ROBERT DUGGER: Co-Director, University of Chicago Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group, former partner, Tudor Investment Corporation, and co-founder, ReadyNation.

The European Union's Covid recovery fund is a Hamiltonian moment, but not for the reason many people think. Yes, the fund's creation has similarities to Alexander Hamilton's 1790 proposal for handling U.S. Revolutionary War debts. However, there is a more fundamental reason than simply developing a deep liquid government debt market. A shift from antiquated short-term individualism to forward-thinking generationalism is occurring. The shift is revolutionary.

For Hamilton, the main social, political, and economic challenges of America in the 1700s required escaping the dead grip of aristocratic and church rule. The answer was a philosophy of individual and business liberty and a war to obtain it. Challenges of comparable scale today include climate change, government debt, and elite political control. These challenges affect generations. To address them, the work of the current century is to establish that individuals and businesses have unalienable obligations to communities, society broadly, and future generations.

Hamilton was aware of the tension between individualism and its short-termism and the needs of society and future generations. His life was an expression of Enlightenment Revolution aspirations. He supported the goals of the U.S. Constitution's Preamble including the last and most important, "to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

However, in the explosive expansion of industrial capitalism in the 1800s, the United States drifted away from the Preamble's generational concerns. Captains of industry supported securing liberty for themselves but opposed having to consider the interests of "Posterity." They steadily persuaded politicians and judges that the Preamble is substantively meaningless. By the end of the century, as William Treanor, Dean of the Georgetown University Law Center, concludes, "the Supreme Court came to view the Preamble as simply introductory fluff." The...