Why We Still Read the Federalist Papers — and Why That's Not Enough

I.

On October 27, 1787, a New York newspaper called the Independent Journal carried an essay signed "Publius." It opened with a sentence the author hoped would land like a verdict: "It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide 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."

The author was Alexander Hamilton. The "people" he addressed were the voters of New York State, who would shortly be asked to ratify the new federal Constitution. Eighty-four more essays followed, by Hamilton, James Madison, and (briefly) John Jay, all signed Publius, all published in the New York press, all aimed at persuading a wavering ratifying convention. Together they became The Federalist. Two and a half centuries later, we treat them as something they never were: a sacred text.

This is an essay about that habit — about why it is so persistent, what it costs us, and why I cannot quite bring myself to recommend giving it up.

II. The cult of Publius

Begin with the strange fact that The Federalist is now cited more often in Supreme Court opinions than at any time since John Marshall sat on the bench. Citations roughly doubled between 1980 and 2010 and have only climbed since. Both wings of the Court invoke Publius for everything from the unitary executive to the meaning of "Privileges and Immunities."

It would have surprised Hamilton. He thought of the essays as polemics — newspaper work, urgent and disposable, written under deadline to win a particular vote in a particular state. Madison, more cautious, suspected the essays' rhetorical heat would later embarrass their authors; in his old age he sometimes refused to identify which numbers he had written, claiming he could no longer remember.

The two men had no idea they were composing a foundational commentary. They were trying to head off a defeat. New York was a state where the antifederalist Governor George Clinton commanded a majority of delegates and where ratification, as late as the spring of 1788, was widely believed to be lost.

The cult of Publius rests on a category error. Treating The Federalist as scripture treats it as a record of what the Constitution means rather than as the most ambitious sales document ever produced for it.

III. Why we still read it

And yet I keep returning to it. I expect most readers of this magazine do.

Part of the appeal is that the essays are exceptionally well written, in a register American political prose has more or less abandoned. The sentences are long, periodic, conscious of their own balance. There is genuine argument inside them — not the hardened formulas of later constitutional theory but the live attempt of three writers, working at speed, to construct a defense of an unprecedented institution.

The other part is that The Federalist is the closest thing we have to a contemporaneous account of why the Constitution looks the way it does. The Convention itself sat in secret; Madison's Notes did not appear until 1840, four years after his death. For more than half a century, The Federalist was the most authoritative inside view of the document available to citizens, judges, and lawyers. That priority shaped the way American constitutional argument was conducted, and the shape persists.

A few of the essays are genuinely indispensable. Federalist 10, on factions, is the central modern statement of pluralism. Federalist 51, on checks and balances ("if men were angels, no government would be necessary"), remains the most economical defense of separated powers ever written. Federalist 78, on judicial review, was so prescient that John Marshall arguably did not invent the doctrine in Marbury v. Madison — he confirmed what Hamilton had already articulated fifteen years earlier.

The problem isn't reading these. The problem is reading only these.

IV. What gets left out

If The Federalist is the New Testament of the American founding, the antifederalist papers are its lost gospels — scattered, half-forgotten, rarely assigned. Their authors are still less well known than Publius's pseudonym deserves: Brutus, Centinel, the Federal Farmer, Cato. They worried about exactly the things we now worry about. They predicted a federal judiciary that would absorb power from the states. They predicted standing armies and an executive who would behave more like a monarch than a magistrate. They warned that a single national legislature would protect only the interests of "the few" because elections at that scale would always favor the wealthy and the famous.

Read alongside Publius, the antifederalist essays change the meaning of the Constitution. They show that the document's defenders were arguing against live alternatives — not against straw men but against a coherent democratic tradition that valued small jurisdictions, local juries, citizen militias, and frequent rotation in office. The Bill of Rights, which Madison initially opposed and only championed when ratification politics required it, is largely a concession to antifederalist demands.

A generation of American readers has been trained to imagine the founding as a single conversation between Publius and a kind of dim, vaguely Jeffersonian opposition. It was nothing of the sort. It was an argument about whether the new republic should be confederal or consolidated, agrarian or commercial, jealous of power or trusting in it. Publius won that argument and Brutus lost it, but the losers' anxieties were not foolish. They were, in many cases, precisely correct.

V. The half-life of an argument

There is another reason to read The Federalist with care: many of its arguments have not aged well, and the ones we cite most often are sometimes the weakest.

Hamilton's defense of judicial life tenure in Federalist 78 assumes a judiciary "in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its coordinate branches." On any honest measure, the modern Supreme Court is not in jeopardy of being overpowered by Congress or the presidency. The reverse is closer to the truth. The institution Hamilton imagined as the "least dangerous branch" has become, by some readings, the most consequential.

Madison's argument in Federalist 10 — that a large republic will dilute factional passion — has been overtaken by communication technologies he could not anticipate. The mass party, the national media environment, the algorithmic amplification of grievance: none of this fits the picture of a continental republic too geographically dispersed for faction to consolidate. The argument is still elegant. It is also, in important respects, falsified.

Most strikingly, The Federalist never reckons with slavery in the terms the Constitution itself does. The three-fifths clause is defended in Federalist 54 with a level of moral ventriloquism that makes the essay almost unreadable today — Madison adopts the imagined voice of a Southern slaveholder and proceeds to argue from that point of view, as if exposition were not endorsement. The essays do not contemplate, because they cannot, the way the document they defend will be used to entrench an institution it nowhere names by name.

VI. Reading like an heir, not a worshipper

What would it look like to read The Federalist without treating it as scripture?

It would look, I think, like reading any other piece of polemical political writing: with attention, with admiration where admiration is earned, and with the historian's instinct to ask what the writer was trying to accomplish and against whom. It would mean reading Brutus alongside Publius and treating both as voices in an argument that has never closed. It would mean noticing where Hamilton's predictions came true and where Madison's didn't, and refusing to use the essays as a shortcut around the harder question of what the Constitution should mean for us.

The Court's increasing reliance on The Federalist is, in this sense, a sign of intellectual exhaustion rather than fidelity. To decide a twenty-first-century case about, say, executive privilege by quoting Hamilton on the unitary executive is to pretend that an essay written to win a New York ratifying convention vote in 1788 settles a question the essay's author could not have framed. It is to outsource judgment to authority — the very habit Publius spent eighty-five essays warning against.

VII. Why I keep coming back

And yet. Every January for the last decade I have reread Federalist 1. I am not sure what to call this except an inherited liturgy.

The opening still works on me. Hamilton's premise — that the American republic is an ongoing experiment in whether free people can deliberate themselves into stable government, or whether they will always be the prey of accident and force — is the question I think any honest American politics still has to confront. He did not answer the question. He could not have. He only insisted that we hold it open.

That is the part of The Federalist worth keeping. Not the doctrines, not the citations, not the rhetorical settlements that judges find so useful. The discipline of holding the question open. The refusal to treat the Constitution as a finished thing.

If we read Publius for that, we will read him correctly. If we read him for anything more, we will be reading him the way he most feared the people would: lazily, deferentially, as if the work of self-government were already done.