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THE OTHER HAMILTONIANS

I had a very pleasant exchange of email with Pundita the other day on the topic of
“ Hamiltonian Realism”, some of which she was kind enough to post on her blog. The discussion had been sparked by the initial flurry of reviews of her “ Democracy Stage Show Kit” essay that appeared here as well as at Flit™, The American Future and of course, at the Glittering Eye.

Initially, Pundita had taken umbrage at my description of her as a “ Hamiltonian Realist” based upon Dave Schuyler’s insightful review of the foreign policy taxonomy of Walter Russell Mead’s American Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World. However, I had not been thinking so much about foreign policy after reading Pundita’s DSSK but about political theory and the nature of democracy.

Alexander Hamilton’s achievements as America’s first Secretary of the Treasury are well known, without Hamilton’s successful management of the national debt the United States might have foundered as a Republic long before 1861. His advocacy of modern central banking, internal improvements, an emphasis upon mercantile trade and manufacturing and a strong Federal role in promoting economic growth would seem to make Hamilton the economic nationalist that Mead postulated.

That however is only part of the picture. Hamilton was not only an astute political economist but he also ranks as a philosopher of government on par with James Madison and John Adams. It was Alexander Hamilton, as the motive force behind the Federalist Papers and as a close adviser to President Washington, who fleshed out our current understanding of Madison’s Constitution – particularly in terms of separation of powers and the role of the executive branch.

Madison and Hamilton, both men deeply influenced by Montesquieu, were not utopians in regards to human nature and government or the relationship between rulers and ruled. They were skeptics, building a governmental structure designed to work with men as they really are instead of how revolutionaries might wish them to be:

“But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

Hamilton and Madison saw their fellow men with a clear eye and their solution was not to make a government that would be mankind’s master but to create a system of government that would possibly allow the mastering of the worst excesses of men’s passions. They were, unlike Tom Paine and Patrick Henry, ardent realists about democratic and republican government.

It was in this sense of supporting free government while acknowledging the role of interests and factions that led me to call Pundita a “ Hamiltonian” – which probably complements rather than contradicts a “ neo-Jacksonian” stance in foreign policy as described by Mead.

Addendum: An apology is in order for my having referred to Walter McDougall, author of Promised Land, Crusader State, as ” Robert” McDougall in my email to Pundita. My apologies to Dr. McDougall and to Pundita.

THE COGNITIVE BIAS OF HINDSIGHT IN EVALUATING INTELLIGENCE FAILURES ( DOUBLE UPDATE)

“Overseers of intelligence production who conduct postmortem analyses of an intelligence failure normally judge that events were more readily foreseeable than was in fact the case”

An important consideration for anyone deeply involved in the ongoing assessment of intelligence community failures in regard to Iraq or the GWOT is the concept of Hindsight Analysis. When an ex post facto critic engages in review of intelligence analysis without being aware of the operation of this cognitive bias their own assumptions about what may have been possible, discernable or ” dot- connected” can be terribly distorted.

Ominously, being aware of this effect causes IC analysts to practice CYA in intelligence assessments first and foremost so that angry Congressman and pundits, enveloped in hindsight bias, cannot destroy their careeers or agency budgets. Thus, out of self-preservation, the IC tends to promote policy paralysis, monitoring of the status quo and studied ambiguity in its assessments combined with vague but broad warnings of disaster.

Being trained as a historian I’ve long been aware of this psychological effect – professional hazard as it were – but it is an extremely difficult concept to get across to other people due to the self-referential nature of hindsight. The CIA it seems, long ago did a very good journal article on this effect in Studies in Intelligence. *

Well worth your time to read as you dive into the reports of various Commissions.

* Heuer, Richard J. ” Cognitive Biases: Problems in Hindsight Analysis”, Studies in Intelligence, vol. 22, no. 2 (Summer 1978), pp 21-28.

UPDATE: Matt of Verisimilitude tackles Bayesian Probability analysis. Incidentally, there’s a Studies in Intelligence article on this one too.

UPDATE II: Pundita examines a bias of a somewhat different kind.

GOING CLEAN FOR DEAN?

Professor Bainbridge points to a Pew survey that indicates the Deaniacs first brush with working on a political campaign was most like for Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern.

Consider the degree to which the MSM misrepresented the Deaniacs as internet-savvy, twenty-five year old, political neophytes hooking up at campaign rallies during the primaries and you understand why much of the blogosphere views them as incompetent and biased.

(hat tip to The Flaming Duck)

KEPEL: ” JIHAD HAS FAILED”

Collounsbury’s favorite Arabist, Gilles Kepel, was in the news recently for his lecture ” The War of Muslim Minds” where he argued that 9/11 represented a tremendous failure for al Qaida because it did not ignite widespread insurgency and provided the neocons with a pretext to attack ME nations. Hat tip to Robert Spencer, who slams Kepel in a post on Jihad Watch.

Kepel does seem to be recycling – at least as I read it third hand – a lot of the popular, leftist, misconceptions about neoconservatism, not unlike what you might hear from Juan Cole on the topic. A good rebuttal to this kind of conspiratorial boilerplate can be found here ( hat tip Milt’s File).

IF ACCURATE, THIS WOULD SEEM TO BE EXTREMELY DUMB

I cannot vouch for this site beyond it being recommended by Counterterrorism Blog but I found this report to be very disturbing. Have to watch and see how it pans out.