Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson differed greatly in the 1790s in their approach to the newly established U.S. federal government. Their philosophical clash did as much as anything to help create America’s first competing political parties.

Yet it’s unwise to try to designate either Founder as the font of one of today’s two main competing political philosophies (liberal versus conservative, statist versus individualist, Democrat versus Republican). Carson Holloway’s book Hamilton versus Jefferson in the Washington Administration reminds us why.

Reviewing the book for National Review, Matthew Spalding highlights one of Holloway’s key points: Sharp ideological differences between Hamilton and Jefferson nonetheless recognized basic principles that no longer seem to unite today’s political partisans.

Their central disputes were on fundamental matters: the meaning of Republican government, the extent of national powers, the nature of the Union. Yet even when they disagreed on a substantive point, and when personal animosity made their divide wider than it had to be, their argument was usually less about the principle of a matter than about its practical meaning. …

… This is because beneath their disagreements was a profound agreement on the principles. They both understood Republican government to be based on the natural rights with which each is equally endowed, a point evident in Hamilton’s 1775 pamphlet Farmer Refuted as much as in Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration. … Both men saw the dangers of centralized power and defended federalism and the separation of powers as the key constitutional structures. Although they accused each other of going outside of the Constitution, neither rejected the principles or the framework of American constitutionalism. …

… Properly understood, their disagreements, as wide as they were, are narrow in comparison to the schism between the Founders and the later progressive political science that rejects outright the principles and forms of American constitutionalism. The bureaucratic despotism that threatens to overwhelm us today would be equally alien and equally abhorrent to Hamilton and Jefferson.