In Federalist #44 Madison reviewed Congressional powers and suggested most of them were non-controversial.

Reviewing the Constitutional debates impresses one with the level of argument engaged by both sides. Members of both parties were serious students of history and political theory, demonstrating that a common education doesn’t necessarily produce agreement. What’s most striking about the arguments of that day is how comprehensive, detailed, and thorough they were.

Peter Berger in his classic essay “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” demonstrated how societies where honor matters have a thick sociology while those with a thin social sphere are dominated by ideas of human “dignity.”

In Federalist #43 Madison continued the themes of the prior essays: an examination of the detailed powers given Congress in Article I, section 8, while also addressing some additional powers.

The commentary on Pope Francis’s passing indicates the extent to which the Catholic Church retains some cultural authority.

Two viruses that define our age and negatively affect our judgements are the tendency to read the past in light of present values and, conversely, to think the problems we face are unique to us.

I offer to the readers of these essays on The Federalist a bit of a breather.

Carl Schmitt, a German writer and thinker who achieved some notoriety after he joined the Nazi party, wrote his most important works in the decade prior to Hitler’s rise to power.

It’s late 1787 and you’re deliberating whether to affirm the plan for the new government.

I’ve argued that essays 37-39 are the hinge on which The Federalist turns.

In the past two Reflection essays I’ve pondered the question as to whether American had a founding and, if so, what difference it makes to think so.

In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton claimed that the Americans had to determine once and for all whether the formation of political institutions could result from reflection and choice or would forever be subject to fate and chance.

A story, perhaps apocryphal, has an audience member ask Albert Einstein why so many advances had been made in physics and so few in our understanding of politics.

The New York Times’s “1619 Project” renewed debates over the nature of America’s “founding.”

Hamilton concluded his meditations on taxation by introducing two ideas that gained little traction at the time but would down the road.

Further exploring the issue of the federal government’s “indefinite power of taxation,” Hamilton in Federalist 35 waded into some new waters.

It is not my habit to go into contemporary politics, especially in these essays, but the power of taxation being — along with death — two of the certainties of life, and the twig having long been bent, it seems worth thinking about the relationship of Federalist 34 to the perennial problem of debt, one of the main themes of the essay.

I want to remind the reader that The Federalist consists of essays written for average citizens, mostly farmers, many of whom had to have the essays read to them, published in local newspapers.

The French philosopher René Descartes believed that knowledge resulted from “clear and distinct ideas” that occurred in the mind.

The two most consequential powers of modern governments are the power to conscript individuals into military service and to dip its hands into people’s pockets.

Debates over the Constitution always involved the balance between granting a power and limiting it.

Since presidential pardons are very much in the news right now we thought it would be a good idea to provide the public with a primer on the power and its limitations.

Hamilton’s extended meditation on the importance of a federal army continued in Federalist #28, the penultimate essay on the topic.

The debates concerning a standing army take an interesting turn in Federalist #27.

The bachannalian and overcommercialized celebration of the New Year with the attendant resolutions to make ourselves better people in the coming year stands somewhere between comedy and farce.

If you had asked educated Americans during the Constitutional period when America was “founded,” they likely would have answered “1688.”

Last week, in discussing Federalist #24, I rehearsed in some detail some of the antifederalist arguments concerning a standing army, the main subject of Hamilton’s essays 24-29.

The next six Federalist essays (24-29), all written by Hamilton, deal with one of the most controversial powers in the Constitution: the ability to create a standing army, which, the critics claimed, posed an essential and enduring threat to liberty.

Federalist 23, while repeating many themes previously explored, begins in an interesting fashion: with a concession.