The Shape of Publius – Matthew J. Franck

The guilty secret among students of American politics is that many of them—perhaps most—have not read The Federalist in its entirety. They may have been introduced to “Publius,” the nom de plume of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, early in their studies, as undergraduates or even in high school. But the demands on the time and attention of both teachers and students to “cover” many things typically meant that only the “greatest hits” of the eighty-five essays were assigned and discussed. Sometimes the authors of introductory textbooks on American government will include pivotal essays such as No. 10 and No. 51 in an appendix, and editors of anthologies of primary sources may include as many as eight or ten numbers of The Federalist. The work is sampled more often than read as a coherent unity.

Even the editors of complete editions recognize that many of the essays will go unread. Clinton Rossiter, the editor of an inexpensive and popular 1961 edition under the inaccurate (but evidently unkillable) title The Federalist Papers—an edition refreshed, reissued, and (annoyingly) repaginated under the editorship of Charles Kesler a quarter century ago—had this to say in a “Note on Text”:

Those readers who do not have the energy and fixed purpose to make their way through the whole of The Federalist may wish to know that, by common consent of learned opinion, the following numbers are the cream of the eighty-five papers: 1, 2, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 23, 37, 39, 47, 48, 49, 51, 62, 63, 70, 78, 84, 85 (ten by Hamilton, ten by Madison, one by Jay).

Those twenty-one essays, with perhaps a half dozen more besides, constituted my own introduction to Publius as a freshman in the 1970s. And when I began to teach American politics in the 1980s, this “cream” of The Federalist made up the essays I assigned—fewer in introductory courses, these and more in upper-level American political thought. In advanced courses also on Congress, the presidency, or the courts, I might home in on just a handful of essays, adding several more to the relevant few on Rossiter’s list.

True confession: I had been teaching for more than twenty-five years before I assigned The Federalist in its entirety to any class I taught—and it was only then that I finally read each and every one of them myself! That was in spring 2007, and concurrently with my class at Radford University, I blogged my way through all the essays for National Review’s Bench Memos page, with a short entry on each one. A decade later, at Princeton University, I teamed up with a visiting fellow to lead a noncredit weekly reading group through all the essays over the whole 2017–18 academic year.

I strongly recommend making the time to do this, and I wish I’d done it years earlier. For teacher and student alike, nothing beats reading the whole of The Federalist. In descending into its granular detail, one begins to see why these essays, written on the fly from October 1787 to May 1788 to urge first New Yorkers but ultimately Americans everywhere to ratify the new Constitution, have had unique staying power among all the contributions to the ratification debate. And with the work involved in grasping the nuances of Publius’s supple arguments, one also begins to ascend again to a bird’s-eye view of the whole series. Close study of this kind will lead you to see why Thomas Jefferson told his son-in-law in 1790, “Descending from theory to practice there is no better book than the Federalist.” 

And now has come into my hands a little book I wish I’d had many years ago, one that should quickly find a place in the library of all those who teach and study The Federalist. It is The Framework of the Federalist: Visualizing the Structure of the Argumentation, just out from St. Augustine’s Press. The author, Harvey Flaumenhaft, has been teaching for more than fifty years at St. John’s College, Annapolis, where The Federalist is part of the “great books” curriculum. Whether one calls his book a guide, a synopsis, or an analysis—each description would be accurate—The Framework of the Federalist is plainly the fruit of long and close study of all the essays. Eschewing the formal divisions of an outline into numbered and lettered parts and levels, Flaumenhaft moves back and forth from a high-level overview of the series and its major headings to finely detailed breakdowns of the structures of individual essays. The cycle of ascents and descents is not at all disorienting. Quite the opposite: frequent recurrence from detail to overview and back again keeps the reader oriented, as one would turn from compass and nearby visual landmark to a map one carries to be sure of one’s progress over a whole journey.

Instead of formal outline divisions, Flaumenhaft employs the visual technique of indenting successive levels of the argument, making sure as well that each page of the book is a self-contained unit of The Federalist as a whole. This requires him frequently to interject a signpost that “expanded detail on” some feature of the present page will be found on the next, with that descent followed by a renewed ascent after the detailed analysis has been unpacked. But Flaumenhaft’s strategy of making each page of his book a coherent unit has a remarkable synoptic effect. It provides, as his subtitle puts it, a visualization of the argument’s structure, and it is hard to convey its effectiveness without a visible sample. Here, for example, is how Flaumenhaft begins to break down Federalist #45, answering the concern that the new Constitution grants such a great mass of power that the sovereignty of states is in jeopardy:

And so on. Although Publius’s elegant prose is stripped away, and with it the full rhetorical richness of The Federalist’s case for the Constitution, it is fair to say that the entire argument of the series is present here in skeletal form, in a mere fifty pages. (Two appendices, a page tabulating the authorship of The Federalist and fourteen pages analytically formatting the Articles of Confederation, conclude the book. I should like to have seen a similar formatting of the unamended Constitution as well, and wonder why the author did not provide it.)

The publisher’s website tells us that this book is eighty pages in length, and measures eight and a half inches by eleven. That size may have been originally intended, but Flaumenhaft’s unique approach to visualizing the text’s structure required the enlargement of the pages and a consequent reduction of their number. The work’s 66 pages measure a full twelve inches a side in order to achieve the author’s intent. And still, in order to pack into each page every structural feature that belongs to it as a unit of the whole, the printers were obliged to employ 8-point type, which is a bit taxing for aging eyes like mine. The desired effect has been accomplished, however: Flaumenhaft has both distilled the essence of Publius’s argument and presented it in a series of text-images that can be grasped by the mind.

One perhaps unintended effect of this book is that it may give some readers the impression that Alexander Hamilton and his co-authors—but chiefly Hamilton, who conceived the series and wrote the majority—gave The Federalist an exact and predetermined design, in structure and in substance, that was carried out with precision and polish. But these eighty-five newspaper essays are not a Platonic dialogue, a treatise in analytical philosophy, or a leisurely legal commentary. They were furiously written exercises in advocacy in a newly independent country going through a political crisis. It is well known that Hamilton sketched, in the first essay, a six-part outline of the coming series; then, when he wrote the concluding essay some seven months later, he noted that only the first four parts had been systematically finished—but begged the reader to recognize that the final two parts had been miscellaneously accounted for along the way! All that being noted, however, Flaumenhaft’s analysis brings to light the care taken by Hamilton, Madison, and (yes, even) Jay to fashion rigorous arguments with moving parts that incline the reader strongly toward embracing the Constitution.

Aside from judicial precedents, nothing is more often cited than The Federalist in opinions of the Supreme Court, not to mention the lower federal courts. Unfortunately, the isolated sentences and phrases of Publius that wind up in judicial opinions are usually so abstracted from their context that the point-scoring achieved by them cannot always be trusted. Copies of The Framework of the Federalist should be on the shelves in every justice’s chambers to help guard against this failing. It is not only judges who forage for authority in The Federalist, of course; scholars frequently offer a specious reliance on Publius for their own agendas, sometimes quite innocently, thanks to their unfamiliarity with the whole.

But the primary beneficiaries of Flaumenhaft’s painstaking work will be teachers. Everyone who assigns even selections from The Federalist should have this book, and using it will be a spur to teach the work in its entirety, which would be all to the good. Teachers should want their students to have The Framework as well, though I can imagine some of them holding it close as their pedagogical secret weapon. 

As I turned Flaumenhaft’s meticulously crafted pages, one more thought occurred and recurred to me: that at a time when we hear much about the power of “artificial intelligence” to do analytical work for us, and even to write for us, here is a book that only a human intelligence could have produced. Only, that is, a real mind, dwelling with a work like The Federalist over a period of years, talking it over with students, and determined to learn not just about it but from it, could possibly have made such a thing as this. Students of our country’s Constitution, and the thought of its makers, are in Harvey Flaumenhaft’s debt.