SOURCE: Duncan, Christopher M. “The Faith of the Federalists.” In The Anti-Federalists and Early American Political Thought, pp. 99-122. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Duncan offers a highly critical view of The Federalist Papers, maintaining that its politics are underwritten with a cynical, Hobbesian view of human nature and a strong tendency toward elitism.]

… we were under a necessity of either returning to the house, and by our presence enabling them to call a convention before our constituents could have the means of information, or time to deliberate on the subject, or by absenting ourselves from the house, prevent the measure taking place. … Thus circumstanced and thus influenced, we determined the next morning, again to absent ourselves from the house, when James M'Calmount, esquire, a member from Franklin, and Jacob Miley, esquire, a member from Dauphin, were seized by a number of citizens of Philadelphia, who had collected together for that purpose, their lodgings were violently broken open, their clothes torn, and after much abuse and insult, they were forcibly dragged through the streets of Philadelphia to the State house, and there detained by force, and in the presence of the majority, who had the day before, voted for the first of the proposed resolutions, treated with the most insulting language; while the house so formed proceeded to finish their resolutions, which they meant to offer you as the doings of the legislature of Pennsylvania.

—The Subscribers Members

The remembrance above¹ paints a slightly different picture of the ratification of the Constitution than accounts emphasizing a collective, consensual, cathartic experience on the part of Americans during the second founding. There were people who disagreed and did so on the basis of principles and tradition, not caprice and fear. As Sheldon Wolin reminds us, the second founding was “revolutionary in the precise sense that it broke with the established direction of political development and available political experience.”² It was also a “metaideological” revolution in the sense that a “new science of politics” was substituted for more traditional experiential conceptions of political life and political change. In other words, as much as the shift from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution was the result of a political/ideological movement that we have called “nationalism,” it was also representative of a critical shift in the way in which politics, and ultimately constitution making, were conceived teleologically. No longer was political theory in America going to flow from political life itself; rather, political life was now to be the product of political theory. This distinction for Wolin becomes the difference between “tending” and “intending” a Constitution, where the former “inclines toward a democratic conception of political life … it implies active care of things close at hand, not mere solicitude. Active care is not, however, a synonym for expert knowledge.”³ “Intending” is defined as “an authoritarian conception as the nineteenth century understood that term: one who loves the principle of authority, that is, the right to command and enforce obedience … to seek deliberately to bring about some desired effect or purpose … to stretch, strain, make tense, intensify, to direct (the mind) toward some objective … [it is] less concerned with taking care of things than with acting effectively, not in the future, but toward it … unlike the tending mode, intending will subordinate collective identity to the needs of power.”⁴

Along with the substantive political changes wrought by the Constitution, then, there are also crucial “metapolitical” changes that must be understood if we are to grasp the full impact and importance of the second founding on American political life as well as on American political theory. Those changes, like all political changes that are driven by theory rather than understood through theory, must by their nature make an appeal based on an intended future. This means that they must by definition rest not on past experience so much as on a promise of what could be. And to understand the promise of the nationalists, as well as to judge correctly whether that promise was indeed kept, we must turn briefly to their most prominent statement of that promise, The Federalist Papers.

The Federalist begins: “After an unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America.”⁵ Publius then presents twenty-one essays constructing a ruthless critique of the existing Confederation and the constitution under which they are organized, thereby providing ample historical fodder for the “critical period” thesis that arose in the century following ratification. The bulk of that criticism is by now well known, but any overview, however brief, should include the threat to the union from foreign force and influence;⁶ from wars between the states;⁷ from faction, domestic convulsions, or internal wars within the states or toward the union;⁸ from the inadequate organization of commerce and the economy;⁹ from the kinds of popular (read moblike) legislation passed within the states;¹⁰ and ending with Madison's polemical summation in Federalist no. 20, the last in a series beginning with Federalist no. 17, collectively titled “The Tendency of Federal Governments Rather to Anarchy Among the Members Than Tyranny in the Head”:

This unhappy people seem to be now suffering from popular convulsions, from dissensions among the states, and from the actual invasion of foreign arms, the crisis of their destiny. All nations have their eyes fixed on the awful spectacle. The first wish prompted by humanity is that this severe trial may issue in such a revolution of their government as will establish their union and render it the parent of tranquility, freedom, and happiness. The next, that the asylum under which, we trust, the enjoyment of these blessings will be speedily secured in this country may receive and console them for the catastrophe of their own. I make no apology for having dwelt so long on the contemplation of these federal precedents. Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred. The important truth, which it unequivocally pronounces in the present case, is that a sovereignty over sovereigns, a government over governments, a legislation for communities, as counter-distinguished from individuals, as it is a solecism in theory, so in practice it is subversive of the order and ends of civil polity, by substituting violence in place of the mild and salutary coercion of the magistracy.¹¹

No radical deconstructive reading is necessary to decode the subtext of the above passage or to understand the direction that the author's “positive” political project will take. The entire core of the Federalist political vision is readily laid out and acknowledged by Madison. He concedes that theirs is a “revolutionary” undertaking, and since the revolution resulting in the separation from England had already been accomplished, this can only mean that the new revolution was to be “fought” against the Articles of Confederation. This new revolution was to secure the lexically ordered values—tranquillity (order), freedom (private, as opposed to public), and happiness (also private, as opposed to public)—as expediently as possible. And the way to secure these goals is by avoiding the “solecism” (improper construction) of the national government. Aside from the practical defects outlined in the twenty or so previous essays, Madison here underscores the dominant theoretical problem with the current national construction, which he construes to be the primacy of the community over the individual, and the primacy of the community over the national government:

The important truth, which it [experience] unequivocally pronounces in the present case, is that a sovereignty over sovereigns, a government over governments, a legislation for communities, as counter-distinguished from individuals … is subversive of the order and ends of civil polity.¹²

To correct the current defects, then, the authority of the states and local political associations must be replaced by the authority, “the mild and salutary coercion of the magistracy” (read national government). The “ends of civil polity”—the trilogy of tranquillity, freedom, and happiness noted above—will now be aspired to as preexisting “forms,” rather than constructed through public/political activity by the citizenry participating as active members in local/democratic political conversations. The nature of political life will also be dramatically reoriented in terms of average persons as they are replaced by experts, or guardians who will take over the task of construction under the guise of truth and knowledge. These arguments are then summarized and fleshed out by Hamilton speaking as Publius in the critical essays Federalist no. 21 and no. 22.

In Federalist no. 21 Alexander Hamilton, sounding like Athena, who warned that she alone of the gods was privy to the keys of chambers where the thunder was locked up, claims:

The peace of society and the stability of government depended on the efficacy of precautions adopted on this head. Where the whole power of the government is in the hands of the people, there is less pretense for the use of violent remedies in partial or occasional distempers of the state.¹³

The veiled threat here is plain to see: either adopt the Constitution and empower the national government, or face anarchy and violence within the state that you may not be able to control. The larger context of this particular essay is the danger to other states from the violence within particular states, as noted by the question Hamilton asks: “Who can predict what effect a despotism established in Massachusetts [by, say, Daniel Shays acting as Cromwell] would have upon the liberties of New Hampshire or Rhode Island, of Connecticut or New York?”¹⁴ Hence the implied danger here is the threat of diversity and difference between the states. Only when there is a uniform government with the power and energy necessary to impose universalist principles when needed, can order and tranquillity be guaranteed. Yet while this set of sentiments is a rather straightforward statement of nationalist beliefs, the theoretical apparatus Publius utilizes here, and in the preceding essay, is something of a Trojan Horse.

In Federalist no. 20 Madison portrayed any government that did not operate on individuals qua individuals as solecistic (improperly constructed), thereby implying that a proper construction would be a government that did act on individuals as individuals rather than as a mediating body between sovereign political communities. In Federalist no. 21 we see Hamilton arguing the same point as he suggests that the nation will be safe only when “the whole power of the government is in the hands of the people, [in that] there is less pretense for the use of violent remedies in partial or occasional distempers of the state.” But what does this really mean? Is Publius arguing for a national participatory democratic union? We know that the answer to this question is “absolutely not.” What, then, does this emphasis on the people mean? It means that by dismantling the sovereignty of the states, and in turn any local political associations protected therein, and turning the power of government over to the people at large—who are, of course, too numerous to take any meaningful political action as a group—the real power will come to rest with the representative institutions of the national government like Congress, the president, and, most important, the Supreme Court. Thus what on the surface appear to be an argument for greater democracy in reality becomes a mechanism for ensuring elite rule on the basis of a Burkean “trusteeship.”

Edmund Morgan has described this process as discovering “a new and more effective way of bending the sovereignty of the people to overcome the deficiencies of locally oriented representation,”¹⁵ and Joshua Miller has called it the construction of “the ghostly body politic.”¹⁶ The end result of this was, then, a vast reduction in the actual political power of the average person through the process of amalgamation, with the corresponding reduction in the possibility of public happiness, and the proportional increase of political disinterest and apathy that results when political life is made more distant and more abstract through centralization. To harken back to the discussion of Tocqueville, the subjects will be made more docile, but the price we pay is that there are no longer citizens. The end result of this is probably best described by Tocqueville when he tells of Americans withdrawing into the small, exclusive circles of private life: “As the extent of political society expands, one must expect the sphere of private life to contract. Far from supposing that the members of our new societies will come to live in public, I am more afraid that they will in the end only form very small coteries.”¹⁷

The end result of such a movement away from public life into private is twofold. First, the political playing field is left open only to the most serious players or supposed experts. Second, the withdrawal of former citizens from a public life/private life dichotomous existence (or their defeat) and their movement to one preoccupied almost exclusively with private life simply magnifies their possessive, individual concerns to such a great extent that there is no longer concern with, or perhaps even knowledge of, anything else—especially of what is shared and public. Whether this was Publius's explicit intention is ultimately unimportant from a theoretical perspective, since by all indications this is what indeed occurred in American politics. It is entirely possible that this particular historical progression was unavoidable, but that does not negate the fact that Publius's constitution authorized such a progression even if it could not entirely author it. There is, however, an important indication, in an earlier essay by Madison, that he thought such behavior in a republic was inevitable, if not already in place at the writing of the Papers. That essay, Federalist no. 10, is now rightfully among the most famous.

In Federalist no. 10 we see Madison's familiar argument concerning the nature, dangers, and possible solutions to the problem of faction in a republic, in his “republican remedies for republican defects” argument. The emphasis we now place on this essay is due primarily to the work of Charles Beard, who thought he had discovered within it the key to the entire Federalist project of usurpation and self-interested protection of class privileges in the form of property rights.¹⁸ But this early attempt at historical deconstruction seems a little misplaced, in that the essay itself is fairly straightforward about its author's political intentions and requires very little exploration in terms of any Machiavellian subtext. After all, the Revolution was fought in part to defend the rights of property owners who by virtue of that property had made the strong republican claim to participate in public affairs. The theoretical arguments contained in the essay are at least as interesting and substantial when taken as acts of good faith as they could ever be when discounted as acts of bad faith. Even if this is not true, good faith on our part requires that we begin with such assumptions. The interpretive trope that will undergird my discussion of this essay is best described as “overcoming contingency.” In other words, what I see Madison as doing on the whole in Federalist no. 10 is not providing some defense of his class position but, rather, attempting in good Enlightenment/rationalist fashion to rid political life of the diverse and the contingent in a manner consistent with the political culture in which he must maneuver, while at the same time overcoming the parts of that culture that resist such “refinement” (a term with which I think Madison would feel comfortable, and with which I myself do not).

Among the core assumptions made by republican political theorists was that of communal homogeneity, a likeness of interests, mores, and beliefs among the particular citizenry. Among the most serious threats to republican community was the absence of this likeness, because where there was fundamental division and disagreement between citizens over how to constitute the public square, there was the potential for strife and civic unrest. This phenomenon was more dangerous in a republic than it would be in some more hierarchically ordered political community because in the latter the government, in its separateness from the people, could impose the degree of uniformity necessary to maintain the society over time. In a republic, however, the people themselves were charged with this task. If they became corrupt (seeking the interest of the part as opposed to the good of the whole), then there was no recourse and civil war would often be the only possible outcome. Since, as Madison notes, the most durable source of faction was inequality or differences in wealth and property, aristocracy or monarchy had typically been thought to be superior to republican political society because the propertied class, by virtue of their lack of want for material goods (they already had them) would be free to seek the public good in a significantly more disinterested manner. Thus republics can flourish only where there is at least a minimal level of economic equality between citizens, thus enabling them to act in a similarly disinterested manner with regard to the public sphere.

This, as Plato noted at the start of Book II of his Republic, is possible to sustain without massive social and political engineering only in relatively poor or subsistence-based agrarian economies like his “city of pigs.” Once we enter “the feverish city,” or the city with “relishes” or luxuries (in contemporary terms, “commercial society”), we encounter the need for “doctors,” those who can fix the defects produced by the expansion of society and the introduction of those things that are likely to cause divisions and differences to emerge (factions). Those factions bring with them increasing levels of what we could call contingencies, which at every turn create difficulties for maintaining the degree of homogeneity perceived as necessary by traditional republican theory. The greatest source of contingency is the increasing levels of inequality that accompany “commercial society.” The role of the “doctors” in the “feverish” or complex city is to find ways of minimizing the number of contingencies, which Plato does through the restriction of freedom, manipulation of the socialization and educational process, and eventually outright coercion and violence when necessary. Given his cultural matrix, as well as his own predispositions, Plato's particular solutions are not available to Madison; but Plato's problem is Madison's problem as well, and in Federalist no. 10 he seeks to find a way of reducing the possibility of the political contingency that he feels endangers the life of his particular republican community.

Madison claims that there are two methods of removing the causes of faction: “the one by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interest.”¹⁹ Both of these solutions were embraced in part by Plato, but Madison claims to reject both, contending that the first option is “worse than the disease” and that the second is impossible.²⁰ Madisonian empiricism works in fruitful opposition here to a strict Platonic rationalism. Thus Madison is left with his conclusion that, rather than removing the causes of faction, we should busy ourselves with “controlling its effects.”²¹ But what does this mean? How do you control the effects of something described as a disease without attempting to cure it?

A brief exploration of the metaphor might be helpful here. Suppose that the disease “factions” is like the disease “cancer,” and assume that the first set of solutions, “removing the causes,” is analogous to amputation or organ removal in cancer treatment. And, finally, assume that such surgery is not an option for some reason, so we, as the doctors, have decided to “control the effects of the disease.” The question becomes how we go about doing this. Would such a thing even make sense, given a disease with a massive proclivity to spread when left unchecked? The answer, I suppose, is to isolate the other parts of the “body” somehow, so that they might avoid infection, or to give those parts of the body some kind of preventive medicine that would make them immune. If we were able to do that, then the riddle might be solved—we would have controlled the effects of the disease without removing it from the “body.” We know that this is not yet possible with actual cancer, but Madisonian political theory believes that it is possible with the body politic. This, too, however, is a Platonic strategy. Madison, despite his empiricism, thinks much as Plato did: that yet another way of controlling the disease of faction (contingency) is to isolate a class of people within the body politic who would either be uninfected by the disease or, as we will see both here and in Federalist no. 51, unable to infect the body any more than the other limbs were able to.

Plato's strategy for controlling the effects of faction, as opposed to his strategy for getting rid of it altogether, was to select his class of guardians and then structure their lives so that they were free from the impulses that other people naturally had. Without getting into a detailed discussion of the Republic, suffice it to say that his general way of doing this in terms of the guardians was to make them completely public people, people who cared only for the general (the state) and nothing for the particular (themselves as individuals or institutions like the family). He did this through rigorous education, through isolation, through the destruction of the family, through equalization of wealth, and finally through making them dependent upon the state and the goodwill of the citizenry for their survival. In turn, the citizenry was dependent upon the guardians (political doctors) for their continued good health in the “feverish city.” Little attention is paid to the vast majority of other people who live and work in the Republic. The reason for this inattention is that so long as the guardians as a class were intact and properly “isolated,” it mattered relatively little what everyone else did. The guardians were now fully public people, and everyone else was more or less wholly private (because if they were also somehow “public” in any significant way, they might infect the rest of the body politic with the disease that was “natural” to them: faction).

Despite their epistemological and methodological differences, Madison's strategy in Federalist no. 10 is quite similar in many ways to Plato's Republic. To begin with, he claims that faction is the natural condition of a free people around whom wealth (luxury) and subsequent inequality combine to produce a situation where “those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”²² If left to judge for themselves, either party or faction would surely judge in its own favor with no regard for the public good, since, according to Madison, “a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time.”²³ Thus the act of judging must be taken from the hands of those who have particular interests in the outcome and given to those who, like Plato's guardians, love only the general. This leads Madison quickly to reject “pure democracy,” since in such a system “there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual … [and the systems] have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”²⁴ Thus we are left with a scheme of government based on representative institutions rather than participatory ones. It is important to note that at this point Madisonian theory briefly diverges from Platonic theory insofar as Madison's “guardians” are to be elected, thus completing his task of securing “the public good and the private rights of other citizens … and at the same time preserv[ing] the spirit and the form of popular government.”²⁵ The ultimate theoretical hope of this transfer of authority (though not necessarily power) for Madison serves to

refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.²⁶

It is important to note that here, as well as at other points in the essay, Madison has made two very important intellectual moves. First, he has continued his project of praising the general good and denigrating as the work of small minds and “diseased” thinkers the promotion of the local over the national interest; intimately related to that move is the subtle, yet all-important, introduction of the idea of a “national interest.” This language had typically been reserved for speaking about states and local political associations whose interests and rights were to be protected by the government à la traditional Whig theory, but here Madison has, in good nationalist fashion, transformed that mode of discourse and co-opted it for the government itself. The end result is to force the political dialogue into what are at best uncharted theoretical waters, and at worst illegitimate and violently acultural linguistic modes of political discourse. This theoretical maneuver rivals Plato's attempt to replace the traditional/particular family with the state for his guardians.

Once we are pushed to talk about the “good” of the nation, as if it were a local community or even an individual, then predicates that were hitherto thought to be gibberish suddenly begin to make sense, and we see sentences that begin The nation needs … ; The country wants … ; The United States feels … ; and so on. These types of sentences that for the first 150 years (including the revolutionary period) would have made sense only in the broadest and more ephemeral of contexts are now spoken as if they are commonplace parts of legitimate political speech. Just as Plato moved his dialogue from the individual to the city in what he claimed was an effort to see the thing more clearly, so does Madison. In so doing, he has managed to set the agenda and structure the discourse in such as way that, rather than arguing about what is good for particular people and particular communities, we are forced to argue in terms of what is good in general. This leads, as even the most casual reader of the Republic knows, to a far different thing than what is good in particular. An important by-product of this shift is that as we move further from what we know on an experiential level to what we can only conceive of in increasingly abstract terms, the more the rationalist, technocratic model of political theory and regime organization addressed in chapter 2 comes to dominate, and the less room there eventually is for citizens as opposed to administrators. Thus, while Madison may have been an empiricist, his emergent theory authorizes a rationalist political order.

Yet, as we know, representative institutions are not necessarily free from defects or disease. There is still the chance that “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests of the people.”²⁷ Madison's structural solution to this dilemma is his most famous theoretical contribution to political science, the extended republic. While it is true that Madison owes much on this point to David Hume, who had argued in his Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, that “though it was more difficult to form a republican government in an extensive country than in a city; there is more facility, when once it is formed, of preserving it steady and uniform, without tumult and faction,”²⁸ it is Madison who popularized and made commonplace what had been considered not only unconventional but also illegitimate political thought, given the prominence of Montesquieu.

By extending the size of the republic, and thus implicitly changing the entire cultural/theoretical foundation upon which the country had been formed, Madison hopes to accomplish three tasks in his quest against faction. First, the expansion of the political arena will make it “more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried … [and] the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to center on men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffuse and established characters.”²⁹ Second, by expanding the domain, the chances of a representative being unduly bound to local issues or parochial concerns diminishes, thus allowing him to “pursue great and national objects.”³⁰ Finally, even if these two theoretical hopes did not pan out, the expansion of the domain would prevent the “easy concert and execution of any plans of oppression.” Madison argues:

Extend the sphere and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength and to act in unison with each other.³¹

In the passage above the echo of Rousseau suddenly becomes audible in the work of Madison as we see the implicit distinction between what the former would refer to as the “general will” and the “particular will” making itself known. The Madisonian framework of representation and territorial extension clearly is intended to make the “general will,” if not the Platonic “form,” of the regime a more pronounced possibility. By increasing the number of “particular wills,” Madison hopes to make them inaudible in the public sphere, thereby ensuring to the extent possible that the only voice heard is that of the general will or the public (national) good.³² Embodying this will and speaking on its behalf will then become the task of the representatives in the national government, who, under this theory, will be those with “enlightened views and virtuous sentiments [that] render them superior to local prejudices and to schemes of injustice.”³³ And if some members of the regime were to fall victim to the “disease” of particularism, they would be less able to “spread a general conflagration through the other states.”³⁴

The important theoretical contribution that Madison wants to make can now partially be seen: the creation of a republic without need of republican citizens. What the reader should notice upon close investigation of Federalist no. 10 is the lack of attention to the character and behavior of the average citizen, an attitude shared by Plato. What Madison is concerned with here is the creation of structural mechanisms for ensuring, if at all possible, virtue among the representatives (guardians) or, failing that, the erection of barriers to thwart the spread of any corruption that may make its way to the head of the regime. What is expected of the average citizens is that they will withdraw for the most part into their private (particularized) affairs (which Madison and others of this period believed to be the natural condition for human beings), and, upon discovering their inability to carry their private concerns into personally beneficial public policy, will cease to participate in public life other than through casting an occasional vote.

Thus the majority of people are rendered almost purely private beings. The active conception of citizenship, associated with both traditional republicanism and its new American counterpart, which saw the citizen as participating in the construction of the public good, along with the necessity of civic virtue among the masses, is done away with as utopian. Also rejected by Madison and others is the possibility of transformation by any but the most select few (national representatives, who for Madison are seemingly predisposed to such behavior), such as those who in this volume have been associated with citizenship. The end result of this theoretical set of remedies, once coupled with the advent of national political parties and the transformation of the conception of representation from some form of delegation to trusteeship, is the creation of both a theoretical basis for, and the subsequent reality of, a new cultural matrix that can best be understood as liberalism. But that unanticipated consequence was clearly not Publius's intention in general, and especially not Madison's in particular.

The matrix shift desired by Publius was one that could best be described as a shift from democratic confederate republicanism to elitist unitary republicanism. The way to accomplish this shift was to take authority away from the people and give it to the virtuous representatives, while leaving the people in ultimate possession of political power (not much of a concession if we acknowledge that ultimately, whether stated or not, this is where power presides anyway³⁵). Once that transfer was accomplished, the enlightened representatives, with their enlarged and refined views, were to set about the crucial task of political reformation through proper administration. (This approach illustrates the central differences between the classical republicanism of Aristotle, who would have described the central task of the elite as educating the majority for citizenship, and this newer modern elitist brand of republicanism that denied the possibility of such an enterprise and opted instead for control and the rule by virtuous expertise; both of these approaches are vastly different from the modern American democratic republicanism that existed in pre-Constitution America and that is defended as another alternative throughout this volume.)

Before that proper administration could begin, however, the new government had to be imbued with the degree of energy necessary to its tasks. The defense of that energy is the subject of Federalist no. 23-no. 36, which, interestingly, include not only lengthy defenses of energetic government in general but also important discussions about standing armies and taxation in particular (perhaps two possible means for accomplishing similar ends in different historical contexts). In any case, a reader who wants to understand more precisely the nature of the new and dramatically more energetic regime needs simply to look at two of the most expansive provisions of the Constitution and Publius's defense of them: the Supremacy Clause (Article VI, sec. 2) and the Necessary and Proper Clause (Article I, sec. 8).³⁶ However, there are more important substantive questions that must be discussed before we can truly understand and assess the Federalist project: what the precise nature of the reformation will actually be, and how Publius intends to guarantee that reformation once the new energy is unleashed.

Alexander Hamilton provides us with a glimpse into the heart of the Federalist political project in Federalist no. 22 as he defends the supremacy of national judicial decisions over those of the state courts. This defense takes place in the context of a much more general argument put forth by Hamilton concerning the dangers of diversity and the benefits of uniformity—uniformity in commercial policy, uniformity in military affairs, and so on. Hamilton, no great defender of democracy, goes so far as to defend the principle of majority rule as opposed to the existing principle of unanimity with regard to the states, claiming that the latter principle “contradicts that fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.”³⁷ This is a defense of democracy in its most adversarial form, where the emphasis is on what we now call minimum winning coalitions. This is democracy as a weapon for erasing difference and forging an agreement by sheer numbers and power (which, Hannah Arendt tells us, in its purest form is all against one³⁸). At this point we can see quite clearly the dangers, and perhaps even theoretical perversions, that can result from Publius's adoption of an extended republic.

Hamilton's assertion about the “sense of the majority” prevailing in a republic is correct, but that principle was based upon the existence of a small, relatively homogeneous, and typically face-to-face democratic community like the New England town, where the phrase was not the “sense of the majority,” but the “sense of the meeting.” In other words, to use Jane Mansbridge's terminology, Hamilton has here, either nefariously or just wrongly, used a principle that was theoretically attached to “unitary democracy” as support for an argument in defense of “adversarial democracy.” In the hands of Publius a principle that was intended to illustrate agreement and the existence of general will among members of a particular community is used as a method of subjugating that will and those members to a majority of particular wills or one large particular will. It is as if we have kept the form and gutted the substance that made the form sensible in the first place. Here a passage from Rousseau might help to clarify this line of criticism. He writes in chapter 3 of The Social Contract on “Whether the General Will Can Err”:

Finally, when one of those groups becomes so large that it can dominate the rest, the result is no longer the sum of many small differences, but one great divisive difference; then there ceases to be a general will, and the opinion which prevails is no more than private opinion.³⁹

It is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to reconcile Publius's fear of majority tyranny in Federalist no. 10 with his defense of adversarial majoritarianism here. What becomes obvious is that Publius either is ready and willing to use whatever rhetorical arguments he thinks necessary in order to sustain his overall political project, or he is engaged in a theorization that lacks the most basic internal consistency. Rather than assume the former, as those who would simply like to “unmask” the framers would have us do, I would assume the latter. First, there is little gain from the “good guy/bad guy” approach embodied in the first. Second, and far more important, whether it is internally consistent or not, Publius's theorization concerning the relative strengths and weaknesses of unity and diversity, and the extended republic became the dominant mode of political discourse, as well as the basis on which American practical politics came rather quickly to be practiced.

Hamilton quite plainly tells us in Federalist no. 22 what Publius sees as the single greatest problem facing the existing form of political association under the Articles of Confederation. While Hamilton presents the argument under the guise of a foreign affairs problem, we should have no compunction, given the general tone of the essay, about reading it in a far more expansive manner than might at first glance appear justified:

A circumstance which crowns the defects of the Confederation remains yet to be mentioned—the want of judiciary power. Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation. … To produce uniformity in these determinations, they ought to be submitted, in the last resort, to one SUPREME TRIBUNAL. … There are endless diversities in the opinions of men. We often see not only different courts but judges of the same court differing from each other. To avoid the confusion which would unavoidably result from the contradictory decisions of a number of independent judiciaries, all nations have found it necessary to establish one court paramount to the rest, possessing a general superintendence and authorized to settle and declare in the last resort a uniform rule of civil justice.⁴⁰

Although I do not want to belabor the point, the reader should note yet again a strange duplicitousness in the teachings of Publius, who throughout Federalist no. 17-no. 20 stressed in a number of different ways the unique nature of the American experiment, and the failures of older theoretical models (like Montesquieu's small republic theory) to accomplish their goals. Then, when searching for a justification here, he has no trouble using a simple argument from authority like the one denoted in “All nations have found it necessary. …” To return to the point at hand, the assertions made by Hamilton above go a long way toward capturing the essence of Federalist republicanism.⁴¹ The Federalist reformation of American political theory and traditional American republicanism involves a very intricate theoretical maneuver along the same lines as the early shift concerning the “virtuous representatives.”

Although Federalist no. 10 on one level seems to accept, and even embrace, human diversity, it is not a warm embrace between friends; rather, it is an embrace best represented by the cliché about keeping one's friends close and one's enemies closer. Publius does not like diversity, nor does he invent a political system steeped in mutual toleration for difference; what in fact he does in Federalist no. 10 is to acknowledge a reality or a “fact,” human difference—a fact that, unlike Plato, he realizes he cannot change wholesale because his is not just a city in speech but an actual regime where “facts” cannot simply be argued away. So in Federalist no. 10 Publius sets about creating a system that “accept[s] men the way they [are]” (or at least how he thinks they are), takes political authority away from them because of that perception (and gives it to the virtuous), provides the new leaders with the desired energy in the form of things like the expansive Necessary and Proper Clause and the Supremacy Clause to remake the political world as they see fit, and finally directs them to render the political world as uniform and homogeneous as necessary to sustain the nation over time.

Thus diversity was accepted on its face because it was either that or slavery, but it was accepted only as a short-term, necessary evil. Rather than thinking this was a strength, it was considered a weakness that had to be overcome, perhaps incrementally at first. Since Publius had already rejected the classical role of a republican elite as “civic educator” because he believed human nature to be more or less constant and unchangeable, the question then is viewed from a theoretical perspective: What type of uniformity was possible, given what appeared to be intractable diversity in opinions and desires? The answer was “individual self-interest.” Since Publius found himself unable to count on the possibility of human transformation or education, he decided to foster a system (or at least provide it with a relatively superficial, culturally acceptable, theoretical matrix) that would emphasize what he could count on. But this shift, like so many theoretical adaptations, brought with it other potential consequences and problems that Publius now had to solve within the confines of his increasingly trenchant theoretical model.

Publius was no fool. Once he had rejected the notion of civic virtue as an organizing principle for the political life of ordinary people, he was faced with the dilemma that all people were ordinary people in America. This is not to say that the Federalists did not believe in a natural aristocracy or in the categories of the “worthy and the licentious,”⁴² because they did. But just like finding Plato's “men of gold,” Publius knew that there was no way to guarantee that “enlightened statesmen will be at the helm.” Even with the extension of the republic and the other “cures” of Federalist no. 10, Publius still had to deal with his own root proposition, which was that men were by nature “more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.” And even if we were to bypass this overtly negative posture, the best we could hope for from most people would be mutual indifference. Thus we come to the second stage of the Federalist newfangled republican theorization, which is made explicit by Madison when he claims in Federalist no. 51 that “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”⁴³

Madison's construction for ensuring this control is his model of separation of powers. Although the model bears more than a superficial resemblance to the older model of a balanced or mixed constitution in which various social orders were represented by the Senate, the Commons, and the crown in a taut and structurally tensioned relationship that recognized that different orders or social classes had fundamentally different interests that, if they were not offset by another power of equal strength, might run roughshod over the others, Madison's model was in reality a radical, and very American, departure from it. As Tocqueville later noted, in America people are “born equal rather than having to become so.” This exceptional attribute of American political culture meant that the idea of specific economic classes or social orders that served as the foundation for “balanced constitutionalism” was not available for American political theorists and political actors.⁴⁴ The categories that were available centered on virtue, character, and effort broadly defined, which were, at least in theory, open to all people of all classes. Thus the only categories with which Madisonian theory can truly be thought to be concerned are those of the “worthy” and the “licentious,” or the deserving and the undeserving. The “fact” that many of the “worthy” people came from advantaged backgrounds was to be treated as simply coincidence. The “fact” that the “worthy” might not always prevail in the democratic electoral arena, or that they might indeed become the “licentious,” became the justification for separation of powers in America since, as Madison acknowledges, “men are not angels.”

Federalist no. 51 is perhaps the most recognizable essay within the Federalist collection, and it is perhaps because of this historical familiarity, which tends to make even the most exceptional things appear mundane or even conservative, that we often fail to see the absolute theoretical radicalism embodied within this brief work. It is here that what we have referred to as the Federalist “faith” is given its doctrinal content, and that content is represented in the following passage penned by Madison:

A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as each may be a check on the other—that the private interest of every individual may be sentinel over public rights.⁴⁵

In our earlier discussion of the Puritans we came across the idea of “mutual watchfulness,” which was a direct extension of the Puritan belief in a communal collective soul that required each member of the community to undertake the positive obligation of checking not only his own behavior but also that of his neighbors. The idea was that by obligating each member to watch over the others, the community would be able to fulfill its “contract” with God. This behavior, however, was not merely one of “moral policeman”; instead, it included that host of requirements outlined broadly by John Winthrop in his “Modell of Christian Charity” sermon: “making each other's burdens our own,” “walking with each other in brotherly affection,” and so on.

At first glance Madison's model appears to share certain attributes of that earlier one, but only at first glance. Upon further investigation we see how complete the transformation of that older model actually is. Here people are still charged with watching each other, and with watching their government, but it is not the watchfulness of a family member who has your best interest at heart, nor is it the watchfulness of a fellow citizen who worries about the public world you both share; instead, it is the watchfulness of the jealous man, the watchfulness of the covetous or possessive man, who is worried and fearful at every turn that you may infringe upon what is his, or that he may be asked to shoulder more than his share of a particular burden. It is not the fraternal watch of one who shares in your successes and your failures, and thus applauds you in victory and consoles you in defeat like a brother or a sister, but the distrustful watch of one who sees in your every move a potential theft, and in every kindness an ulterior motive. It is the qualitative difference between the idea that you should not steal because it is wrong, and the notion that you should not steal because you might get caught; both social approaches may in fact reduce theft, but each conception carries with it a particular view of the world and its people. In the former world, utopian or not, we are asked to be better people, to live up to the laws that we ourselves have made; and if we succeed, both we and our communities are better off—transformed, if you will. The latter world creates a community of pessimists and sneaks, one ever fearful of being taken and the other always watchful for an opportunity to take.

What Madison is in effect telling his readers here, whether he likes it or not, is the following: Guard your property and your rights with a vengeance and let others do the same, and peace and tranquillity will follow; within that peace and tranquillity you will be able to achieve personal happiness while others do the same, unencumbered by either your fellow citizens, who are now only asked to mind their own business, or by the government, whose tasks will soon be limited to maintaining the necessary circumstances for the pursuit of private happiness. The end result will be the appearance of a virtuous republic, well ordered without licentiousness, that can maintain itself over time by counting on people to do what they would naturally do—which is watch out for themselves. It is the “invisible hand” republic come to life. Federalist no. 51 then can be read reductively as the application of this broad social theory to the micro level of national government. Each separate branch will be endowed with certain powers that are unique to that branch, and others that overlap. In turn, the branches will engage in the new “watchfulness” over the people and over each other, and the people will engage in the same over them and over each other. I will not bother to make a list of all the checks and balances this mutual watchfulness and suspicion generates, for they are well known to even the most casual reader.

In the end, only those initiatives with enough general support from the population, or those with a focus specific enough to generate massive indifference, will become the law of the land in what could by an uncareful reader be seen as the embodiment of Rousseau's “general will” theory. But the reality is that there can be no such thing as a positive “general will” once the size of the territory is expanded to include many varied and diverse communities, except in the case of the most basic human needs like survival. Usually there can be only the gradual imposition of a particular will, large though it may be, that renders public life and the public good merely an extension of those baser and more universal private concerns. This leads to greater and greater centralization of authority and power as the nation and the citizenry begin to speak with one consonant voice that may from time to time sound different as the result of particular or individual circumstances, but that in the end can be characterized as of the same genus as private property, individual rights, and the negative state associated with liberalism. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations believed that the free-market or “invisible hand” approach to things economic would make that realm more rational than the mercantile system of government interference that he was criticizing in his work. Thus Hartz's irrational Locke is not born from the American earth as the only possible staple crop so much as the soil in which any competing social or political theory, like early American republicanism, could grow is made too contaminated for any other use. Publius had not necessarily found a new way to achieve the common good so much as he had changed the definition of that good by lowering not only the expectations of political life but also the possibilities. …

Notes

1. “An Address of the Subscribers Members of the Late House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to their Constituents,” in The Complete Anti-Federalist, edited by Herbert J. Storing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 3.2.3. (The numbering system is Storing's and refers to the volume, place within the volume, and paragraph, respectively.)

2. Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 87.

3. Ibid., pp. 88-89.

4. Ibid., pp. 90-91.

5. Kramnick, Federalist no. 1, p. 87.

6. Ibid., Federalist no. 2-no. 5.

7. Ibid., Federalist no. 6 and no. 7.

8. Ibid., Federalist no. 7-no. 10.

9. Ibid., Federalist no. 11-no. 13.

10. Ibid., Federalist no. 15-no. 20.

11. Ibid., Federalist no. 20, p. 172 (emphasis in the original).

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., Federalist no. 21, p. 174.

14. Ibid.

15. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 262.

16. Joshua Miller, The Rise and Fall of Democracy in Early America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), ch. 5. Miller argues that “the Federalists' great accomplishment in political theory was to establish an unmediated relationship between the national government and the people that, ironically, discourages democracy,” p. 106.

17. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by George Lawrence, edited by J. P. Mayer (New York: Harper & Row, [1835], 1988), p. 604.

18. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Free Press, [1913] 1986), ch. 6.

19. Kramnick, Federalist no. 10, p. 123.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., p. 124.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., p. 126.

25. Ibid., p. 125.

26. Ibid., p. 126.

27. Ibid.

28. It was the historian Douglass Adair who first elaborated on the relationship between the work of Hume and of Madison in his essay “The Tenth Federalist Revisited,” in the collection of his essays titled Fame and the Founding Fathers edited by Trevor Colbourne (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974). This citation from Hume is taken from that essay at p. 98.

29. Kramnick, Federalist no. 10, p. 127.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Although I do not want to deal with it in the body of the text, there is a very important recent contribution to the interpretive literature surrounding the second founding in general and the Federalist in particular: Bruce Ackerman, We the People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). In this book (the first volume of an intended three) Ackerman constructs a theoretical model that he calls “dualist democracy” (ch. 1) in order to explain the theory of The Federalist Papers. The basic argument is that the founders established a democratic system that allowed the voice of the people to be heard in a collective fashion through the making of the Constitution and its subsequent amendments, and the voice of the virtuous representatives to be heard during periods of “normal politics.” The argument concerning the Federalist is based on the idea that the founders “recognized that much of American politics would lack the quality of mobilized deliberation they associated with the spirit of the Revolution” (p. 165). In other words, the extreme context of the Revolution had made virtuous behavior the norm during that period, but once the war was over and the tension was released, that virtuous spirit dissipated and the people returned to their private (factional) affairs. Thus what Publius intended post Revolution was “to design a system that, given the available human materials, will do as good a job as possible in recreating the kind of public-spirited deliberation that the People themselves can attain only during rare constitutional crises” (p. 186). This was, of course, to be found in the new national government and Madison's virtuous representatives. The expansion of the republic in Federalist no. 10 is then interpreted by Ackerman as a way of creating so many voices that the representative will be left free to choose what he or she thinks is right, since there will be no clear-cut “general will” to listen to. He describes this in the following manner: “the aim of constitutional science is to check and balance competing factions to allow the People's representatives leeway to deliberate and pursue the public good” (p. 224). While I think that Ackerman's argument may have some important descriptive merit, what troubles me is the normative import that runs through his work. For him it is good that “normal politics” are left to the “experts,” and furthermore, he sees, wrongly, no discrepancy between this new political order and the goals of the Revolution itself (ch. 8).

33. Kramnick, Federalist no. 10, p. 128.

34. Ibid.

35. On this point see Hannah Arendt's discussion in her On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), where she claims, along with Jouvenel, “that to suppose that majority rule exists only in democracy is a fantastic illusion … political institutions are manifestations of power which petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to support them,” pp. 40-41.

36. Kramnick, Federalist no. 44, p. 286.

37. Kramnick, Federalist no. 22, p. 179.

38. Arendt, On Violence, p. 42.

39. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, translated by Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 72.

40. Kramnick, Federalist no. 22, p. 182.

41. See Michael Lienesch, New Order of the Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 124, for a discussion of the varying approaches to history pursued by the Federalists and their political opponents.

42. See Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (New York: W. W. Norton, [1969] 1972), ch. 12, on this point.

43. Kramnick, Federalist no. 51, p. 320.

44. For the best historical/contextual discussion of this very important theoretical subtlety, see Gordon Wood's discussion of John Adams in “The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams,” in his The Creation of the American Republic, ch. 14.

45. Kramnick, Federalist no. 51, p. 320.

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