In the Fury of Democracy post a couple down, I wondered about the difference between an aristocratic, old wealth versus a meritocratic view of the national leader class.  A few pages after those that prompted that question, Professor Ferling gave me a word for the former: squirearchy.

And this latest section of Ferling’s A Leap in the Dark prompts another, similar question: which is the more egalitarian, Hamilton’s vision of an industrial, merchant society, or Jefferson’s collection of minimally governed self-sustaining yeomen?

One can make the case for each.  A commercial society is (kindof)  inherently egalitarian, profits are status-blind, and so on.  Self-sufficient farms are egalitarian in the sense that they allow a family to live largely off the social-status grid; one need not be connected to grow sweet potatoes.  And they are, from Ferling, “uncorrupted by the snares of capital.”

For the cons of each, here is Ferling:

Jefferson foresaw, correctly, that the world Hamilton wished to create would consist of considerable pain, including widespread exploitation of white workers, among them very young children, unspeakable urban squalor, and the emergence of a commercial and industrial plutocracy that would ravage the promise of individual liberty that had been the cornerstone of the republican ideology of the American Revolution.  However, the world that Jefferson hoped to sustain was not without pain.  It included abused slaves, who lived without hope under the most abominable circumstances, and many free persons who eked out a living from timeworn lands while paying homage to a squirearchy that monopolized political power.

In any event, it strikes me as a good American History exam question: the respective visions of Hamilton vs Jefferson, which is the more egalitarian?