SOURCE: "Political Thinkers—The English Group," in Main Currents in American Thought, An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920: The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800, Vol. I., 1927. Reprint by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955, pp. 297-326.

Parrington was an American historian, critic, and educator. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the first two volumes of his influential Main Currents in American Thought (1927); the third volume remained unfinished at the time of his death. In the following excerpt, Parrington presents Hamilton as a key theorist of American industrial economy.

Of the disciplined forces that put to rout the disorganized party of agrarianism, the intellectual leader was Alexander Hamilton, the brilliant Anglo-French West Indian, then just entered upon his thirties. A man of quite remarkable ability, a lucid thinker, a great lawyer, a skillful executive, a masterly organizer, a statesman of broad comprehension and inflexible purpose, he originated and directed the...