The Noblest Minds: Fame, Honor, and the American Founding

Abstract

The Noblest Minds: Fame, Honor, and the American Founding. Edited by Peter McNamara. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999. Pp. ix, 236. Cloth, $59.00; paper, $23.95.) Power versus Liberty: Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Jefferson. By James H. Read. (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 2000. Pp. xi, 201. Illustrations. $47.50.) The authors of the essays in The Noblest Minds explore the conceptions and uses of fame, honor, and glory in the thought of many of the principal founding fathers. The result is often fascinating and suggests the diversity of belief among the elite thinkers of the revolutionary generation. Paul A. Rahe begins the volume, and his essay is erudite and thoughtprovoking, as one would expect from the author of the deeply-learned Republics Ancient and Modern (1994). Rahe traces the place of the pursuit of fame in republican thought from antiquity to the American Revolution. He examines the ways in which America's republican theorists were shaped by the western republican tradition's thoughts regarding fame. Rahe's conclusions supplement the main themes of his larger study. It is essential to understand the founders as part of the western republican tradition. Yet the modern conditions that shaped their republican dilemmas made them think differently than, and develop sharp criticisms of, the ancients. Those wishing for an introduction to Rahe's important study receive a superb one here. Rahe argues that the rise by the eighteenth century of modern economic forms and a civic culture and public sphere distinct from the acts of governing meant that American revolutionaries viewed public life differently than did the ancient world. The founding fathers valued private pursuits in ways unimaginable in antiquity. Americans feared that the unchecked desire for fame-so closely associated in classical thought with service to the commonwealth-could justify the invasion of the private by the emboldened agents of the public. The Americans'attitudes towards fame, filtered through a republican consciousness that valued the private at least as much as the public, was therefore ambivalent, while the value that ancients placed on the search for fame was unambiguous. Essays on Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton follow Rahe's. These essays support his study with careful, learned discussions. None of these founders believed the pursuit of fame was inherently good; at the same time, however, all believed that a republic that ceased to care about fame, and thus about public life and the commonweal, was doomed. Using fame as the entry point turns out to be a fine way to assess some of the most famous revolutionaries and to demonstrate the real differences that existed among them. Steven Ford shows that Franklin sought to democratize the sense of the sort of life that could make one famous. He felt a republic was safest when fame was connected to mastery of life's necessary, even prosaic, tasks. The Republic would have no Cato, but it would not have to endure Caesar. Though all the essays are good, I point out Lance Banning's on Madison and David Mayer's on Jefferson. Both essays summarize key themes of the authors' books on the two Virginians, yet the special attention to their thoughts on fame provides fresh insights. In particular, graduate students and others who have yet to read Banning's The Sacred Fire of Liberty (1995) will find his essay a useful guide. Though Rahe's argument holds in all the essays, the most classical founder was Hamilton. Peter McNamara gives us a republican statesman who thought only Cato could prevent Caesar. Hamilton was enthusiastic about the applicability of the ancients' thinking. He studied Plutarch and in 1782 exhorted his dear friend Henry Laurens: Peace made-The object then will be to make independence a blessing-Quit your sword, my friend, put on the toga, come to Congress (148). …