Carson Holloway's book offers a detailed account of the debates between two compelling figures of the Founding era. Tracing the back-and-forth between Hamilton and Jefferson from Hamilton's Report on Public Credit in 1790 through to the Pacificus-Helvidius debates of 1793, the text covers the first term of the Washington Administration and the crucial period in which both Hamilton and Jefferson remained part of it. Holloway organizes his account around three themes within the relations between the two principals that are presented as proceeding chronologically, albeit with some necessary temporal overlap. The book consists of three parts: “A Debate between Cabinet Colleagues,” “A Clash of Rival Party Leaders,” and “Founding Foreign Policy.”

The first part of the book considers the debates between Hamilton and Jefferson expressed through Hamilton's first two Reports (Public Credit and the National Bank) and Jefferson's responses. Holloway provides a rich and absorbing retelling of these exchanges. Scholars of this period will undoubtedly be familiar with these debates and, despite careful parsing, the book offers no new evidentiary revelations with regard to them. With such well-worn ground it would be remarkable if it did. Nonetheless, Holloway does offer a significant reading of these debates. An interpretative framework of “public faith” illuminates the substance of Jefferson and Hamilton's disagreement and provides a basis for tracing that disagreement as it evolves over the course of the presidential term. The account presents Jefferson as suspicious of Hamilton's “constitutional faith” and Hamilton as dubious of Jefferson's commitment to maintaining “public faith” in the credit of the United States. This is perhaps the signal theoretical contribution of the book and to the extent that it enriches interpretations that have leaned heavily on “energy” versus “constraint,” it is an important one.

The second part, “A Clash of Rival Leaders,” begins with Hamilton's Report on Manufactures and covers ground until the end of 1792. In the course of this central section of the book a more expansive account of the Jefferson-Hamilton debates is offered. Holloway brings into relief the degree to which it was not so much rival visions of the new federal government as a misunderstanding of each other's motives that brought Hamilton and Jefferson into conflict. While Hamilton feared Jefferson was “undermining the principles necessary for any just government” (193), the latter believed that Hamilton was blind to, if not complicit in, the accumulation of power in the executive branch. Here too, the motif of public faith is evident in Jefferson's charge that the Hamiltonian agenda represented a violation of the faith of the states ratifying the Constitution in 1787–88. And it is present in Hamilton's view that the Jeffersonians’ willingness to forgo the public faith upon which property rested made their defense of the limitations contained within the Constitution ring somewhat hollow.

The third part deals with the diverging views on matters of foreign policy prompted by the French Revolution. Holloway notes the apparent reversal of the principals on the issue of public faith when it came to the United States’ treaty obligations with France. Jefferson urged the United States to stand by those commitments, while Hamilton called for their suspension. At first glance this would seem to suggest that ideological commitments end “at the water's edge,” but as Holloway convincingly shows the reversal is only apparent. In tracing the Pacificus-Helvidius exchange, the author shows that the Jeffersonians still feared that Hamilton sought to accrue power to the executive, while Hamilton remained of the view that the United States had fulfilled its obligations and that further involvement would present reckless risk. On this question of international faith, both Hamilton and Jefferson drew upon their erstwhile understandings of government's obligations and its existential threats.

The author notes the difficulties and temptations of seeking the wisdom of the Founders for use in current political debates and correctly counsels that “we cannot always find a straightforward answer” (325). Nevertheless, the debates presented here will be of interest to many scholars. The final part's discussion will make the book of interest to scholars of international relations and international relations theory, offering as it does a detailed account of a republic's attempts to formulate a foreign policy in a world of monarchies, normative questions of international intervention, and consideration of the issue of treaty obligations during a time of political upheaval. To the current political debates over the role of the federal government within the economy, the second part of the book offers illustrations of Jeffersonian reluctance and Hamiltonian vision, but also the potential for excesses contained within each approach. Students of the early Republic and its political theory are offered a significant and extended reading of these debates which oscillates around the motif of “public faith” and does much to inject new life into stale binaries of energy and constraint and a just-so story of rival visions. To the latter group in particular, this is a significant and timely intervention.

The timeliness of the book points to an issue, if not necessarily a weakness, of the text. Holloway candidly notes an inclination toward Hamilton's positions within these debates (4), and the reader will not escape this impression in the course of the book. Hamilton's writings set the agenda for the analysis, positioning Jefferson as continually responding to Hamilton's policies to the point that the secretary of state seems almost a dissatisfied underling. This tendency reaches an apex in the final chapters, wherein Madison's Heldivius stands as a proxy for Jefferson on the basis of the latter's involvement in their production. While Holloway addresses this head-on at the beginning of the last chapter, it seems a problem only to the degree that the book is presented as the debates of Hamilton and Jefferson. In fact, the book's contribution might be best understood as a compelling investigation of Hamilton's thought during this pivotal moment of US history and his own political career. To the extent that this is Hamilton's story, the uneven treatment of Jefferson makes sense, but at times the need to present Jefferson as an interlocutor also seems to constrain the development of that story. During this moment of Hamilton fever, brought on by the Broadway show and the renewed interest in questions of federal management of the economy, Hamilton requires the detailed and theoretically rich rereading of his policy contributions offered here. But perhaps it is time that Hamilton was no longer read only in reference to the more widely studied Jefferson.