BRADLEY THOMPSON: Commerce and the Birth of a Free Society.
Post-Founding Americans embraced commerce and a free-market economy like no other people in history. In 1795, Phineas Hedges exuberantly sang the praises of commerce: “In a free government, commerce expands her sails; Prompted by a spirit of enterprize and a desire of gain, men venture the dangers of a boisterous ocean in pursuit of new commodities. With wider acquaintance of man the elements of the monk and the barbarian dissolve into the sympathizing heart of a citizen of civilized life.” Likewise, Republican congressman Edward Livingston toasted America’s rising glory this way: “The Colossus of American Freedom,” he exclaimed, “may it bestride the commerce of the world.” Commercial expansion in America’s nineteenth-century liberal society was rapid and mostly unregulated as America’s new-model man embraced hard work, competition, and the spirit of enterprise.
Jeffersonian republicans came to view commerce as more than just the economic transactions of businessmen via money in the pursuit of profits. In 1811, Jefferson translated and had published in America A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws by the French Idéologue, Comte Destutt de Tracy. Tracy and his American students took a latitudinarian view of commerce as consisting of all forms of exchange. All exchanges, wrote Tracy via Jefferson, “are acts of commerce, and the whole of human life is occupied by a series of exchanges and reciprocal services.” In other words, commerce is what brings discrete individuals together in a harmonious relationship of give and take. The exchange of both material and spiritual values is, according to Tracy, “not only the foundation and basis of society, but . . . it is in effect the fabric itself; for society is nothing more than a continual exchange of mutual succours, which occasion the concurrence of the powers of all for the more effectual gratification of the wants of each.” Jefferson’s translation of Destutt de Tracy was one way for the former president to explain his political philosophy to his fellow Americans.
Now it’s different, and we’re less free in many respects.