The Federalist Papers | Philip Abbott (essay date 1996)
Philip Abbott (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: Abbott, Philip. “What's New in the Federalist Papers?” Political Research Quarterly 49, no. 3 (September 1996): 525-45.
[In the following essay, Abbott focuses on Publius as a storyteller, using narrative as a central means for advancing his argument in The Federalist Papers.]
The centrality of the Federalist Papers in American political thought is indisputable. Even the most severe critics of Publius grant its monumental importance as a “new explanation of politics, of whose beauty and summetry the Federalists themselves only gradually became aware” and as a “masterly statement” in support of a literal or at least ideological coup d'état (Beard 1913; Wood 1969). For others, the Federalist Papers is a sacred text, a text which captured the “thought and intention of those few men who fully grasped what the ‘assembly of demi-gods’ was doing” and which...
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