Publius as Public Writer
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.
Read more in Law & Liberty.
