SOURCE: Jasinski, James. “Heteroglossia, Polyphony, and The Federalist Papers.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 27, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 23-46.

[In the following essay, Jasinski uses the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of heteroglossia and polyphony to examine the rhetoric of The Federalist Papers.]

INTRODUCTION: THE CHALLENGES OF THE LINGUISTIC TURN

In the last few decades historians have devoted significant attention to the language used by political actors during the American revolution and founding. The ground-breaking work of Bailyn, Pocock, and Wood established the importance of language as a motivating force, conceptual filter, and constitutive process.¹ The concept of ideology as a paradigm or organizing conceptual framework figured prominently in these early studies. Initially, the (re)discovery of situated language led to the recovery of a republican ideology at the core of the early American political imagination.² The claims of republican historiography were, of course, contested by other historians who located alternative ideological frameworks such as “liberalism” or “protestant Calvinism” in the language of early American politics.³ More recent historical scholarship challenges “the assumption that there is but one language—one exclusive or even hegemonic paradigm—that characterizes the political discourse of a particular place or moment in time.”⁴ Historians of political discourse (including rhetorical critics and public address scholars) now face the challenge of studying the interaction of, and interrelationship between, multiple ideologies, idioms, or languages in early American public culture.

This recent interest exhibited by historians in the language of the revolutionary and founding period is part of a broader “linguistic turn” in historiography and humanities scholarship generally.⁵ Part of this turn has involved problematizing the status of language and historical documents or texts. Whereas pre-turn scholarship commonly approached language as a transparent medium for transmitting ideas and treated the text as an unproblematic vessel that transported the “idea,” first, to an historically proximate audience, and then, to succeeding generations, post-turn scholarship (in rhetoric, history, literary studies, etc.) explores the cognitive and constitutive capacity (and the limits or incapacity) of linguistic representation as well as the internal and external dynamics of the discursive text. This shift in attitude regarding language and text generates a particular dilemma that I term the problem of the contested text.⁶ Put simply, certain texts (most notably in philosophy and the sciences, but in the political realm as well) seem to resist the linguistic turn. These texts invite and/or demand, their defenders inform us, a pious, respectful reading. Texts of this sort, opponents (mainly on the right) of the linguistic turn commonly argue, have escaped the perishable or ephemeral fate that awaits the vast majority of discursive products because they contain and transmit timeless truths or universally valid principles and must, therefore, be read in a manner that acknowledges and respects this achievement. Contested texts challenge critics and historians to subvert “monologic” interpretation and pious “theoretism”⁷ without stumbling into the interpretive abyss of absolute indeterminacy.

Rhetorical critics and post-turn historians confront the challenge of studying multiple ideologies and languages in a specific historical period as well as within particular texts and they also face the hermeneutic challenge posed by the contested text. I argue in this essay that the insights of Mikhail Bakhtin provide critics and historians with a way of responding to these challenges. In the next section of this essay I review Bakhtin's writings on prose discourse and rhetorical practice. Such a review reveals Bakhtin's ambivalence towards practical rhetorical performance.⁸ But a confrontation with Bakhtin's reservations about rhetoric makes it possible to extend his account of prose discourse (as a dynamic, heteroglot and polyphonic event)⁹ to practical rhetorical performances. Such an extension, I maintain, provides rhetorical critics and post-turn historians with the resources to respond to the two challenges facing post-turn humanities scholarship noted above. First, Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglossia and polyphony can help critics and historians chart the interaction of idioms, languages, or ideologies within individual texts or performances (overcoming both the assumption of linguistic hegemony that marks the first wave of the linguistic turn in history and the common tendency to focus exclusively on the linguistic or ideological tension between antagonistic political factions). Second, Bakhtin's account of prose dynamics, its “eventfulness,” helps subvert various forms of monologic interpretation by leading the critic and historian to the recovery of the dialogic moments or elements inscribed in the text.

The second half of this essay illustrates the critical and conceptual value of Bakhtin's understanding of prose dynamics through a critical encounter with a pivotal contested text from the American founding period: The Federalist Papers.¹⁰ The third part, organized around Bakhtin's concept of linguistic heteroglossia, explores “Publius”'s lexical orchestration, focusing particular attention on the role of ambiguity and on the way an unvoiced but central metaphor (the pharmakon) helps orchestrate the competing languages or “images” of language. The final section of the essay, organized around the concept of polyphony, focuses on some of the various forms of voice appropriation in The Federalist Papers (including the practice of pseudonymous authorship). Special attention in this discussion is given to the use of voice in “Publius's” defense of the Constitution's three-fifths slavery clause.

BAKHTIN, RHETORIC, AND THE CHALLENGES OF POST-TURN CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP

Bakhtin develops four broad indictments of rhetoric in the course of his writings. First, unlike fully prosaic events, rhetorical performances are monologic and finalizable. The rhetorical advocate focuses attention exclusively on the situational exigence in an effort to secure personal victory and to defeat her/his opponent: “In rhetoric there are the unconditionally right and the unconditionally guilty; there is total victory, and annihilation of the opponent.”¹¹ Dialogic events are, in contrast, never exhausted (“DiN” 330) and in principle unfinalizable. Second, rhetorical advocates presume to speak in an authoritative language that mirrors their objective of total victory. Authoritative language “demands our unconditional allegiance” and admits only two responses: complete affirmation or complete rejection. The perfected authoritative utterance resists appropriation; it is unified and indivisible: “one cannot divide it up—agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part” (“DiN” 343). Third, although advocates “are oriented toward the listener and his [sic] answer” (a basic condition of dialogism; “DiN” 280), they can at best produce what Morson and Emerson term “nonheteroglot double-voicing” (315). Rhetorical advocates are, Bakhtin maintains, isolated individuals cut off from social heteroglossia and historical becoming. Advocacy is a purely instrumental and completely practical (hence “extra-artistic,” “DiN” 355) activity resulting from “individual dissonances” (“DiN” 325; emphasis in original) or “differences” (“DiN” 284). These differences or “oppositions between individuals are only surface upheavals of the untamed elements in social heteroglossia” (“DiN” 326). Rhetorical performances are, Bakhtin suggests, concerned in the final instance with one thing only: power in the form of individual advancement or personal gain. Finally, partisan rhetorical advocates, pursuing personal advancement through authoritative language and bent on total victory, are unable to experience the “relativized” (“DiN” 324-26, 378, 400), “decentered” (“DiN” 367, 378), or “prosaic consciousness” (“DiN” 324, 368) that authentic prose helps to produce. Rhetorical advocates employ a “unitary and fully affirming language (without any distancing, refraction or qualification)” “naively” believing it to be self-evident and “incontestable” (“DiN” 332, 327). In other words, rhetorical advocates cannot organize or experiment with multiple languages because they are trapped within their own unitary language, not realizing or comprehending that other languages exist.

Regarding the first indictment, Bakhtin fails to appreciate the internal tension embedded in a rhetorical performance between what can be called its “finalizing activity” (Problems 68) of inducing or shaping judgment of the particular questions or issues in dispute in the immediate situation and its recursive, constitutive potential.¹² The rhetorical act participates in the ongoing and in principle unfinalizable conversation that is constitutive of civic life as it engages the contingent specifics of its immediate situation. Certain performances, most obviously epideictic acts, manifest their participation in the larger civic conversation more clearly than others, but that fact does not deny the constitutive potential of more pedestrian rhetorical events. It is also not true that the finalizing or instrumental dimension of the rhetorical performance necessitates total victory and total annihilation. Rhetorical performance shares with dialogue the need to maintain discursive and deliberative space.¹³ It is true that in the desire to achieve a sense of local closure, rhetorical performances often erase the traces of their own rhetoricity or unfinalizability thereby contributing to the impression that they are inherently finalized, monologic events. But it is also true that creative advocates can negotiate the internal tension inhabiting the rhetorical performance in more complicated ways: urging measures designed to produce local closure while also acknowledging the centrality of contingency and promoting the openness or unfinalizability of civic life.¹⁴ There are moments when “Publius” achieves this level of rhetorical creativity but they cannot be appreciated from a monological interpretive perspective.

The second and third indictments overlap and can be treated together. The problem of authoritative language and rhetorical advocacy can be addressed, initially, by pointing to the addressivity of prose performances. In soliciting agreement from an audience, an advocate must abandon a purely authoritative tongue and, as Kenneth Burke noted long ago, speak the language of the audience. In appropriating the audience's language, the advocate is forced into the position of managing a range of double-voiced words that are not under his/her absolute control. Addressivity entails dialogue at the level of the word even when the advocate appears authoritative.

This response to the second indictment is problematized by the third claim: that rhetorical advocacy involves nonheteroglot double-voicing (a form that is superficial because cut off from processes of historical becoming; it is “merely a game, a tempest in a teapot” “DiN” 325) because it is predicated on individual differences. Bakhtin's sense of rhetorical advocacy is ultimately nominalistic: there are only individuals engaged in personal polemics detached from the social turbulence embodied in linguistic heteroglossia.¹⁵ Countless studies in public address scholarship as well as post-turn political and intellectual history, however, advance the opposite claim. Political conflict expressed in rhetorical advocacy is more than individual polemic and partisan self-justification. Political advocacy is, as Pocock points out, a social and historical event; it reflects and shapes a society's ideological, economic, and social divisions. Rhetorical performances are a vehicle for affirming, subverting, and reconstituting such elemental aspects of a society as individual and collective identity, interests, values, political principles and concepts, historical traditions, and memories of the past. Rhetorical practice is, contra Bakhtin, a critical force in historical becoming.

There are a number of possible responses to Bakhtin's discussion of prosaic consciousness (and the implicit claim that rhetorical advocates cannot obtain this form of experience). One option is to follow the argument developed by Stanley Fish (among others) and dismiss the concept of relativized consciousness.¹⁶ If the internal validity of the concept is granted (or the question bracketed), its connection to rhetorical advocacy can be established in two other ways. First, as Bakhtin suggests in a number of passages in “Discourse in the Novel,” prosaic consciousness is fundamental to the process of “ideological becoming” (“DiN” 341-2) or self-formation. Bakhtin's point is that there is no essential, uncontested self; the self is composed from the internal struggle of various languages and voices.¹⁷ Prosaic consciousness exists most fully at those moments of flux when a language or a voice (or a combination of languages and voices) destablizes the reigning configuration (the current “self”) thereby introducing doubt and a relativized consciousness. During rhetorical performances, advocates will often speak as dogmatists and exhibit a naive self-confidence in their language. But there are exceptions to this general rule that demonstrate the possible compatibility of advocacy and prosaic consciousness. For example, Madison's famous digression on language in essay #37 (treated more extensively below) expresses anything but a naive self-confidence in his language (or language in general). In fact, advocates frequently manifest an intense anxiety over the medium of language and this was particularly true during the founding era.¹⁸ Linguistic anxiety can produce in the advocate an obsessive desire to preserve and protect their dominant self/language from corruption but it can also foster a dialogic exploration of alternative languages and voices. Such an exploration, perhaps only present in the rhetorical event during brief moments, need not be a conscious strategy of the advocate to have a relativizing effect.¹⁹

If advocates sometimes back into a “prosaic key” as part of their struggle with anxiety, there are other cases where advocates intentionally aim at linguistic disruption (recognizing that such intentions are invariably refracted in the text). During nonheteroglot eras, prosaic consciousness can be fostered through subversive advocacy that challenges the dominant language(s). Dissenting advocates, no less than novelists, can both experience themselves and represent for others (provide an “image of a language”) the experience of prosaic consciousness.

It is not entirely clear why Bakhtin divorced rhetorical performance from historical and ideological becoming. What does seem clear is that such a move seriously distorts the performative and constitutive capacity of such practical discursive events as political deliberation, legal advocacy, and epideictic oratory. As the discussion above tried to establish, rhetorical performances, whether manifest in the form of one of the classical genres or shaped by modern generic conventions, are prose events: they are not essentially monologic or finalizable, they do not, indeed cannot, employ an authoritative voice that demands unconditional allegiance, they are implicated in the ongoing process of historical and ideological becoming, and they can provide the opportunity for linguistic self-reflection. But what difference does it make if we extend Bakhtin's account of prose discourse to the realm of public rhetorical practice? Let me try to illustrate briefly the significance of this move by returning to the challenges posed by multiple languages and monologic interpretation.

Consider the following observation on The Federalist Papers by Garry Wills. Wills is discussing Hamilton's attempt to define the meaning of one of the key terms in the ratification dispute: federalism. “Hamilton,” Wills writes, “tried to keep the language of the confederacies while attacking their rationale (emphasis in original).”²⁰ Confronted with this facet of the text, critics and historians have (at least) two interpretive choices. First, they could follow the essentially monologic path pursued by Wills (and virtually every other commentator on the text): that is, they start by assuming that there is present in the text clear authorial intention and a consistent, unified “meaning” that can be discovered by looking through the linguistic strategy (what Wills describes as “sweet talk”). Once the problematic language is revealed for what it is (merely a “protreptic exercise”), the monological “truth” (and “real” authorial intent) of the text can be reconstructed. The other interpretive option involves treating the text as a dialogic event. This approach requires the critic to look at the language rather than through it; it involves struggling to account for the various conceptual repercussions and implications of the definitional tension rather than simply dismissing it. In terms of “Publius's” discussion of federalism, looking at the language of the text reveals what Bakhtin refers to as the “internal dialogism of the word” (“DiN” 279-80).²¹ As Bakhtin explains: “The word in language … becomes ‘one's own’ only when the speaker populates it with his [sic] own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention” (“DiN” 293-94; on the “life of the word” see also Problems 202). But this often strategic, occasionally inadvertent, appropriation is never total. Every word contains traces of other meanings that are not fully eradicated or extinguished. Authorial intention does not strip the word of its semantic traces bending the word to the author's overpowering will; instead, the word shimmers as various languages and voices flow through it and the author's intention is “refracted” and “diffused” through the appropriated words that populate the text (“DiN” 302).²² Authorial intention is neither valorized nor dismissed when the text is regarded as a discursive event. Instead, the author is understood as an organizer, shaper, and participant in a dialogue over which he or she have no final or absolute control.²³ In following this interpretive path, the critic or historian begins to reconceptualize rhetorical performance as a prosaic event.

All texts, but especially complex, contested discursive events like The Federalist Papers, contain essential dialogic moments.²⁴ These moments, often organized into episodes, reveal a “dialogic inter-orientation” (“DiN” 284) or interaction between different languages and voices at the level of word, sentence, utterance, and/or text. The appropriation and organization of multiple languages (heteroglossia) and voices (polyphony) through a variety of compositional forms is, Bakhtin argues, the essence of a discursive or prosaic event (see “DiN” 300). The critic's or post-turn historian's task is to reconstruct the dialogue embedded in the dialogic word and polyphonic utterance.²⁵

HETEROGLOSSIA: SPEAKING IN TONGUES

As recent historians suggest,²⁶ the colonial and founding period in America can be described as a “heteroglot era when the collision and interaction of languages [was] especially intense and powerful” (“DiN” 418). Numerous languages and idioms—political, professional, philosophical, religious, regional, and ethnic—circulated and collided within early American public culture. Bakhtin defines heteroglossia as “another's speech in another's language” (“DiN” 324). The words inserted into the text are “double-voiced and internally dialogized. A potential dialogue is embedded in them, one as yet unfolded, a concentrated dialogue of two voices, two world views, two languages” (“DiN” 324-25). While different voices and accents are important in realizing heteroglossia, Bakhtin stresses “double-languagedness” understood as “the collision between differing points of view” (“DiN” 356-360)

An exhaustive analysis of all the dialogized words and colliding languages in The Federalist Papers is beyond the scope of this essay. Among the central concepts that merit dialogic analysis are federalism (noted briefly at the end of the last section), political representation (the tension between representation as an expedient substitute for a meeting of all the citizens and representation as a positive good),²⁷ power (the tension between admiration and fear),²⁸ and justice (the tension between a substantive protection of rights and procedural guarantee of exact impartiality).²⁹ The focus in this section will be limited to the rival interpretive languages employed by “Publius” and their relationship to the “images” of language, or the languages of language, contained in the text.

Both Furtwangler and Wills have examined the role of “candor” as an interpretive appeal in The Federalist Papers. Repeatedly throughout the essays, “Publius” urges his reader to engage in a candid assessment of the Constitution and the arguments offered on its behalf. Such an assessment strives to avoid speculating on, or magnifying, the potential flaws of the proposed governmental structure, seeks to limit excessive construction of the language of the Constitution, bases its judgment of the Constitution on realistic criteria and does not expect or demand perfection, and tries to remain disinterested and impartial in the face of the intense partisanship of the ratification debate.³⁰

Less attention has been paid to the rival interpretive frame: republican jealousy and suspicion. Wills, for example, insists that: “The Federalist, far from glorifying distrust, or relying on it, attacks foes of the Constitution for their indiscriminate jealousy (suspicion).”³¹ But the issue is more complicated than Wills acknowledges. References to jealousy and suspicion appear in thirty-eight (out of eighty-five) essays (a little under half). The accent or inflection given to the term (most commonly by way of adjective qualifiers like “delirious” or “prudent”) is not, as Wills would lead us to believe, uniformly pejorative. In fact, a careful reading of the text reveals “Publius's” internal dialogic struggle with the practice of hermeneutic suspicion.³²

When the words “suspicion” or “jealousy” appear in The Federalist Papers, they carry within them echoes and reverberations of over a century of political controversy in England and the colonies. Because power is a corrupting influence, the words and deeds of those who wield power must be carefully scrutinized. Suspicion and jealousy, once qualities of tyrannical princes,³³ become appropriated by the rising middle class and landed aristocracy and inscribed in the political literature of 17th and early 18th century England. Later in the 18th century, these “republican maxims” function as part of the interpretive politics of the American revolution.³⁴

The Anti-federal opponents of the proposed Constitution continue this decidedly uncandid interpretive practice in the early stages of the ratification debate.³⁵ In The Federalist Papers, jealousy and suspicion serve as verbal battlefields for conflicting languages of interpretation. “Publius” struggles to make these terms “serve a second master” but they resist easy redefinition or reconceptualization. A more complex orchestration of interpretive languages is necessary.

One moment in the orchestration occurs in essay #64 (one of the few penned by Jay). The broad topic of the essay is the provision requiring senate approval of treaties and the resulting status such treaties will obtain: they become supreme law of the land. “Publius” voices the Anti-Federalist objection; they “insist, and profess to believe, that treaties, like acts of assembly, should be repealable at pleasure.” “Publius” continues: “this idea seems to be new and peculiar to this country, but new errors, as well as new truths, often appear.” The initial problem is perceptual confusion: how can people distinguish the new truth from the new error? The problem is compounded, “Publius” hints in the next sentence, by the confusion of names (see also #14, 100). “Publius” appears to work himself out of the immediate dilemma by appealing to a definition of a treaty as bargain that must be binding on both parties. But the interpretive struggle resurfaces at the beginning of the next paragraph. “However useful jealousy may be in republics, yet when like bile in the natural it abounds too much in the body politic, the eyes of both become very liable to be deceived by the delusive appearances which that malady casts on surrounding objects.”³⁶

This passage merits careful attention. The first thing to note is “Publius's” appropriation of the “voice” of a physician rendering a complex diagnosis.³⁷ The voice reinforces the metaphor of the “body” politic and that metaphor, in turn, supports the comparison between “bile”³⁸ and jealousy. At least three languages are put into play in the metaphor: the language of medical science, the Anti-Federalist interpretive language, and an alternative language of interpretation that points out the dangers of deception, and, at least tacitly, urges interpretive candor.

Is there any sense in which these languages are organized or orchestrated? Jealousy and bile are connected, and the interpretive languages brought into contact, because each can be “useful” but also potentially disastrous to their respective “bodies.” “Publius's” double-voicing of jealousy functions in the immediate context as a way to domesticate and also redirect this form of interpretive practice. But what holds the languages of interpretation and medicine together? I want to suggest that there is a key unvoiced image recurring throughout the text that helps maintain a dialogic interaction among these languages. That image is the pharmakon.³⁹ Politics and medicine both treat phenomena that are fundamentally dialogic: the material of each domain of practice can be a remedy as well as a poison (this idea helps explains why new “truths” and new “errors” are so easily confused; the same concept can be both truth and error, remedy and poison). Jealousy and suspicion, contra Wills, are not single-voiced or single-languaged concepts; they contain within them the physiologically inscribed dialogic conflict between remedy and poison.

A similar figural logic is present in “Publius's” discussions of language and the problem of ambiguity. The nature of the problem is outlined in the passage from #64 we have been considering: the “eyes” of the body politic (and what are the eyes but the representational system, the language and logos, of the polity) are “deceived” causing a confusion between “delusive appearances” and the clarity of the “surrounding objects.”⁴⁰ In other words, language becomes corrupted and the principal culprit is ambiguity.

“Publius” joins an already well established battle against linguistic corruption in 1787. As Michael Kramer suggests, “Publius's” attack on ambiguity and linguistic corruption proceeds through two different idioms: one grounded in Lockean epistemology and the other in the moral teachings of the Scottish common sense tradition.⁴¹ Each idiom or “image” of language, like “Publius,” “disdains ambiguity” (36) but each attributes the problem to a different cause. In #14 “Publius” notes that in certain cases the language “error” is “accidental” (in this case, the confusion between republics and democracies appears to be, at least in part, due to the inherent inadequacy of language) while in others it is caused by “the artifice of some celebrated authors” (100). In the Lockean tradition, the problem (articulated most thoroughly in #37) is the inherent or natural limitation of language as a system of representation. Language simply is inadequate and the only remedy is the cultivation of linguistic precision. “Publius” grounds his attack on the opposition in a number of essays on their imprecise language and frequently defends the Constitution for its precision through “express terms” (eg. #25, 164; #31, 197; #35, 214; #66, 403).⁴² In the common sense tradition, the problem is the result of intentional deception; as “Publius” put the issue in #31: “obscurity is much often in the passion and prejudices of the reasoner than in the subject itself. Men, upon too many occasions, do not give their own understandings fair play; but, yielding to some untoward bias, they entangle themselves in words and confound themselves in subtleties” (194). The remedy for linguistic corruption, the problem of becoming entangled in words, in the common sense tradition is not more or better words but sincerity and authenticity.⁴³

While the essays contain considerable support for each of these remedies, “Publius” also acknowledges (a) that each remedy can present its own difficulties and (b) that the central problem—ambiguity—can at times function as a remedy. “Publius's” demand for precision is tempered by his contention that, since the final objects of legislative action cannot be anticipated in advance (only the general object can be fixed), it is impossible to stipulate every federal power in exact detail. Too much precision in the language of the Constitution can hamper the ultimate objective: the creation of a stable polity. And even the effort at linguistic precision will often misfire, confounding people in needless subtleties and creating needless interpretive problems (see #26-31). Nor is sincerity a sufficient solution. It is too easy, “Publius” admits in #1, to attack the opposition for their insincerity and to “multiply professions” of one's “good intentions.” Ultimately, “Publius's” “motives must remain in the depository of my own breast” (34-6).

Just as the languages of Lockean epistemology and common sense morality interanimate in the text, at times complementing and at other times contesting each other, they both collide with their apparent opposite: a language trafficking in ambiguity. The key passage here is in #37. In the essay “Publius” is reflecting broadly on epistemological matters (the sources of “obscurity”) as they relate to the practical problem of constructing a constitution. Turning to language, he notes:

Besides the obscurity arising from the complexity of objects and the imperfection of the human faculties, the medium through which the conceptions of men are conveyed to each other adds a fresh embarrassment. The use of words is to express ideas. Perspicuity, therefore, requires not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriate to them. But no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many equivocally denoting different ideas. Hence it must happen that however accurately objects may be discriminated in themselves, and however accurately the discrimination may be considered, the definition of them may be rendered inaccurate by the inadequacy of the terms in which it is delivered. And this unavoidable inaccuracy must be greater or less, according to the complexity and novelty of the object defined. When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated.

(229)

The language of the passage is largely Lockean, including the reference to the Almighty,⁴⁴ but the sentiment is not. The “cloudy medium” of language is not finally reformable; it must be acknowledged for what it is.⁴⁵ If not a celebration of a language of ambiguity, the passage certainly reaccents the word (making it double-voiced even if not voicing it directly) and it does so under the sign of the pharmakon. Ambiguity, when employed wisely by the political physician, promotes the health of the polity; in the hands of the quack (the lurking figure of the demagogue that inhabits the text),⁴⁶ it can be poison.⁴⁷ The figural logic of the pharmakon helps “Publius” orchestrate the conflicting images or languages of language.

“Publius's” more tolerant reaccentuation of ambiguity also helps, if only indirectly, to highlight the ultimate unfinalizability of the Constitutional dialogue. Law, like the language it is written in, is inherently equivocal. “All new laws,” “Publius” notes as he moves into the topic of language in #37, “though penned with the greatest technical skill and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications” (229). Commenting on this passage, Gustafson claims “Madison's philosophy of language thus circumvents or reorients any quest to determine the express meaning of the letter of the law: the meaning of the Constitution must be produced in the future, not discovered in the past.”⁴⁸ “Publius” thus incorporates the internal tension of all rhetorical advocacy into his understanding of language and political interpretation: discourse is able to organize situational contingencies and generate local closure in the midst of the ongoing and in principle unfinalizable conversation of politics and law.⁴⁹

POLYPHONY: THINKING IN VOICES⁵⁰

A polyphonic text-event presents a “diversity” or “variety” of voices (“DiN” 264, 300), “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses”; “the essence of polyphony lies precisely in the fact that the voices remain independent” (Problems 6, 21). From Bakhtin's perspective, The Federalist essays may not represent true polyphony, there is, Bakhtin might argue (as I engage in my own polyphony), too much of a merging of voices in the text. Such a reading of the text, however, neglects important tensions that need to be analyzed if we are to appreciate the eventfulness of the text and assess its potential polyphonic character.

An obvious tension, noted some years ago by Alpheus Mason, exists in the doctrinal inconsistencies that appear in the text.⁵¹ Another tension emerges through the vocal inflections or accents employed by “Publius.” As Gordon Wood notes, Federalists, and “Publius” in particular, appropriated the language and vocal intonations of democratic radicalism⁵² but this democratic accent needs to be juxtaposed with “Publius's” strong aristocratic inflections.⁵³ Particularly interesting tensions can be uncovered in the pseudonymous voice inhabiting the essays and in the specific instances of voice appropriation where “Publius” speaks in a voice other than his “own.”

The use of pseudonyms to conceal as well as enhance identity is a common discursive convention in 18th century Britain and America. Because it was, as Bailyn puts it, so “common and transparent,”⁵⁴ historians are inclined to overlook its presence. Those historians, like Douglas Adair,⁵⁵ who have paid attention to the practice reveal aspects of its instrumental persuasive potential, but stop short of engaging its dialogic or constitutive significance. In one of the most conceptually sophisticated efforts at exploring the textuality of the founding era, Michael Warner argues that pseudonyms contribute to the impersonality and depersonalization of the early American public sphere.⁵⁶ But this negation of persons did open up a new space for voices, and “Publius's” was one of the many voices seeking a hearing in 1787.

“Publius” is taken from the Roman statesman Publius Valerius, also own as “Publicola” (the people-pleaser).⁵⁷ Epstein suggests that the pseudonym is connected to “Publius's” “temporizing” strategy (or, as Wills might put it, the pseudonym is another aspect of the “protreptic” textual surface distinct from its substantive monological core). Furtwangler, on the other hand, maintains that it functions “to imply a positive, lofty intention behind this new series.”⁵⁸ The tension between these accounts of the pseudonym is brought to the surface by Warner. He argues that: “in choosing the relatively uncommon pseudonym of Publius the authors of The Federalist punningly identify themselves with the public while also identifying themselves with the founding of polity and the institution of law.”⁵⁹ Beyond functioning as a pun, the pseudonym “Publius” reveals the essential polyphonic quality of the text. The Federalist essays not only merge the distinct personalities of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay into the voice of “Publius”; the essays also allow the constructed author “Publius” to speak with a double voice. The first voice is that of a popular politician (perhaps bordering on the voice of the unscrupulous demagogue) that appeals to the public at large through the appropriation of the democratic idiom of popular sovereignty (and other forms of what Wills terms “sweet talk”). The second voice is that of a “founder-father.”⁶⁰ In this voice “Publius” speaks as a lawgiver or an expert political physician who can diagnose the nation's problems and offer the appropriate remedies (without regard for their popularity). Somewhat like Dostoevsky, who in his polemical essays, according to Bakhtin, “does not really persuade but rather organizes voices” (Problems 93), “Publius” tries to persuade his immediate audience as well as engage his future readers through his linguistic and vocal orchestration.

A thorough analysis of these competing voices would require a separate essay (at least). A passage from the opening essay (penned by Hamilton) warns the reader about the different voices engaged in the ratification debate:

An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of violent love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is too apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interests can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious [attractive] mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.

(35; emphasis added)

Two rival “masks,” two competing voices are identified. The first is the “specious [attractive]”⁶¹ mask of the popular politician. This voice courts “popularity at the expense of public good,” stigmatizing energetic and efficient government as despotic, through its employment of the interpretive language (discussed in the last section) of jealousy and suspicion. “History,” “Publius” reminds the reader, shows that this popular voice is nothing but a (false) mask that hides the real voice at work: the demagogue and tyrant. The second voice that emerges in the passage, the voice of the “founder-father,” speaks through a second mask: “the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.” The “founder-father's” voice is “enlightened” and unlikely “to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust.” It will not employ the “stale bait” used by popular politicians but will, instead, seek to elicit “a sound and well-informed judgment.”

The voice of the “founder-father” dominates the essays and, there seems to be little doubt, it is the voice with which “Publius” most closely identified. But just as “Publius” double-voices key concepts like interpretive jealousy under the sign of the pharmakon, he also appropriates the voice of the popular politician. In the passage from #1 we have been considering, “Publius” rejects the popular language and voice of suspicion as beneath the persona of “founder-father.” But the overall force of the passage re-voices this perspective. This re-voicing becomes clear at the beginning of the next paragraph. Here “Publius” admits that in this opening essay he has “had an eye, my fellow citizens, to putting you upon your guard against all attempts … to influence your decision … by any impressions other than those which may result from the evidence of truth” (35). As founder-father, “Publius” claims to have access to “the evidence of truth.” In order to deploy this evidence, however, “Publius” must appropriate the popular voice and urge his readers to be on their “guard,” to be suspicious, of the competing advocate-voices in the ratification debate. The process of voice appropriation, in evidence on a small scale in essay #1, reveals the polyphonic character of the pseudonym; “Publius” speaks as both “founder-father” and popular politician.

There are a number of moments in the text where polyphonic voice appropriation is explicit (rather than, as seems to be the case with the pseudonym, more implicit). An early example occurs in essay #24 where “Publius” constructs the identity of a “stranger” and then recreates the debate over standing armies through “his” perspective (157-162). An even clearer and more complicated example is introduced in essay #54.⁶² “Publius” is in the middle of a discussion of the House of Representatives. After having considered qualifications of electors and the elected (#52) and the term of office (#52-3), he turns to the question of apportionment. The potential stumbling block that must be addressed is the clause in the proposed Constitution that would allow slaves (euphemistically referred to as “all other persons”) to be counted as three-fifths of a person for determining direct taxes and the number of seats in the House of Representatives that will be allotted to each State.

“Publius” develops his reply through the figure of prosopopoeia: speaking directly in the voice of an absent (or in this case, fictitious) person. “Publius” begins the essay by revoicing (“in its full force”) the criticism of the opposition: “Slaves are considered as property, not as persons. They ought therefore to be comprehended in estimates of taxation which are founded on property, and to be excluded from representation which is regulated by a census of persons” (336). In order to be “equally candid,” “Publius” introduces the “reasoning” of the “opposite side” in the voice of “one of our Southern brethren” (336). The remainder of the essay, except for two relatively brief closing paragraphs, is in the voice of the Southerner.

The Southerner begins by rejecting the dichotomy presented by the opposition. Slaves are not considered “merely as property.” True, a slave is “vendible” and therefore a species of property but the law also treats the slave “as a moral person.” The slave's “true” character is “mixed” and this is recognized by the proposed Constitution (337). But these remarks are only preparatory for the main argument. First, “Publius's” hypothetical Southerner charges the opposition with inconsistency. “Might not some surprise also be expressed,” the Southerner inquires, “that those who reproach the Southern States with the barbarous policy of considering as property a part of their human brethren should themselves contend that the government … ought to consider this unfortunate race more completely in the unnatural light of property than the very laws of which they complain?” (338). In the Southerner's “voice,” the three-fifths compromise is reinterpreted as a positive achievement,⁶³ an at least partial recognition of the slave's humanity, that critics of the Constitution, because of an abstract ideological commitment, are willing to throw away.

In the next section, the Southerner revoices another possible objection (bring the voice levels to four: Madison, “Publius,” the Southerner, the opposition): “It may be replied, perhaps, that slaves are not included in the estimate of representatives in any of the States possessing them. They neither vote themselves nor increase the votes of their masters. Upon what principle, then, ought they to be taken into the federal estimate of representation?” (338). The Southerner replies that the Constitution leaves it up to each state to determine the qualifications of suffrage while making federal representation the subject of one uniform rule. No two states have the same suffrage requirements. “In every state,” the Southerner claims, “a certain proportion of inhabitants are deprived of this right by the Constitution of the State, who will be included in the census by which the federal Constitution apportions the representatives” (338). Not only is the Constitution an advancement for slaves, but the South is now presented as generous. Southerners “might retort” (a new hypothetical voice) that slaves should be fully counted in the census (just as, it would seem, nonvoting women are fully counted in the North). But the South has “waived” this demand asking only “that equal moderation be shown on the other side” (338-39). “Publius's” introduction of the Southerner's voice allows the entire initial section to function as a large epitrope: a “candid” encounter with the opposition's claims eventuates in a complete reversal of the initial claims. The three-fifths clause is not an unfair gain for the South; it is reinscribed as a sacrifice for the sake of compromise, an act of generosity on the part of the South, made on behalf of the union.

At this point “Publius's” goal seems to be accomplished and the fictitious Southern voice no longer necessary. But the voice continues, demonstrating (at least a degree of) the autonomy that Bakhtin believes is critical in fully developed polyphony. But what more might the Southerner say? “He” continues by traversing new argumentative “ground.” “Government,” the Southerner maintains, “is instituted no less for the protection of property than of the persons of the individuals.” But no branch of the new government is designed to be the “guardian of property.” In order to protect property, “some attention ought, therefore, to be paid to property in the choice of those hands [representatives]” (339). Rich states lack the “imperceptible channels” manipulated by wealthy individuals in order to supplement their individual votes and exploit the “superior advantages of fortune.” The three-fifths clause provides a Constitutional remedy by securing (Southern) states of “superior wealth and weight” a “superior share of representation” (339-40). By unleashing the Southerner's “voice,” “Publius” introduces a concept (the representation of wealth and property) that is at odds with the dominant principle of the Constitution (popular representation) and reminiscent of the discredited political doctrines of the former mother country.

“Publius” concludes by acknowledging that the “reasoning” of the Southerner may “be a little strained in some points” but then he “confess[es] that it fully reconciles me to the scale of representation which the convention have established” (340). In the course of the essay, the hypothetical Southerner grows increasingly autonomous while the author, “Publius,” assumes the role of a reader. Like the reader of his essay, “Publius” seems to have had some doubts about the three-fifths clause but the reasoning of the Southerner has removed those just as “Publius” seems to hope that the entire essay will remove the doubts of his primarily Northern reader. The essay blends together (public) self-persuasion and public advocacy. But also like the reader, “Publius” did not control the way the rhetorical event unfolded. The Southerner's voice spoke fully and with a considerable degree of authority, even if the reasoning was a little strained. But it is precisely those strains that embody the dialogic tensions, the competing voices, and the internal arguments, of the text.

CONCLUSION

Discussing language and the nation's founding, Gustafson notes: “The conflict between what Bakhtin calls the centripetal forces of monoglossia and the centrifugal forces of heteroglossia, or between centralizing forces seeking a unitary language and decentralizing forces seeking diversity in language and thought, is written into the very fabric of American government in the conflict between federal and state governments and between the state and the individual.”⁶⁴ This tension, along with many others, “is written into the very fabric” of one of our nation's fundamental acts of political advocacy and imagination: The Federalist Papers. The Federalist Papers, like most complex rhetorical performances, are a dialogized, heteroglossic, and polyphonic text. This reading of certain key moments of the text-event does not exhaust its dialogic potential. What I have tried to do is indicate some of the ways that Bakhtin's understanding of prose discourse, especially his concepts of heteroglossia and polyphony, can be used to engage contested texts like The Federalist Papers as a dialogic event.

Notes

1. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975); and Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969).

2. For an overview of the literature on republicanism, see Robert E. Shalhope, “Republicanism and Early American Historiography” William and Mary Quarterly, 39 (1982): 334-356; Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept” Journal of American History, 79 (1992): 11-38.

3. See, for example, Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (NY: New York University Press, 1984) and John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism. (NY: Basic Books, 1984).

4. Isaac Kramnick, “The ‘Great National Discussion’: The Discourse of Politics in 1787” William and Mary Quarterly, 45 (1988): 4.

5. Leading proponents of the linguistic turn in history include J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. See Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (NY: Atheneum, 1971); Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” History and Theory, 8 (1969): 3-53 and “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action” Political Theory, 2 (1974): 277-303. Linking Pocock and Skinner in this way does not imply that their positions on key issues (like intentionality) are identical. Nor am I suggesting that the linguistic turn in history is a unified theoretical movement; it may be more precise to speak of linguistic turns. For an alternative turn, one that has influenced my approach to the problem of the contested text, see Dominick LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts” in LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983) 23-71. For an account of the broader “linguistic turn” in the humanities and its relationship to historical inquiry, see Donald R. Kelley, “Horizons of Intellectual History: Retrospect, Circumspect, Prospect” Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987): 143-169.

6. My sense of the “contested text” is similar to Montrose's idea of the “complex text” that is “produced and appropriated within history and within a history of other productions and appropriations.” See Louis A. Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture” in The New Historicism, ed. H. A. Veeser (NY: Routledge, 1989), 22. Cf. LaCapra's “dialogical” approach to “complex” texts and their “intense moments of inner difference and self-contestation” (18).

7. These are Bakhtin's terms. For an overview of these concepts in the context of Bakhtin's thought, see Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990; subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text). In my view, dialogic interpretation occupies a middle ground between a narrow instrumental approach to the text (an extreme monologism) and a complete interpretive unmasking common in some forms of deconstruction.

8. In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin insists that “the novel, and artistic prose in general, has the closest genetic, family relationship to rhetorical forms.” Rhetoric is crucial to Bakhtin's reformulation of prose analysis: “Once rhetorical discourse is brought into the study with all its living diversity, it cannot fail to have a deeply revolutionizing influence on linguistics and on the philosophy of language.” In The Dialogic Imagination, tran. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 268-69 (subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text as “DiN”). But in other passages of the essay Bakhtin effectively dismisses rhetorical performance as superficial and shallow.

   On Bakhtin and rhetorical studies, see Kay Halasek, “Starting the Dialogue: What Can we Do About Bakhtin's Ambivalence Toward Rhetoric?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 22 (1992): 1-9; Michael Bernard-Donals, “Mikhail Bakhtin, Classical Rhetoric, and Praxis” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 22 (1992); 10-15; Don Bialostosky, “Bakhtin and the Future of Rhetorical Criticism: A Response to Halasek and Bernard-Donals” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 22 (1992): 16-21; and James Thomas Zebroski, “Mikhail Bakhtin and the Question of Rhetoric” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 22 (1992): 22-28.

9. Bakhtin's sense of the text-as-event is developed in “DiN” 259-422 and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text as Problems). The idea of text-as-event has played an important role in the linguistic turn in intellectual history. LaCapra, inspired in part by Bakhtin, maintains that “texts are events in the history of language. To understand these multivalent events as complex uses of language, one must learn to pose anew the question of ‘what really happens’ in them” (Rethinking 65). Pocock also emphasizes the eventfulness of discursive invention (or, as he puts it more simply, “thinking”) as part of his version of the linguistic turn. Texts function as a “social event, an act of communication and of response within a paradigm-system, and as a historical event, a moment in a process of transformation of that system and of the interacting worlds which both systems and act help to constitute and are constituted by” (Politics 15). The “eventfulness” of rhetoric is also a theme in Gerard Hauser, An Introduction to Rhetorical Theory (NY: Harper and Row, 1986).

10. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (NY: New American Library, 1961). Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text. The project was initiated by Hamilton. He approached a few possible contributors but those solicitations ended once Madison and Jay agreed to work on the project. Jay fell ill shortly after the series began, leaving the bulk of the work to Hamilton and Madison (Jay eventually penned five essays). There has been some dispute about the authorship of a few of the remaining essays. Rossiter relied on the work of Douglass Adair to claim that Hamilton wrote fifty-one papers and Madison the remaining twenty-six. Hamilton outlined the overall structure of the project in essay #1 (36). The first thirty-six essays treat three topics: the necessity of union, the insufficiency of the Articles of Confederation as the basis for a national government, and the need for an energetic national government. Madison's essay #37 is a transitional piece, something of a digression, that leads into a discussion of the relationship between the proposed Constitution and the principles of “republican government.” After offering a defense of the convention, Madison, and then Hamilton (with one Jay essay), dealt with the powers granted to the national government by the proposed Constitution and a consideration of each branch of government. Two good introductions to the authorship, production, structure, and argument of The Federalist Papers are: David Epstein, The Political Theory of The Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Albert Furtwangler, The Authority of Publius (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).

    Numerous issues were the subject of dispute in the 1780s. Economic policy in the states (taxes, debtor relief laws, paper currency, etc.) was the subject of considerable agitation. The transition to a market economy generated a number of political and social tensions. Tensions between the regions (e.g. the more commercial New England states and the agrarian South) and between different regions in a state (rural versus urban) were also growing. In some areas, conflict took on class overtones. The reasons for the perceived “national crisis,” as well as the possible solutions, were debated in the popular press. These debates introduced an important ideological dimension to the unfolding argument as the virtues of various political orientations (republican, democratic, monarchical, “mixed” regimes) and the meaning of key political concepts (federalism, virtue, representative government, etc.) were debated.

    The literature on the founding period is extensive. Among the many useful studies, see: Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation 1781-1789 (NY: A. A. Knopf, 1950); Jackson Turner Main, The AntiFederalists: Critics of the Constitution 1781-1788 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); Wood, Creation; Peter S. Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985); and Michael Lienesch, New Order of the Ages: Time, the Constitution, and the Making of Modern American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

11. M. M. Bakhtin, “Iz zapisei 1970-1971 godov” [From Jottings of 1970-1971] in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979) 355 quoted in Caryl Emerson, “Editor's Preface” in Problems xxxvii.

12. The distinction suggested here, between the instrumental and constitutive dimensions of a rhetorical performance, is emerging in post-turn intellectual history and political theory. See, for example, James Farr's discussion of the “activating and constituting dimensions” of language action (in James Farr, “Conceptual Change and Constitutional Innovation” in Conceptual Change and the Constitution, eds. T. Ball and J. G. A. Pocock [Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1988] 13-34).

13. In terms of The Federalist Papers, Furtwangler notes: “The Federalist … had to be more than trenchant, and its authors had to see beyond the winning of a few grudged ballots or narrow majorities. They had to dispel doubt, elicit assent, and promote a lasting sense of confidence in the new framework of government” (69).

14. Thomas Gustafson provides some indirect support for this claim. In his view, America's Constitutional order, and not just a single text like The Federalist Papers, is structured in such a way as to promote this kind of creativity: “The dialogical novel maintains an unresolvable [unfinalizable] conflict of representations, while America's constitutional government seeks to resolve those conflicts in acts of voting, legislation, or judicial review. But this distinction needs to be qualified, because the structure of American government precludes the finality of any resolution. The consensus of the vote, of legislation, and of judicial review is temporary; it yields to new campaigns, new debates, new cases.” See Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 30.

15. Bakhtin's nominalism is replicated in some pre-turn historical accounts of the American revolution and founding. Consensus historians, believing that Americans really agreed on all essential ideological issues, had to explain the presence of conflict in American politics. The solution for some was to reduce the conflicts to personal animosity or elite power struggles (e.g. Samuel Adams against Thomas Hutchinson, Patrick Henry against James Madison, or petty state politicians trying to protect their power from the encroachments of disinterested Federalist statesmen). My point is not that personal disputes played no role in revolutionary and founding-era politics; the issue is whether all conflict can be reduced to this level. Post-turn historians suggest that ideology (if not clearly rooted in a sense of class) played an essential role in the political disputes of the late 18th century.

16. Fish's position on a number of issues relating to rhetoric and textuality are congruent with Bakhtin's (compare Fish's discussion of the network of constraints within which individuals exist with Bakhtin's account of heteroglossia and ideological becoming) but he adamantly rejects the idea that individuals can achieve distance from themselves through a relativized consciousness. Fish asks “Just how does one distance oneself from oneself? With which part of oneself can one be tentative about oneself?” Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1990) 517; see generally 436-467.

17. See George Kamberelis and Karla Scott, “Other People's Voices: The Co-Articulation of Texts and Subjectivities” Linguistics and Education, 4 (1992): 359-403.

18. This anxiety is a key theme in Gustafson. On the linguistic “self-questioning” of the founders, see also Cynthia S. Jordan, “‘Old Words’ in ‘New Circumstances’: Language and Leadership in Post-Revolutionary America” American Quarterly, 40 (1988): 491-513.

19. Additionally, even the self-confident advocate can exhibit traces of prosaic consciousness through their strategies for repressing alternative languages and voices. In his discussion of the Constitutional text, John Leubsdorf suggests that despite being “written to speak decisively” the Constitution will still “quarrel with itself” since decisiveness only leads “to the repression, not the elimination, of discord.” Leubsdorf, “Deconstructing the Constitution” Stanford Law Review, 40 (1987): 183.

20. Garry Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist (NY: Penguin Books, 1981) 171.

21. Jay Fliegelman notices this tension in The Federalist Papers. In Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993), he writes: “Thus the title of our nation's greatest work of political theory may be said to contain an active dialogue between a position that asserts the primacy of the parts over the whole and one that asserts the primacy of the whole over the parts” (152). Fliegelman's account of the internal dialogism of the concept of “federalism” illustrates one of Bakhtin's central contentions about language: the inherent tension between its centripetal and centrifugal impulses (oddly, Fliegelman doesn't mention Bakhtin).

22. It seems worth noting that Bakhtin's discussion of the way intentions are refracted through various linguistic planes (eg.“DiN” 311) parallels Wills' reading of Madison's “theory” of political representation. See Wills esp. 223-247. This observation suggests the need for additional analysis of the relationship between political and linguistic representation in The Federalist Papers.

23. Echoes of Bakhtin's account of the author as organizer can be found in Fleigelman's discussion of “an older understanding of the role of the author.” According to Fliegelman, this “older understanding,” still present during the American founding period, blurred the tasks of author and editor, making possible an inventive practice he terms “writing with scissors” (Declaring 170-73).

24. The ubiquity of the dialogic appropriation of languages and voices is illustrated in Kamberelis and Scott.

25. As this passage illustrates, language and voice are interwoven in Bakhtin's thought. Heteroglossia, the presence of multiple languages within a text, and polyphony, the presence of multiple voices, are two sides of the same coin. For a similar account of these concepts, see Margaret D. Zulick, “The Agon of Jeremiah: On the Dialogic Invention of Prophetic Ethos” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 78 (1992): 125-148.

26. For example, see Kramnick; Peter S. Onuf, “Reflections on the Founding: Constitutional Historiography in Bicentennial Perspective” William and Mary Quarterly, 46 (1989): 341-375; Ruth H. Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America” Signs, 13 (1987): 37-58; and James T. Kloppenberg, “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse” Journal of American History, 74 (1987): 9-33.

27. On the topic of representation in The Federalist Papers, see Epstein esp. 147-161; Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967) esp. 190-98; and Wills 177-264.

28. Leubsdorf notes the Constitution's and I think the same argument can be made for “Publius's,” “double-mindedness about power” (192).

29. As Morton White observes, “Publius” refers to justice as “the end of government and of civil society, but never tries to define ‘justice.’” Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution (NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987) 194.

30. Furtwangler 45-79; Wills 207. See also James Arnt Aune, “Candor, Rhetoric, and Interpretation in The Federalist” in Spheres of Argument: Proceedings of the Sixth SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, ed. Bruce Gronbeck (Annandale: SCA, 1989) 361-65.

31. Wills 188.

32. My reading of the text on this topic is much closer to Epstein (eg. 29-32). Epstein describes “Publius's” stance in these terms: the people “must trust those they are jealous of so that their natural jealousy will be useful, and be jealous of those they trust so that their natural trust will not be duped” (48). Epstein's dense prose (parallelism, antithesis, chiasmus) and figurative articulation (the essentially oxymoronic idea of “jealous trust”) syntactically acknowledges the difficulty of trying to redescribe “Publius's” linguistic orchestration.

33. See Pocock, Machiavellian Moment 352.

34. On the relationship between British and American political thought in the 18th century, see Bailyn esp. 22-54. On the importance of the maxims of interpretive jealousy and suspicion in the political literature of 17th- and early-18th-century England, see Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, II New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought (1992; rpt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

35. On the Anti-Federalist interpretive politics of jealousy and suspicion, see “Cato” VII, New York Journal, 3 January 1788 (rpt. in The Complete Anti-Federalist, ed. Herbert J. Storing [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981] II, 125); “Centinel” II, [Philadelphia] Freeman's Journal 24 October 1787; (rpt. in Complete II, 145); “Poplicola,” Boston Gazette, 24 December 1787 (rpt. in Complete IV, 149); and “Cincinnatus” III, New York Journal 8 November, 1787 (rpt. in Complete VI, 11).

36. Medical metaphors abound in The Federalist essays (evidence of their presence can be found in at least thirty-four of the essays). My discussion here of medicine and the pharmakon image is a first step in a larger project that seeks to respond to Wood's suggestion that “the fascinating connection between 18th-century medical science and terminology and Enlightenment thought needs full exploration” (52).

37. Madison, in #38, adopts the posture of physician (234) while Hamilton, in #28, attacks Anti-Federalists for being “political doctors whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction” (178).

38. In the physiology of the time, bile was a humor, a bodily secretion that determined a person's temperament, connected to irascibility and melancholy.

39. In the classical tradition of rhetoric, the possibility that logos might function as a pharmakon is raised by Gorgias (see “Encomium on Helen” in Readings from Classical Rhetoric, eds. P. Matsen, P. Rollinson, and M. Sousa [Carbondale: SIU Press, 1990] 34-6) and, as Derrida points out, occupies a prominent place in Plato's thinking on language and rhetoric. See Jacques Derrida, “Plato's Pharmacy” in Dissemination, tran. B. Johnson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981) 63-171. My discussion of the pharmakon image has been stimulated, in part, by some provocative observations in Gustafson and I hope to pursue this line of inquiry in a project tentatively entitled “Publius's Pharmakon: Medicine and Metaphor in The Federalist Papers.”

40. The relationship between visual metaphors and reason is noted by Harry S. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” William and Mary Quarterly, 34 (1977): 529.

41. Michael P. Kramer, Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992) esp. 119-136. I think Kramer is right in highlighting the tension between the Lockean and common sense approaches to language critique in The Federalist (a point not emphasized, for example, in Gustafson) but I find his argument that Locke's approach only appears in Madison's discussion in #37 off the mark. Kramer and Gustafson appear engaged in an effort to establish the dominant language paradigm of the founding period (e.g. “it was in a Lockean linguistic framework that Americans would construct, debate, and battle over the Constitution” Gustafson 157; “the predominant linguistic theory of the founders [was] that of the Scottish Commonsense philosophers” Kramer 121). My interest is in the dialogue between the different languages of language.

42. Although in one case (#36, 218) “Publius's” attack on Anti-federal imprecision develops metaphorically, illuminating the dialogic tension between precision and signs of linguistic corruption.

43. On sincerity and authenticity in The Federalist, see Fliegelman esp. 125-27. My discussion of the dialogue of languages reaffirms Fliegelman's observation that “what energizes a great deal of the polemical prose of the period is the dialectical relation between the authority of impersonality rooted in the discourse of descriptive science and the authority of sincerity rooted in the discourse of affective experience” (129). Both of these “discourses,” Lockean epistemology and common sense morality, interact throughout The Federalist essays.

44. Gustafson 282-83; Kramer 125-27.

45. “Publius” seems to come close, through the “cloud” metaphor, to recognizing that language is a “medium of refraction” (Problems 202); it is “cloudy” because it contains the traces of other people's “words,” their meanings and intentions, that then refract the intentions of any speaker or writer.

46. Daniel Walker Howe notes that “the demagogue is a sinister figure in The Federalist.” Howe, “The Political Psychology of The Federalist” William and Mary Quarterly, 44 (1987): 503. See also Gustafson 289.

47. In his discussion of the pharmakon, Derrida notes Plato's tendency to oppose “good” and “bad” ambiguity (103). On ambiguity in The Federalist and the founding period, see Kramer 132-35.

48. Gustafson 283.

49. The fluidity of the process is unintentionally captured in the 18th-century term “liquidate.”

50. See Problems 93.

51. Alpheus T. Mason, “The Federalist—A Split Personality” American Historical Review, 57 (1952): 625-643. Mason's essay has become a punching bag for commentators seeking to establish the coherence and unity of the text.

52. Wood 562.

53. This inflection can be “overheard,” for example, in the heavy use of condensed dissociations in discussing the operations of the new government. Again and again, “Publius” insists that the new system of government will be based on a “due dependence” and “proper degree of influence” (#35 216), or that legislators will exhibit a “requisite dependence” (#52 328) upon the people.

54. Bailyn 11.

55. Douglas Adair, “A Note on Certain of Hamilton's Pseudonyms” in Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair, ed. Trevor Colburn (NY: W.W. Norton, 1974) 272-285.

56. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990) 62, 42-3.

57. Plutarch's Lives, tran. Sir Thomas North (NY: Limited Editions Club, 1941) I, 274-307. See also Epstein 203.

58. Epstein 30; Furtwangler 51.

59. Warner 113.

60. On the “rebirth” of “fathers” in post-revolutionary America, see Jordan, “‘Old Words’” and Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982).

61. On the 18th-century meaning of “specious,” see Wills 282.

62. Many commentators on the text (eg. Epstein, Wills) ignore #54. Furtwangler (77) argues that the “antic pose” adopted in the essay reflected “Publius's” commitment to the principle of candor; all arguments needed to be considered with care. Historians of American slavery, on the other hand, frequently refer to this essay. For example, see Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics 1765-1820 (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), 236-38.

63. In the 1970s, Herbert Storing would indirectly revoice “Publius's” argument. In “Slavery and the Moral Foundations of the American Republic,” Storing writes: “The concession to slavery here was not in somehow paring the slave down to three-fifths but in counting him for as much as three-fifths of a free person.” Herbert J. Storing, “Slavery and the Moral Foundations of the American Republic,” The College, July 1976 (rpt. in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, ed. R. H. Horwitz, 3rd ed [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986], 321).

64. Gustafson 30.