GIUSEPPE BOTTARO

John Taylor of Caroline e la polemica contro la «Paper and Patronage Aristocracy»

N. 185

Summary — This work deals with the debate, in the period from the end of eighteenth-century to the beginning of the nineteenth-century, between John Taylor of Caroline, one of the most important exponent of the republican party, and the great statesmen and theorists of federalism, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton.

Taylor is considered the philosopher of the republican agrarianism: in his works he has brilliantly expressed the conception of American politics emerged from the Revolutionary era. He feared, in fact, that in the United States forms of " paper and patronage aristocracy " could get the upper hand. His choice for a republic based on agriculture and on the prevalent role of the landowner in the society could be considered, in the period when he lived, the more consistent with those values of democracy. Taylor, in fact, exalted the good moral principles and the practice of the civic virtues, and condemned the moral corruption and the patronage. Hamilton, on the contrary, considered indispensable, for the growth of the United States, the construction of a strong central government and of financial instruments, such as the Bank or the Public Debt, able to direct the national economy and to increase the prosperity of citizens. But according to Taylor, who on this question based his ideas about the classical republican tradition, the civic virtue and the good moral principles of the American people were basic to the realisation of a Republic safeguarding the values of freedom and political independence more than the power of the State.