Fears of a Setting Sun
The Disillusionment of America's Founders
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- 2,99 €
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- 2,99 €
Publisher Description
The surprising story of how George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson came to despair for the future of the nation they had created
Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them—including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—came to deem America’s constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation. Fears of a Setting Sun is the first book to tell the fascinating and too-little-known story of the founders’ disillusionment.
As Dennis Rasmussen shows, the founders’ pessimism had a variety of sources: Washington lost his faith in America’s political system above all because of the rise of partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was too weak, Adams because he believed that the people lacked civic virtue, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions laid bare by the spread of slavery. The one major founder who retained his faith in America’s constitutional order to the end was James Madison, and the book also explores why he remained relatively optimistic when so many of his compatriots did not. As much as Americans today may worry about their country’s future, Rasmussen reveals, the founders faced even graver problems and harbored even deeper misgivings.
A vividly written account of a chapter of American history that has received too little attention, Fears of a Setting Sun will change the way that you look at the American founding, the Constitution, and indeed the United States itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Political scientist Rasmussen (The Infidel and the Professor) delivers an illuminating account of how the founding fathers worried about the future of America. With the notable exception of James Madison, Rasmussen writes, the country's early leaders, including George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, were pessimistic that the American experiment in republican democracy would endure. Washington's fears stemmed from concerns that political partisanship would inevitably tear the country "asunder." Adams distrusted the people's ability to put aside their self-interest in favor of the greater public good, according to Rasmussen, while Jefferson anticipated that regional divisions—exemplified in differing attitudes toward slavery—would doom the American enterprise. Hamilton, meanwhile, worried that the federal government lacked the energy or authority to successfully govern the states. One factor behind Madison's relative optimism, Rasmussen notes, was his lower expectations for how the new country would operate. Rasmussen lends weight to his arguments with revealing—and often sobering—quotes from primary sources (Hamilton, for instance, called the Constitution "a frail and worthless fabric"), and enlivens the proceedings with flashes of wit ("with enemies like Jefferson, slavery hardly needed friends"). This standout history provides useful context for understanding the roots of contemporary political turmoils and may comfort those who fear that American democracy is in dire peril.
