Hoffmann's stated purpose of addressing a weakness, as she sees it, in the discussions of banking—namely, pointing out “how political the banking process is”—may be news to political scientists, but historians and economists have squabbled about this for decades.

The first serious pitfall the author encounters in trying to explain “public philosophies” of banking is to assume that either Hamilton or Jefferson spoke for many more people than themselves. There were as many different interpretations of what banks should be, how they should operate, and who should own them that any attempt to construct a Hamiltonian–Jeffersonian struggle is problematic. Hoffmann also seriously misreads both men when it comes to their concepts of corporations and, especially, banks. Both were well aware that the primary purpose of any “national bank” (such as the First BUS) was to provide credit to the nation, not to engage in either stabilizing or stimulating the economy or providing the country with a circulating medium. Those were completely secondary concerns, and as such did not dominate the financial agendas of either man. Economist Charles Calormiris, for example, makes this clear in his concise entry on Hamilton in The Encyclopedia of Business History and Biography. Likewise, Jefferson's view of corporations is overly oriented toward his notions of an “agrarian republic,” without noting that the Sage of Monticello was famously contradictory: He helped found a long-lasting republic, yet argued that all governments should be torn down every generation. His thoughts on banking were no less complicated. Some of these weaknesses stem from the fact that Hoffmann accepts those parts of Hamilton and Jefferson that suit her and discards others as not what he intended (see, e.g., p. 25, where she claims that “constructing the economy” was the central purpose of the BUS, not providing credit to the government, despite all evidence to the contrary). Later, she states that “Hamilton had smuggled his national bank in through a back door, focusing attention on its public functions,” (p. 47) implying that the “public functions” were serving the commercial economy, rather than lending the new government funds. And he didn’t “smuggle” in anything: Jefferson not only agreed to the Bank, but in a well-known bargain, received the relocation of the U.S. capital to Virginia in return.

Despite an abundance of footnotes, at times one gets the sense Hoffmann still does not understand how these institutions worked. For example, the BUS never had a monopoly, but only a monopoly over certain privileges, such as interstate banking and holding the U.S. government's deposits. Likewise, I do not know of a single economic historian who accepts that the BUS “was large enough to be an effective regulator” (p. 41). Quite the contrary, all the economic time-series evidence shows that the BUS lacked either the capital or the penetration to even begin to regulate the U.S. economy. Her unfamiliarity with, say, Naomi Lamoreaux's work on New England (or Lynne Pierson Doti's work with me on the structures in the American West) lead her into a mesh of errors. For example, Lamoreaux convincingly showed that early banking institutions in New England existed only for the benefit of the stockholders through “insider lending,” and that this was viewed as neither undesirable nor unethical in any way. Hoffmann's discussions of the Jacksonian developments assume that William Gouge was the main source of “public philosophies,” missing the dozens of different views on money that shaped both Jackson and the early Whigs. Not surprisingly, the main source of Hoffman's material for these chapters—Robert Remini—also made these errors in his wellknown biographies of “Old Hickory.” But that hardly makes it accurate.

The reliance on, say, Remini, for example, illustrates a serious problem. Hoffmann's sources are badly dated, and lack virtually any of the new research on banks and credit functions in the last 30 years. She lacks any citations of Charles Calomiris (on virtually everything related to banking), A. Rolnick and W. Weber (on the free-banking era), Naomi Lamoreaux (on New England banking structures), Edwin Perkins and me (on the Second BUS), Hugh Rockoff (on free banks), Peter Temin (on both the Jacksonian era and the Great Depression), Richard Timberlake (on Jackson), and Eugene White (on the rise of bank regulation in the late nineteenth century). There is no mention of Eugene White, whose Regulation and Reform of the American Banking System (1983) is not only a (by-now) classic, but which addressed the very public policy issues Hoffmann seeks to explore. How one can ignore Timberlake's Origins of Central Banking in the United States (1978) on this, or Temin's decisive revisions of Robert Remini's outdated work, is mystifying.

In most cases, Hoffmann does not have an appreciation for how the gold standard shaped banking, and how competitive notes in the antebellum period and the Federal Reserve after 1913 were to be disciplined by the metal. Her discussions of the “real bills” doctrine in the interim period is accurate, but also devoid of any sense of who (other than Nelson Aldrich) actually contributed to making these policies. One also gets the impression that there was a consistent line of banking-policy thought running from Hamilton to William Gouge to Nelson Aldrich to Herbert Hoover to Marriner Eccles. Yet in no sense do even two of these individuals fit the “progressive” mold that Hoffmann raises as a model for regulation. Indeed, some “hard money” Jacksonians, after the Civil War, were in the forefront of the inflationist/Greenbacker movement. Ironically, Hoffmann seems to miss the political implications of these ebbs and flows, a rather stunning oversight for a political scientist.

Hoover receives an inordinate amount of attention, yet there is virtually no discussion of the “public policy” role of the Fed in causing the Depression. There is a good analysis of the New Deal banking laws, but without the necessary assessment of the overall impact of the New Deal on expanding federal power, thus (through its government creditor role) endowing the Fed with even more control over the U.S. economy.

Finally, there is also missing throughout a sense of policy options missed—an analysis of why, for example, the free bank–state bank system that worked extremely well by employing a competition in money from 1836 to 1861 was not revived. Why was the single reform that most economists agree would have solved the nation's “elasticity” needs (and possibly staved off the Great Depression)— interstate branch banking—never adopted? Unfortunately, those answers will not be found in Politics and Banking.