Federalist 17
At the end of Federalist 16 Hamilton wisely warned us against expecting too much from either government itself or a plan for government. Tragedy, irony, and the unexpected will always dog human affairs; we are not good at predicting the future. He offered (to paraphrase) what has become a cliché: the perfect is the enemy of the good.
He also elaborated in 16 on the idea that any effective government had to operate its powers directly on individual citizens without the intermediation of other sovereign authorities. This nub of the whole debate over the Constitution -- what is the scope of federal authority and what sovereignty is retained by the states -- received further reflection by Hamilton in Federalist 17, one of the more interesting of all the papers for it deals directly with the issue of people’s allegiances. The danger of a government operating directly on citizens, Hamilton acknowledged, is that it would “enable it to absorb those residuary authorities” that might best be left “with the states for local purposes.” At least, he acknowledged that’s the argument. He didn't leave it there, however, replying that:
Allowing the utmost latitude to the love of power which any reasonable man can require, I confess I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons intrusted with the administration of the general government could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that description.
Why would that be? Hamilton’s answer soon followed: the powers of the states are too meager, too administrative, too banal, and too petty to attract men with grand ambitions. Police power, education, welfare, regulating marriage and divorce, protecting public health and safety, agriculture, criminal law – regulating these things would never attract men eager to distinguish themselves. Rather, in a somewhat autobiographical turn, he contended that “Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to comprehend all the objects which have charms for minds governed” by the passion for greatness and glory, and therefore “all the powers necessary to those objects ought, in the first instance, to be lodged in the national depository.” Those in the national government would never seek to usurp state authority, he claimed, for the simple reason that it would be more trouble than it’s worth. The state and local stage simply wasn't big enough for those with grand designs.
Maybe, he conceded, there is a kind of ambition that sought to extend itself into the nooks and crannies of people's lives. Not merely content with doing great things, this kind of ambition would seek to do everything. Nothing would be outside the purview of its desire, and no object of control would be too small. Such persons, he observed, would first and foremost be controlled by other agents in the federal government who would have their own lives and ambitions compromised by the meanness of these extensive schemes and would thus “control the indulgence of so extravagant an appetite.” Indeed, federal officials would recognize that exercising such menial powers would diminish “the splendor of the national government” and would thus check the ambition of an expansive appetite.
More importantly, Hamilton believed, the states retained enough residual power under the Constitution to resist encroachments on their sovereignty. Indeed, he believed the states posed a much greater threat to the national government than the other way around, mainly because the people would care more about the matters attended to by the state governments than those attended to by the national government.
The most significant limitation on the national government, he believed, resulted from the habits and dispositions of the people, who would always prefer what they knew and were close to over what was new and distant.
It is a known fact in human nature, that its affections are commonly weak in proportion to the distance or diffusiveness of the object. Upon the same principle that a man is more attached to his family than to his neighborhood, to his neighborhood than to the community at large, the people of each State would be apt to feel a stronger bias towards their local governments than towards the government of the Union…
This propensity seems impossible to dislodge, but Hamilton continued his observation by noting that these affections could be destroyed by a government that proffered superior administration of its duties. The key, then, was to give the national government powers suited to its competencies and then to monopolize talent and resources in such a way as to demonstrate superior administration of people’s affairs, which in turn would shift their affections. This focus on competent administration as the essence of good government proved in many ways Hamilton’s lasting legacy. Only by altering people’s affections could the new national government gain the legitimacy it required, and the three tools it would use to loosen attachment to kin and place would be its claims to superior administration, industrial capitalism, and war.
Part of what would make the claims of superior administration attractive to people came from the fact that state and local governments would largely be relegated to dealing with civil and criminal affairs, which not only deferred power to courts and policing functions, but would exercise their power mainly through coercion, and this oppressive touch would also attenuate people’s affections even while it remained the main source of “popular obedience and attachment.” The fine-grained approach of local governments would impress "upon the minds of the people, affection, esteem, and reverence towards the government” that would act as the “cement of society.” The larger question remained: how to cement the already nascent affections of the people to the nation?
This granular approach to governing, in the republican theory of the day, was symmetrically related to the fact that people, because of their proximity to power, could see how power was being exercised and thus hold it accountable. The argument against centralization was always its lack of transparency and accountability. Hamilton recognized this when he averred that the operations of the national government would fall “less immediately under the observation of the mass of the citizens.” In that case, federal acts would only be discernible to “speculative men” who had the time and inclination to indulge such reviews, and those men would, in turn, be “less apt to return to the feelings of the people” and thus also less able “to inspire an habitual sense of obligation” or generate “an active sentiment of attachment” from the masses.
The problem of attachment has remained one of the bedeviling issues in American politics ever since. One of the challenges of emancipatory freedom is that it encourages detachment – from place, family, institutions – and cause our loyalties to tumble across the social landscape. Power always seeks first and foremost strategies of detachment for the purpose of commanding and monopolizing a people’s allegiances, and will squeeze out or absorb the authority of other institutions as a way of altering people’s dependencies and thus their loyalties. On the one hand, Hamilton recognized the power of these localized, particular, idiosyncratic, and fracturing attachments that people have; on the other hand, he also recognized they posed a problem for a centralized authority.
This recognition of the problem reveals itself in the second half of the essay wherein he identifies the failure of previous confederacies to address the proportions and locations of people’s affections. Successful leaders enjoyed success precisely because they could elicit “the fidelity and devotion of their retainers and followers” and turn that devotion into an augmentation of their power. In feudal systems, where power was more decentralized, vassals and retainers would always side with the baron most nearly located to them, and the amalgamation of those barons would always supersede the power of princes. So long as those nobles operated liberally and mercifully they could always count on the “confidence and good-will of the people”; only when they dropped the ball would princely authority increase. Analogously, if the states were well-run the affections of the people would provide security against “all encroachments of the national government,” thus putting at ease the minds of those who thought the Constitution unduly centralized power. What’s not clear is how Hamilton could square the emphasis on the deposit of power in the states with his earlier claim that the federal plan required that government have the power to bypass the states and operate directly on individuals and in such a way it could alter their affections. But his squaring of that circle would still be a ways off, even as the cannons of war echoed in the distance.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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