The American civic canon holds that the Constitution creates three branches of government that are both separate and “equal.” Publius’s essays on Congress cast serious doubt on this supposition, at least with respect to the extent of each branch’s influence on the workings of the national regime. It is no mistake that both the Constitution and The Federalist treat Congress as the first branch of government. It is “justly regarded” as such, Louis Fisher says, primarily because of the appropriations power elucidated in Federalist 58. The Federalist understands Congress, George W. Carey writes, “to be the heart of the proposed system.” Even the doubts and concerns that Publius expresses about Congress reflect regard for its authority. Federalist 51, for example, acknowledges that the legislature “necessarily predominates” (Fed. 51, 350) in a republic, but it also seeks a remedy for the “inconveniency” this poses to the separation of powers. Institutionally, Congress has the power both to constitute and discipline the other branches, which have no comparable authority over it. Even when defending executive energy, Publius describes it as secondary to legislative deliberation. The centrality of the legislative branch is demonstrable not only institutionally but also theoretically, for it is here that Publius places his greatest hopes for solving one of his most fundamental problems: the reconciliation of a government with sufficient authority and energy on the one hand, with the preservation of both public and personal liberty, on the other – a concern that Hamilton and Madison respectively expressed in Federalist 1 and 37.

Aristotle conceived of politics as the master science, encompassing both the most practical political concerns and the highest human purpose: the quest for human happiness through the life well-lived. In light of this classical perspective that recognized both the limitations on political life and the nobility of its highest achievements, the renowned scholar Martin Diamond once provocatively asked: How would Aristotle rate America? Diamond’s query was not merely an academic exercise, but was intended to prompt his fellow citizens to raise the profoundest of political concerns: Is my country worthy of my allegiance? And am I, as a citizen and human being, worthy of my country – of what it stands for, what it aspires to be?

In April 1787 James Madison composed for his own use a memorandum entitled “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” He did so in preparation for a convention, slated to meet within a few weeks in Philadelphia, which had been called – in part at his urging – for the purpose of proposing amendments to the instrument linking the various American states.

In late May 1788, with The Federalist’s essays on Congress and the executive now completed, Alexander Hamilton turned finally to Article III and the judiciary. His six essays on the judiciary, Federalist 78–83, had only a limited effect on ratification. No newspaper outside New York reprinted them, and they appeared very late in the ratification process – after eight states had ratified. But, if these essays had little immediate impact – essentially limited to the ratification debates in New York and, perhaps, Virginia – they were a stunning intellectual achievement. Modern scholars have made Madison’s political and constitutional theory the great story of the Federalist, and Federalist 10, in particular, has long been “in the center of constitutional debate.” But careful study of essays 78–83 reveals that Hamilton had an innovative and consequential vision of the law and the judicial role that deserves at least as much attention as Madison’s contributions.

The wisdom of The Federalist brings the politics of liberalism to a height it had not reached before and was not to keep. To sustain this lofty claim, I shall first briefly compare its political science – the form of its wisdom – both backward to its sources in liberalism and republicanism and forward to its unwitting heir, the political science of today. The Federalist made liberalism popular and republicanism viable, on the one hand refashioning Locke and Montesquieu to accommodate the American “republican genius” (Fed. 66, 448; also Fed. 37, 234; Fed. 70, 471) and on the other, giving lessons in prudence to naïve republicans in thrall to utopian theory and unable to learn from sad experience. Looking forward, we shall see that our political science repeats the formula we have from Publius (apparent author of The Federalist), as it criticizes formal theory and then proceeds to recreate a formal theory of its own. But our political science does this unconsciously and incompletely, so that it loses the capacity to give advice. To recover the wisdom of The Federalist – still available to us – I shall examine its reform of the republican form and try to show how we can recover its sage and subtle advice. To follow Publius will require a study of the use and abuse of forms in politics.

A particular understanding of James Madison’s constitutional thinking now dominates American scholarship, especially in law. According to this view, Madison was frightened of popular politics and deeply suspicious of majority rule. Having witnessed politics in the states during the critical years just after the Revolution – more, having experienced state government firsthand during an exasperating three-year stint in the Virginia Assembly – Madison had come to see democracy as the problem, particularly as it was practiced in the popularly elected state legislatures. Yet rather than give in to despair, as some of his contemporaries were wont to do, Madison set out to find an answer. And he succeeded brilliantly, shepherding in a new national constitution while helping to create what Gordon Wood has called a fresh “American Science of Politics” – the theoretical framework of which he spelled out in his writings as Publius.

On October 22, 1787, five days before the appearance of the first Federalist paper, John and Sarah Jay hosted a dinner party in New York City whose guests included Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Hamilton had recently returned from Albany, where he had pled before the state supreme court, while Madison was attending the moribund Continental Congress. John Jay’s hosting duties represented the social side of his official role as secretary for foreign affairs under the Articles of Confederation, but on this occasion his guests were all men of affairs, and politics could hardly be avoided in the charged atmosphere created by the recently proposed Constitution. While it is tempting to picture Jay, Hamilton, and Madison – the future Publius – finalizing their plans over Madeira and rum punch, the secrecy of the project makes it unlikely that it was openly discussed.

How does Publius’s treatment of politics in The Federalist measure up as “political science”? On one hand, the purpose of the essays was more polemical than scientific. The Federalist sought to persuade New Yorkers to adopt the proposed Constitution rather than to evaluate it from an entirely dispassionate stance. Yet Publius’s rhetorical method necessarily required predictions about the ways in which the new institutions would work. The Federalist necessarily made use of positive (empirically based) political science to ground normative political arguments to defend the novel constitutional scheme.

For well over a century, the authorship of the individual essays of The Federalist was a matter of great uncertainty. The initial source of this uncertainty simply reflected the conventional practices of eighteenth-century political writing, when most polemical pieces, especially those appearing in newspapers, were published pseudonymously. When Alexander Hamilton, the instigator and chief author of The Federalist, chose Publius as the penname, he was paying homage to Valerius Publius Publicola, the sixth-century BCE aristocrat who was a chief founder of the Roman republic. His two co-authors, James Madison and John Jay, would have welcomed his choice. Madison in particular would have saluted Publius’s distinguished republican credentials. A major part of Madison’s preparations for the Federal Convention of 1787 involved his comparative study of “ancient and modern confederacies” and his thorough assessment of the failings of popular government recorded in his famous memorandum on the “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” Madison returned to that project shortly after the Convention adjourned on September 17, 1787. Within the next few years, he developed an even more ambitious plan – apparently never fulfilled – consulting writings either from antiquity or about it to provide the framework for a study of modern republican government.

Alexander Hamilton’s essays in The Federalist on the need for an energetic central government have long stood in the shadow of James Madison’s essays on interest-group conflicts, the structure of government, the perils of majority rule, and the protection of minority rights. This privileging of Madison over Hamilton in the interpretation of both The Federalist and, by extension, the founding began more than a century ago, when Charles Beard presented Federalist 10 as the essence of Federalist political philosophy. In his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, Beard even claimed that his own view of the Constitution as the outcome of clashing economic interest groups, ultimately rooted in “the various and unequal distribution of property,” was “based upon the political science of James Madison.” The central thrust of Madison’s intervention, The Federalist, and the Constitution, Beard said, was to promote material gain by providing greater safeguards for private property rights.

Since Charles Beard first focused attention upon the tenth Federalist, James Madison’s famous essay has been rivalled only by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself as the most important political writing of the American founding. A set of specific claims forms the basis of its still-vaunted status. These include uncontested claims for its eloquence and lucidity, its theoretical novelty and brilliance, the uncanny prescience of Madison’s depiction of the structure of modern American society, and his farsighted projection of the workings and challenges of the American political system. Nevertheless, these claims also include now deeply disputed assertions about its influence in the adoption of the Constitution, its place at the vital core of Madison’s political thought, and its plausibility as an expression of the underlying philosophy or understanding of the original Constitution. This essay elides the specialized debates that have grown up around each of these claims. Its goals instead are to revisit the debate over the meaning of Madison’s theory, propose a straightforward reading of Federalist 10 that integrates and eclipses previous interpretations, and provide a foundation for future scholarship addressing the numerous disputes that still govern the interpretation of Madison’s classic.

The very existence of The Federalist is due to the roiling dissents that greeted the Constitution in the weeks following its publication. By late September 1787, informed Americans knew that three prominent members of the Philadelphia Convention – Elbridge Gerry, George Mason, and Edmund Randolph – had refused to sign the document and that they would likely make the reasons for their opposition public. The fiery “Centinel” began publishing essays in the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer on October 5. Two weeks later, the articulate defender of the middle class, “Brutus,” started a series of essays in the New York Journal arguing the Constitution threatened self-government. This is close to the date that Alexander Hamilton wrote Federalist 1. Critics of the Constitution appeared in nearly every state. James Madison worried in a November 18 letter to George Washington that initial enthusiasm about the Constitution in Virginia had starkly subsided, “giving place to a spirit of criticism”. Madison’s first contribution to the collaboration, the now-famous Federalist 10, appeared in print only four days later.

The eleven essays published by “Publius” between March 11 and April 4, 1787 jointly constitute the most famous defense of presidential power in the American constitutional tradition. It is here that Alexander Hamilton extols “energy in the executive,” along with the canonical litany of “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch.” Such energy, for Hamilton, requires “unity” in the chief magistracy, the focus and coherence of a single mind (Fed. 70, 471–472). But it equally demands “firmness” – a readiness to exert oneself in defense of the “constitutional powers” of one’s office – which can only be expected from those whose “duration in office” is sufficiently long. “It is a general principle of human nature,” Hamilton explains, “that a man will be interested in what he possesses, in proportion to the firmness or precariousness of the tenure, by which he holds it.” Only a magistrate who regards his office as truly his own will subject himself to danger or opprobrium in order to secure the system of which it is a part – and this he must routinely do. For while “it is a just observation that the people commonly intend the PUBLIC GOOD,” they do not, alas, always “reason right about the means of promoting it.” An effective, energetic executive must accordingly wield his prerogatives to tame their episodic folly; to “withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.” The republican principle may require deference to “the deliberate sense of the community,” but it “does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests” (Fed. 71, 481–82).

This chapter examines the reception of Augustine’s “Confessions” in the Enlightenment through three major lexicographical works: Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary; Chevalier de Jaucourt’s entry in the Encyclopédie, “Church Fathers”; and Voltaire’s Questions on the Encyclopedia. All of them deliberately misappropriate Augustine's account of his life as a sinner in order to undermine aspects of his theology, and, by extension, the theology of Jansenism in their own era.