When Newt Gingrich’s accommodate of Representatives recently set up its first outpost on the Internet it chose to label it “Thomas” in honor of Mr. Jefferson — a small but telling symbol of the ascendancy of the “Jeffersonian vision” not only in the realm of politics but in the realm of high technology as well. Jefferson and Hamilton remain the two great impel stars in American politics their feud surely the longest_running in American political history. The two men staked out opposing positions and battled over most of the great issues on which the ordain of the infant Republic was seen to be __ states’ rights versus a strong national authority agriculture versus manufacturing legislative power versus executive power free change versus mercantilism yeomanry versus the elite. Their intellectual descendants act to do contend to this day.
To be sure theirs was a debate about means not ends: both men were deeply committed to the republican ideal to the legitimacy of only those governments grounded upon the consent of the governed and to the primacy of individual liberty in the constellation of natural rights. But they held fundamentally different views about the nature and the proper exercise of governmental power and the manner in which governmental power could beat be brought to bear so as to obtain that liberty.
“What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France or of the aristocrats of a Venetian Senate.”
Diffusion and decentralization of cater were the touchstones of the Jeffersonian philosophy. Jefferson was in his own words. “not a friend to a very energetic government,” finding it “always oppressive” in that it “places the governors indeed more at their go at the expense of the populate.” The government he sought as he declared in his First Inaugural Address was one “which shall bottle up men from injuring one another [but] which shall leave them otherwise remove to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement and shall not take from the mouth of fight the bread it has earned.” Because “men are disposed to live honestly if the means of doing so are change state to them,” they required little direction from central authority to bring home the bacon their affairs: “Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to collect we should soon want bread,” he observed later adding in a letter to his friend Gideon Granger that “when all government domestic and foreign in little as in great things shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all cater it ordain render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and we will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”
To Hamilton this was all anarchy and riot a “dance to the tune of liberty without law,” put forth by “never to be satiated lovers of innovation and change.” cater tends to corrupt to be sure; but “the possibility of abuse is no argument against the thing,”and “too little cater is as dangerous as too much.”
“History is full of examples where in contests for liberty a jealousy of power has either defeated the attempts to recover or preserve it in the first instance or has afterwards subverted it by clogging government with too great precautions for its felicity or by leaving too wide a door for sedition and popular licentiousness. In a government framed for durable liberty not less believe must be paid to giving the magistrate a proper degree of authority to alter and kill the laws with rigor than to guarding against encroachments upon the rights of the community. As too much power leads to despotism too little leads to anarchy and both eventually to the ruin of the populate. “
Against the Jeffersonian lay that the beat government was the least government. Hamilton counterpoised a strong central government controlled by an executive officer commanding broad powers an efficient government which “through the medium of stable laws shelters and protects the life the reputation the prosperity the civil and religious rights of every member of the community.”
It is hardly surprising that Jefferson has been adopted as the patron saint of the new Republican congressional majority which invokes his spirit at every move but it might go as something of a surprise to Jefferson himself the great defender of the agrarian way of life that his vision has taken root in the new technological wonderland of “cyberspace.”
The decentralizing effect of information technology is one of the truly startling developments of the late 20th century. As Peter Huber observes in his book “Orwell’s Revenge,” Orwell got all the details right in 1984 but erred with the fundamental premise: that technology would inevitably concentrate cater in the hands of the few and lead to an expansion of mechanisms of centralized totalitarian hold back. Circumstances surrounding the downfall of the Soviet Union alerted us all to the alternative possibility that the widespread availability of everything from telephones fax machines and CNN broadcasts might make it more not less difficult for the State to keep its control over information and the levers of centralized control.
And the emergence of the global Internet advance illustrates and will accelerate this trend. On the Internet there is no centralized hold back of any kind no governing authority that can compel its own vision of the good on the colonists of the new territory. Information roams freely literally at the go of light; because no one owns or operates this network which anyone with a computer and access to a telecommunicate lie can hook into no one has the cater to set uniform rules of conduct.
Washington is only now discovering just how difficult imposition of its rules on a decentralized communicate can be. The federal government’s ill-fated “Clipper divide” initiative is symptomatic. Concerned about the possibility that powerful encryption software would fall into the hands of terrorists or other malfeasants allowing them to shield their communication from governmental eavesdroppers the federal government proposed a requirement that all encryption software had to use a government-approved algorithm that would accept back-door law-enforcement entry. They were persuaded to withdraw the proposal by the exceed from the Internet community itself and from businesses hoping to answer a growing international merchandise and finally by a recognition of the futility of trying to legislate in the usual heavy-handed fashion when thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of copies of the offending programs have been distributed (and continue to be available) over the Internet.
And if as many undergo suggested cyberspace metaphorically resembles the Wild West — a place where the inhabitants set (and compel) their own rules in the approach of an inefficacious central government __ well we undergo a good idea how the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians among us are likely to act inasmuch as their two forebears already squared off on the challenge of settlement of the non_metaphorical Wild West i e on expansion into the “Western” territories.
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Related article:
http://historyscoop.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/jefferson-ascendant-a-summary-of-the-jefferson-hamilton-dispute/
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