Barack Obama’s 2008 election was the best thing that ever happened to Alexander Hamilton’s reputation. Without it, he’d still be wheeled out as one of the less likeable founding fathers, primarily emblematic of the way the early federal state was constructed by and for a coterie of military contractors, land speculators, and financiers. The closest the real Hamilton ever got to inspirational was in his opening number for The Federalist:

“It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

The Obama moment created the conditions for Hamilton to be thoroughly re-imagined. I remember first seeing the video of Lin Manuel Miranda’s 2009 White House performance when the historian of slavery Philip Morgan showed it in his 2011 Harmsworth Lecture (which was actually mostly about the other Alexander Hamilton). What was at first planned as “a hip-hop concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop” (as Miranda put it, to laughter from the White House audience) made it to the stage as a musical in 2015, supercharging the portrayal of Hamilton as a workaholic outsider and relatable social striver in Ron Chernow’s fathers-day-gift-market biography.

Miranda’s Hamilton is in fact full of artistically fruitful ambivalence, especially in the way it pits his insistent egomania against his wavering devotion to family life. But what’s inarguable is that the musical makes him an icon of the all-American bootstrap story, a projection of Miranda himself and of the liberal, individualist, post-racial fantasy Obama’s election had briefly provoked.

The thing is, even the musical’s implicit critique of the man (he put his passion for fame, his desire to win every argument, and his conception of personal honour before the good of his country, and even the ones he loved) has very little to do with what I’d say was really going on in the United States’ first couple of decades. Hamilton’s real mission was the ruthless consolidation of power among an emerging ruling class. The state he tried to build was meant to be that class’s instrument, coordinating profitable conquest, industry, and commerce, while being walled off as far as possible from intervention by the lower orders.

William Hogeland’s recent book, The Hamilton Scheme, doesn’t exactly tell that story either. His focus is less on the ways Hamilton tried to forge ruling class solidarity and institutionalise its rule, and more on the “flat-out class war” that he waged against the workers and small-landowners whose interests ran against him. What Hogeland also neatly does is show how Hamilton’s untimely death did not spell the end of “the Hamilton scheme.” The financial system he constructed, which yoked the federal government to the perpetual enrichment of its public creditors, proved to be effectively unkillable (in spite of Albert Gallatin’s apparent best efforts).

The late Richard Bernstein, meanwhile, has written a brisk and lucid biography that argues Hamilton prioritised government authority and effectiveness—what he called “energy.” He isn’t wrong about Hamilton’s eagerness for centralising power. At the height of Hamil-mania there was even an effort to recuperate him for the big-state left. Yet what these arguments come up against, I think, is something Hogeland gets at nicely: Hamilton’s state wasn’t built to serve the many, but the few. Its energy, its power, wasn’t neutral. Now, today’s federal state has come a long way from the one Hamilton built, through multiple major constitutional upheavals. Still, turning its energy in any serious way against capital would surely demand a greater, more radical upheaval than any we’ve seen so far.