Whatever their political party, American leaders have generally subscribed to one of two competing economic philosophies. One is a small-government Jeffersonian perspective that abhors bigness and holds that prosperity flows from competition among independent businessmen, farmers and other producers. The other is a Hamiltonian agenda that believes a large, powerful country needs large, powerful organizations. The most important of those organizations is the federal government, which serves as a crucial partner to private enterprise, building roads and schools, guaranteeing loans and financing scientific research in ways that individual businesses would not. Today, of course, Republicans are the Jeffersonians and Democrats are the Hamiltonians. But it hasn"t always been so. The Jeffersonian line includes Andrew Jackson, the leaders of the Confederacy , William Jennings Bryan, Louis Brandeis, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The Hamiltonian line includes George Washington, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, both Roosevelts and Dwight Eisenhower. Michael Lind"s "Land of Promise" uses this divide to offer an ambitious economic history of the United States, The book is rich with details more than a few of them surprising and its subject is central to what is arguably the single most impotent question facing the country today: How can our economy grow more quickly, more sustainably and more equitably than it has been growing, both to maintain the United States" position as the world"s pre-eminent power and to improve the lives of its citizens? Lind, a founder of the New America Foundation in Washington and the author of several political histories, acknowledges from the beginning that his thesis will make some readers uncomfortable. "In the spirit of philosophical bipartisanship, it would be pleasant to conclude that each of these traditions of political economy has made its own valuable contribution to the success of the A-merican economy and that the vector created by these opposing forces has been more beneficial than the complete victory of either would have been," he writes. " But that would not be true," he continues. " What is good about the American economy is largely the result of the Hamiltonian developmental tradition, and what is bad about it is largely the result of the Jeffersonian producerist school. "