He was a tough soldier, austere workaholic, and exacting bureaucrat, yet Alexander Hamilton was also a sexual libertine and a glory-obsessed romantic with suicidal tendencies. As Parenti argues, however, we have yet to fully appreciate Hamilton as the primary architect of American capitalism. In this exploration of Hamilton's life and work, Christian Parenti rediscovers this gadfly as a pathbreaking political thinker and institution builder who laid the foundation for America's ascent to global supremacy—for better or worse.