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Assessing the problem of necessity in politics and morality is a good place to begin our review of The Federalist because The Federalist itself begins with this problem. The opening paragraph of the work introduces the dichotomy facing Americans over the question of ratification. In Publius’ words Americans had the option “of establishing good government from reflection...

The last chapter examined the foundations in principle of The Federalist’s constitutionalism. That constitutionalism was anchored in the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence. In Federalists 2–8 we begin to...

The last two chapters have discussed The Federalist’s natural rights constitutionalism and certain elements of its commercial republican theory that might be improved with the Constitution. Part of the argument here is that the Constitution would be a means to national greatness and the higher toning of American character through the political and...

The spirit of commerce was an animated spirit that could indeed provide energy to the private sphere, as Agrippa had suggested. But on The Federalist’s reading it was also a spirit that could be belligerent and warlike, one that had led nations to use military force to attempt to acquire both territory and dominion over others, and this frequently at the cost of their own...

As the last chapter indicated, The Federalist embraces a theory of commercial republicanism that challenges the orthodoxy of Enlightenment political thinking that commercial societies, particularly commercial republics, were moderate or...

How then might we take the lessons from Thucydides and apply them to The Federalist? What exactly do we have to learn here? To recapitulate, the emphasis on the spirited, even warlike character of commercial republics that occupies the early Federalist numbers provides us a clue about how The Federalist will turn the tables on traditional republican theory...

Federalist 10 proposes that individual rights are private in nature. They are private because in a strict legal sense they generally apply only to those matters over which individuals have exclusive control: property, contracts, claims of negligence, even such things as the right to vote, which...

The last two chapters have presented Federalists 9–14 as complementary numbers. Federalists 11–14 emphasized how the development of commerce and enterprise under the Constitution would assist that first governmental object announced in Federalist 10 of protecting men’s faculties. The Constitution would protect those faculties and assist...

Federalist 19 identified self-government with self-defense. If a nation could not defend itself it could not be self-governing. Like The Federalist’s admonition against the use of foreign arms, the identification of self-government with self-defense was offered up as a permanent feature of politics, as necessary in ancient times as it was in modernity. It was also a...

My focus at the end of the last chapter was on two themes: the creation of a national free market as a moral and a military imperative, and Publius’ idea about how a new American nationalism might be nurtured through improved confidence in the federal government and commercial enterprise. These themes are developed throughout the first...

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Anthony A. Peacock is professor and head of the Department of Political Science at Utah State University. He is also the director of USU’s Center for the Study of American Constitutionalism. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including, most recently, How to Read The Federalist Papers (2010), Freedom and the Rule of Law (2010), and Deconstructing the...