Price of Greatness

The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy- Jay Cost
Basic Books
Release Date: June 5, 2018

Rating:
📚📚

Synopsis: In the history of American politics there are few stories as enigmatic as that of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison's bitterly personal falling out. Together they helped bring the Constitution into being, yet soon after the new republic was born they broke over the meaning of its founding document. Hamilton emphasized economic growth, Madison the importance of republican principles.

Jay Cost is the first to argue that both men were right--and that their quarrel reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of the American experiment. He shows that each man in his own way came to accept corruption as a necessary cost of growth. The Price of Greatness reveals the trade-off that made the United States the richest nation in human history, and that continues to fracture our politics to this day.

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The Price of Greatness explores the origins of much of the American political and economic engines that we still see today, from the starting point of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.  These two Founding Fathers quickly became divided over America's identity and path, and Jay Cost argues that both men were, in ways, right- and wrong.

I always like learning about original context in history- political, social, economic, etc. and The Price of Greatness does explain some of America's early economic ideas. Unfortunately, the book was a little too dry and rambling (and repetitive) for me to manage more than about a chapter at a time, which means I probably didn't retain or understand as much information as I would have liked.  Particularly by the end, Cost seems to stray from the original point of the book- which I took to be the creation of early American political and economic systems- to wander down a recital of various historical ways the government has not acted 'for the people, by the people'.  He begins to talk about corruption- as we understand the term today and as Madison and Hamilton would have used the term- and tries to show the reader how to return to America's founding greatness.  But all he really succeeds in showing us, in my opinion, is that human nature and greed will naturally take advantage of any system, and that there will always be conflict.  

Ultimately, The Price of Greatness does only a mediocre job in explaining "the Creation of American Oligarchy", but if you can get through the dry and repetitive writing, there are some interesting historical nuggets hidden within the text.  I'm not entirely sure, however, I found it worth the effort of working through reading the book.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Death of Democracy

The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic- Benjamin Carter Hett
Henry Holt & Co.
Release Date: April 3, 2018

Rating:
📚

Synopsis: Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time.

To say that Hitler was elected is too simple. He would never have come to power if Germany’s leading politicians had not responded to a spate of populist insurgencies by trying to co-opt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler’s hands. They had willingly given him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship.

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How Hitler was able to come into power in Germany has always been an interesting debate.  What could have been differently? How much of our debates are 20-20 hindsight versus what was actually seen and known at the time?  Could something like that ever happen again?  Benjamin Carter Hett's The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic is the latest look into the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s and an attempt to understand what happened.  

Unfortunately, for as potentially interesting as the topic is, Hett completely failed to keep me engaged in the book.  He assumes his reader is familiar with the Weimar republic and much of the German condition post World War I, and mentions conspiracies and people that he only later goes back to explain.  There was a level of back and forth to his timeline that kept me uncertain of the order of many of the events he was talking about.  I found it hard to keep track of the different political parties in Germany for most of the book, thought whether that was a lack of understanding on my part or Hett's to explain in memorable detail I still don't know.  Often repetitive, hammering in points that the readers easily grasps and remembers while glancing off topics you wish he's spent more time on, Hett explores how no one single event created the situation, but decades of cultural, political, and economic change and unrest.  By the end of the book I didn't feel like I had a much clearer grasp on the topic as when I started, but Hett did write one idea that stuck out to me, and probably summed up much of the situation: sometimes it isn't about reality.  Statements can be demonstrably untrue, but it is all about what people emotionally need to believe, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

For a book that was only a little over 200 pages, reading it seemed to be an uphill slog the whole way, and much more work than it was worth.  Hett spent as much time making comparisons between Germany in the 1930s and the Nazi methods and today's American political climate (while carefully not naming names) that it seemed to me the end point of his book was not so much to explain how Hitler and the Nazis managed to come into power (which he had only limited success with for me) as showing how it can happen again today.  Anyone who really wants to give this book a try to see what they can learn should just read the last chapter, which is as much a summary of the rest of the book as a wrap up and lead in to World War II.  It gives you the clearest ideas without actually making you read the entire book.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review