of that joke about "But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

If I were to make the statement "Jeffrey Dahmer was anti-libertarian," purely on the basis of his having killed and eaten seventeen people, would John V also see "very little to nothing" to support it?

That's all fine and good and I make no excuses whatsoever for Jefferson's slavery issue. NONE. But what I didn't see in that entire article was something about Jefferson's general views on governance and commerce. I was hoping to see laws or views he supported/held that showed an anti-libertarian POV.

There, slavery aside, I see very little to nothing.

BTW, you never responded to my email about a Cato debate...

;)