It is good news that the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a distinguished right-wing think tank, is summoning eminent conservatives and reactionaries to honor the father of big government in America.

Of course, the members of tonight’s audience may be under the impression that Alexander Hamilton was, like themselves, a follower of Adam Smith and a champion of unbridled capitalism. But then American right-wingers are oblivious to American history.

It was Thomas Jefferson who called “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” “the best book to be read” on the subjects of money and commerce. Hamilton definitely did not so regard it.

Hamilton’s hero was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the man who invented the French commitment to statism. Colbert was a mercantilist. He believed in state planning and regulation as the way of transforming agricultural countries into commercial and industrial nations.

It was to the statist system established by Colbert that French businessmen addressed the celebrated plea: “Laisseznous faire.”

Hamilton dismissed the “reveries” of Smith and invoked the example of “the great Colbert” as showing the road to national power. Hamilton believed more than Colbert in individual acquisition as a motive, but he had little confidence in self-interest as the organizing principle of society.

The idea that the free market could regulate itself Hamilton called a “wild speculative paradox.” The “spirit of enterprise,” he wrote in the “Seventh Federalist,” when “unbridled…naturally lead to outrages, and these to reprisals and wars.”

Hamilton’s most formal state paper is his “Report on Manufactures.” There, he summed up his case against what George Soros calls market fundamentalism. Americans, Hamilton wrote, had “a certain fundamentalism of mind, a certain activity of speculation and enterprise which if properly directly may be made subservient to useful purposes, but which if left entirely to itself, may be attended with pernicious effects.”

That is the man the Manhattan Institute celebrates tonight.

There was a neo-Hamilton revival a century ago, led byTR and Henry Cabot Lodge, Hamilton’s biographer and editor of his papers.”Our statute book,” Lodge told the Senate in 1894, “is filled with provisions which utterly disregard the let-alone theory of government.” Lodge added that “it did not at all follow because the meddling tyranny of a personal monarchy was bad that the limited and intelligent intervention of every other kind of government is bad too.”

James Bryce, the Scottish historian and a great friend of Lodge and TR, thought that America had gone further than England in intervention, especially, he added ironically, in the West, “which plumes itself on being preeminently the land of freedom, enterprise, and self-help.”

Once in the White House,TR gave his Hamiltonianism free rein. He considered corporate power and market fundamentalism to be threats to democracy itself.

“Only the National Government,” TR said, could exercise the “needed control” over the
marketplace.”This does not represent centralization,”TR said. “It represents merely the acknowledgement of the patent fact that Centralization has already come in business. If this irresponsible outside power is to be controlled in the interest of the general public, it can be controlled in only one way — by giving adequate power of control to the one sovereignty capable of exercising such power — the National Government.”

As Lodge wrote to TR with Hamiltonian disdain, “The businessman dealing with a large political question is really a painful sight. It does seem to me that businessmen, with a few exceptions, are worse when they have to deal with politics than men of any other class.” Hamilton would have agreed.

It fell to Herbert Croly in his influential book of 1909 “The Promise of American Life” to infuse the Hamiltonian revival with democratic content. Croly called for a return to the Hamiltonian policy of making “the central government the effective promoter of a wholesome and many-sided national development.”

This would require, he said,”active interference with the natural course of American economic and political business and its regulation and guidance in the national direction.”

Hamilton’s failure, Croly added, had been his distrust of democracy, but in TR’s program, which Croly dubbed the New Nationalism, he saw a movement to “emancipate American democracy from its Jeffersonian bondage”and to “give a democratic meaning and purpose to the Hamiltonian tradition and method.”

TR enthusiastically agreed with Croly. The New Nationalism led on to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

Right-wingers, as I have observed, have a blindspot on American history. An example is the Federalist Society, an organization of young-fogy lawyers zealously opposed to big government. Of course, the Federalist Party of the 1790s advocated big government.

Hamilton particularly believed, as he put it in the “70th Federalist,” that “energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.”

If the young-fogy lawyers were honest or knew their American history, they would call their organization the Anti-Federalist Society. At any rate, let us applaud the Manhattan Institute for celebrating tonight the father of big government in America.

Mr. Schlesinger is a writer and a historian.