The Federalist remains one of the most influential books ever written about our country because no other single text better or more clearly expresses the mind of the American Founders. Cited in everything from Supreme Court decisions to Broadway musicals, this collection of eighty-five papers by the pseudonymous Publius still has considerable sway over our national imagination. Something about this book keeps Americans coming back to it in search of self-knowledge.
Still, reading these documents cannot help but inspire an aching sense of loss. For one, The Federalist’s elevated style is at a great distance from the sorry state of public discourse today—it is hard to picture politicians on cable news or Twitter/X engaging in this kind of serious political philosophy. But at an even deeper level, it feels as though American politics has lost sight of what Publius understood about the meaning of the common good our republic was constituted to secure. Especially in our era of digital democracy, the intense factional divisions the Founders feared seem to have triumphed over “the better angels of our nature.” On both the Right and the Left, some have even begun to question the validity of the Constitution itself. Is it worth defending this broken-down government anymore? Can The Federalist really still help explain who we are as a people?
But far from being irrelevant to contemporary debates, I would propose that The Federalist contains within its pages the antidote to the diseases ailing our body politic. For one, it is perhaps the greatest explanation of how our written Constitution is supposed to work. It is also, more importantly, one of the great symbols of America’s political tradition, a written expression of the unwritten constitution that seems to be failing. Publius’s true act of statesmanship was not simply convincing the Founding Generation to ratify the US Constitution, but also providing us, their inheritors, with a guide to civic education we desperately need to recover.
In order to understand The Federalist, we must first understand the political crisis it was written to answer. The United States’s improbable victory in the War for Independence did not usher in some kind of earthly utopia; if anything, American government in the 1780s was more unstable than anything experienced under the dominion of the British Empire. Almost immediately following the Battle of Yorktown, the young republic faced threats of domestic insurrection. From conspiracies of Continental Army officers to storm the capital, to the populist Daniel Shays’s rebellion in Massachusetts, it was clear that the Articles of Confederation did not frame a government strong enough to prevent mass disorder or even civil war.
The Constitutional Convention that met in 1787, then, was emphatically not a philosophe’s salon—it was a gamble for national survival. The delegates did not seek to provide a final answer to every political question, but rather to give the Union the strength it needed to resist this pull towards anarchy. Despite the aspersions of their contemporary opponents and the speculations of latter-day critics, these men truly believed in the American Revolution. Some, such as Benjamin Franklin and Roger Sherman, had signed the Declaration of Independence itself. Others, such as Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, fought and bled for its principles on the battlefield. These delegates were not staging an aristocratic coup against America’s democratic ideals, but rather reorganizing the federal government with sufficient energy so that it could preserve Americans’ hard-won liberty.
The constituent parts of Publius’s mind had to set aside whatever real differences of opinion existed between them and adopt a more moderate point of view in defense of the actual, as opposed to their ideal, Constitution.
Inspired as the “demigods” of the Convention may seem in hindsight, none of the delegates were entirely satisfied with the “bundle of compromises” that emerged. James Madison, now revered as the “Father of the Constitution,” felt it did not sufficiently nationalize politics. Hamilton, convinced by his wartime experiences that good government required an energetic executive, felt that the presidency was too feeble. Sixteen delegates refused to sign the document altogether, because they considered it a consolidation of power tending towards tyranny. Persuading the people as a whole to adopt the Constitution would be an uphill battle.
Despite their hesitations and doubts, Hamilton and Madison, along with their colleague John Jay, knew that this was their best chance to secure a stronger union. New York was one of the swing states in the ratification debate, and so they decided to work together to write a series of essays in that state’s newspapers to sway public opinion to the Constitution’s cause—what we now call The Federalist. Adopting the pseudonym Publius, in honor of one of the founders of the Roman Republic, they set out on one of the most important public relations campaigns in history.
Importantly, taking on a common pseudonym was an act of statesmanship in and of itself. In the words of the late scholar George Carey, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay each understood that “a united and coherent defense of the proposed Constitution would require them to trim their theoretical sails, that is, to accommodate themselves and their thinking to the implicit values and assumptions of the document, as well as to the sensibilities of each other.” To write The Federalist, the constituent parts of Publius’s mind had to set aside whatever real differences of opinion existed between them and adopt a more moderate point of view in defense of the actual, as opposed to their ideal, Constitution.
Perhaps they could overcome their personal pride because they understood the stakes. From the outset, Publius is clear that ratification bore a world-historical significance. In Federalist #1, he writes:
It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may, with propriety, be regarded as the period when that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act, may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.
This introduction reveals something about why Publius defended the Constitution so ardently: he believed it would teach the people a certain kind of virtue. It was a commonplace at the time of the Founding that republics need virtue to survive; as Washington put it in his Farewell Address, it “is a necessary spring of popular government.” Strangely, though, Publius does not often mention virtue explicitly. Throughout the work, he is far more likely to discuss the darker side of human nature—the thing the checks and balances of the Constitution were designed to restrain. But Publius’s emphasis on reflection and choice at the very start of his project shows that the preservation of self-government depends on classical virtue of prudence, that is to say, the application of principle to circumstance.
Federalist #10 provides a particularly good example of how Publius thinks the Constitution can teach the people this highest political virtue. The subject of the essay is the problem of faction—an issue with which we are surely familiar in such divided times as our own. According to Publius, a faction is any group of citizens “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest,” seeking to subvert the rights of others or undermine the public good. Factions, he writes, are particularly troublesome in popular governments in which the will of the majority prevails. How does the Constitution solve this problem? According to Publius, by “extending the sphere.” The sheer size of the Union mitigates faction by making it difficult for any single one to gain control of all the levers of power. “In the extent and proper structure of” the federal government, he concludes, “we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”
The entirety of The Federalist is meant to teach readers just how precious freedom is, and how dangerous it is to leave her defense merely to chance.
At first glance, this argument has little to do with prudence. It almost seems as though Publius expects the “extended sphere” to operate on the basis of carefully balanced interests alone—as he says, after all, “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” But in his recent book American Covenant, Yuval Levin argues that Publius understood that this wider array of interests could actually “more effectively compel cooperation across factional lines” by forcing their representatives to deliberate with one another. These kinds of negotiations are a kind of process of discovery; by bringing together a host of particular interests, the Constitution aims to help us see our common interest. Deliberation necessitates prudence to work at all.
Of course, not all of Publius’s rivals were persuaded by this argument. The antifederalists who opposed ratification had such a wide array of ideological commitments and factional interests that it is almost impossible to attribute a single shared viewpoint to the entire party. But one of the things antifederalists usually agreed on was a belief that the Constitution’s “extended sphere” represented a consolidation of power in the political center. They felt that a stronger Union necessarily meant weaker states, and therefore fewer bulwarks against tyranny.
Publius went to great lengths to respond to this criticism. At the most basic level, he agreed with the antifederalists that tyranny, or the accumulation of absolute power in the hands of one person or group, was the worst possible outcome. But the whole point of the Constitution’s model for union was to avoid this. As Publius explains in Federalist #39, for instance,
The proposed Constitution … is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both. In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and, finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.
Politics has become so hyper-nationalized in our era that it can be difficult to discern the outlines of this mixed composition. Nonetheless, it still operates in meaningful ways; intrusive as the federal government is, states are not its mere departments quite yet. They still possess the ability to curb the federal government’s overreaches, both in the courts and by other means of interposition. And the different sources for members of the House of Representatives and the Senate continue to ensure that, in the words of Federalist #62, the legislative power is “founded on a mixture of the principles of proportional and equal representation.” Vestigial as these elements of mixed composition may seem at times, it remains powerful enough to give the true friends of liberty real leverage in the system of checks and balances.
Even if the Constitution does not consolidate political power in the way the antifederalists feared, Publius does seem intent on emphasizing a consolidated sense of national identity. Over and over again throughout The Federalist, Publius strives to emphasize how Americans constitute one people. As he puts it in Federalist #2:
Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence. This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.
Of course, when Publius wrote this passage, it was not strictly true. States like Virginia and Massachusetts could be so different as to seem almost as though they were different countries. Historians estimate that about one-third of Pennsylvania’s population only spoke German. But as the Constitution lays out in the Preamble, one of its most important goals was “to make a more perfect Union.” Contrary to the utopian gloss the phrase is often given today, the Framers did not mean this as a synonym for social progress, however much they may have wished for it. Instead, “more perfect” meant more closely united, more tightly bound together.
The fact that Publius once succeeded in uniting the people should give us hope that renewal is possible.
But beyond simply recognizing the things which already united Americans to one another, Publius hoped to work for this “more perfect union” through a program of civic education. The Federalist aims not just to persuade New York voters to ratify the Constitution, or to explain how the document works, but also to teach Americans what their country means. Throughout the essays, Publius warns that “parchment provisions” or “barriers” are, as he puts it, especially in Federalist #48, “not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.” As carefully designed as the Constitution was, it simply would not work if the people were not possessed by a spirited love of liberty.
The entirety of The Federalist is meant to teach readers just how precious freedom is, and how dangerous it is to leave her defense merely to chance. In the end, this is the reason Publius chose to engage with the American people at the heights of political philosophy. As he puts it in Federalist #85, establishing a new constitution requires “the voluntary consent of a whole people.” With his kindred spirit, Edmund Burke, Publius surely would have affirmed that this kind of consent is something stronger than the contract of a mere commercial partnership. But he also understood that force and coercion are simply not enough to make a nation free or virtuous. Such things can only ever be achieved through acts of love.
To be sure, much of The Federalist aims at the defense of the Constitution on somewhat lower terms. As James Rogers has put in these pages, “Publius makes persistent appeal to self-interest as an analytical and predictive device,” but without reducing all “human behavior to self-interest.” The genius of the Constitution is that it sets ambition against ambition to preserve liberty—but it cannot defuse the fundamental danger posed by ambitious men. In Federalist #64, for example, Publius states: “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.” What is needed, then, is a general spirit of enlightened patriotism that can overcome the worst aspects of ambition and jealousy without hubristically attempting to revolutionize human nature itself.
George Washington adopted this theme from The Federalist as a kind of political mantra as he led the newly constituted republic. The Union, he argued in the aforementioned Farewell Address (which was partly coauthored by Hamilton and Madison, despite their bitter disagreements), “has a right to concentrate your affections” both because it provided security for the people’s interests and because it embodied their highest principles. He therefore cautioned his countrymen to discountenance “whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned, and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our Country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.” Washington and Publius alike sought to teach the people how the Constitution can unite “collective and individual happiness” according to the principles of human liberty.
In our present political troubles, it may seem that this kind of enlightened patriotism has been crowded out by vulgarity or sophistry. But the fact that Publius once succeeded in uniting the people around these ideas should give us hope that renewal is possible—and that it can be achieved through great writing and even great reading. Indeed, many of America’s institutions of higher learning are rediscovering the value of the civic education offered by The Federalist and other works in its tradition. It remains open to all citizens after all.
Another of the West’s great authors, William Shakespeare, can help us understand the profundity of Publius’s achievement. Most scholars believe he likely only wrote one scene of the Elizabethan play, Sir Thomas More—but it is, of course, the most beautiful moment in the entire piece. In it, the titular statesman must stop a riot that threatens to raze the entire city of London to the ground. But instead of drawing his sword, More is able to persuade the mob to back down by giving a speech appealing to both their sense of interest and their “better angels.” Miraculously, it works. In the aftermath, one nobleman marvels that “not steel, but eloquence hath wrought this good.” Much the same could be said of The Federalist.
This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered at the University of Florida at an event organized by the independent, student-run publication The Florida Finibus.