Federalist 9
After directing his attention to the problems of internal dissolution, Hamilton expands on the problem in Federalist #9, one of his most carefully thought through essays, and one that draws on a number of different sources for his argument. Like the Anti-federalists to whom he responds, Hamilton refers to historical examples and well-respected thinkers to make his case. The deep learning of both parties allowed for the debate to take place at a remarkably high level. The lesson should be clear to us: the maintenance of a Constitutional order requires not only the liberal learning of the elites, but their pious attendance to their civilizational inheritance.
Hamilton begins the 9th essay by introducing a new theme: republican governments were always “kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy” and consumed by such “distractions with which they would continually agitated” that the contemplation of them fills us with “sensations of horror and disgust.”
He continued:
If they exhibit occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived contrast to the furious storms that are to succeed. If now and then intervals of felicity open to view, we behold them with a mixture of regret, arising from the reflection that the pleasing scenes before us are soon to be overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage. If momentary rays of glory break forth from the gloom, while they dazzle us with a transient and fleeting brilliancy, they at the same time admonish us to lament that the vices of government should pervert the direction and tarnish the lustre of those bright talents and exalted endowments for which the favored soils that produced them have been so justly celebrated.
Note two important themes there: the reference to glory, and the reference to “the lustre of those bright talents.”
What motivates people to pursue political office? In an ideal world, a sense of public service would suffice, but we don’t live in that ideal world. Even those genuinely motivated by a sense of duty can never efface ambition from their instincts. Ambitious for what? Obviously power, and typically they will promise to use that power well, although more often than not it might satisfy personal or group interests (including grasping at power’s accomplices — wealth and sex). In this brief reference, however, Hamilton expands the political imagination beyond mere ambition, for “bright talents” seek a kind of “glory” that confers upon them immortality.
Machiavelli had argued that the desire for glory could domesticate a base ambition for power. Power for its own sake resulted in ignominy, but power used for a “higher” purpose was power that stretched beyond itself and elevated whoever held it.
The main problem for human beings ever has been and ever will be the problem of death. We spend much of our lives, if sufficiently reflective, reconciling ourselves to the reality of our own death. The closer we get to it the stronger its claim on us. After our physical demise we undergo a second death, when we’ve become forgotten. My children and (God willing!) my grandchildren may speak my name, but then my name is spoken no more. I become one of the billions of those who anonymously inhabit the dirt. The quest for glory is our way of trying to avoid that second death. In Christianity, our glory is achieved in the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, who writes down our names in the book of life, assuring us of eternal life.
In ancient Sparta glory was achieved by heroism and sacrifice in battle. Achilles achieved immortality not only because we still talk about him today, but also because of his paradigmatic excellence. Hector may be a tragic figure, but he too was a great warrior who had the misfortune of being second-best. Christianity not only channeled the desire for glory into pious obedience, but made humility and charity its fundamental characteristics. By inverting the social dynamic of glory — the last being first and the first being last — Christianity decoupled its pursuit from military exploits and introduced the promise of a “peaceable kingdom.” It is, after all, not by our striving and doing that we achieve glory, and this means that we can achieve peace and contentment without soliciting others into our grandiose schemes.
When this Christian resolution wanes, the restoration of ancient notions of glory requires a centralization of power and a desire for military distinction. Indeed, the “lustre of our bright talents” can only shine as a result of power’s increase. This is in sharp distinction to the Constitution’s critics, those “desperate” men “who possess not qualifications to extend their influence beyond the narrow circles of personal intrigue.” Such men “could never produce the greatness of happiness of the people of America.” Hamilton is setting us up: where will this quest for glory take us? What means are required?
That answer is still a ways off. After dealing with the existential question of “to what ends” concerning the new Constitution, he turns his attention in Federalist 9 to the “how” question. Here he engages what may have been the central practical debate of the Convention: the relationship between a people and their representatives. What does it mean to have a system where “the people rule?” The Anti-federalists, sufficiently suspicious of “direct democracy,” were not opposed to a representative system, but they were insistent that “rotation in office” was essential to keep representatives responsive and accountable. For the Anti-federalists, the connection between a representative and the place he was from was an essential one. They wanted to keep that person in that place, meaning they favored part-time legislatures and local government and term-limits that insured that elected officials would continue to live among their neighbors and thus have to answer to them. Brutus observed that
“The confidence which the people have in their rulers, in a free republic, arises from their knowing them, from their being responsible to them for their conduct, and from the power they have of displacing them when they misbehave: but in a republic of the extent of this continent, the people in general would be acquainted with very few of their rulers: the people at large would know little of their proceedings, and it would be extremely difficult to change them.”
The Articles of Confederation had term limits, but the new Constitution eliminated them. Without frequently returning members to their communities, how could we insure that they wouldn’t become captive to outside interests or become too secure and comfortable in their new surroundings? That the sinecure wouldn't matter more than the constituent?
The 18th century was a remarkably fecund era for political thinking, in no small part because of the roiling changes occurring. Events, outpacing reflection, forced political thinkers to come up with new foundations once the pillars of the old order had been torn down. Given the decline of monarchical government and the replacement of the legitimating principle of “the divine right of kings” with “popular sovereignty” (the topic of Locke’s First Treatise), the newly developing experiment in national government on democratic principles required some serious thinking. Roman thinkers had developed theories of representation in the juridical context, but the development of the legislative politics sparked new developments. Locke, certainly, but also thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and David Hume and Edmund Burke, and then especially the Baron de Montesquieu, all deepened our understanding of the complexities of representative government.
Hamilton referred to these developments in Federalist 9. “The science of politics,” he wrote, “like most other sciences, has received great improvement,” the implication being that the Constitution’s critics were not up to speed on things. “The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients.” So what are the elements of this “new science”?
Hamilton argued that all the elements of the new science were found embodied in the Constitution: the system of checks and balances and the system of legislative representation were “either wholly new discoveries , or have made their principal progress toward perfection in modern times.” This sly introduction of “the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns” surreptitiously smuggled in Hamilton’s implication in Federalist 1 that the Constitution’s supporters were on the cutting edge of progress and its detractors mere reactionaries. This argument finds a great deal of resonance in contemporary politics. I can’t say with certainty that Hamilton would have had a “In this house, we believe in science” sign on his front lawn, but the sentiment is there.
So far, however, not many of the Constitution's critics would disagree, happily signing on to the idea of the separation of powers and a system of representation. The new development that Hamilton espoused results from an idea he largely derived from David Hume: that republican politics could be rescaled, the rethinking of “a principle which has been made the foundation of an objection to the new constitution; I mean the ENLARGEMENT of the ORBIT within which such systems are to revolve.” This principle could pertain either within or among states, and Hamilton considers the former as a way of justifying the latter.
Hamilton presented a clever argument: local governments are to the states what state governments are to the (proposed) federal government. A rigorous application of the principle concerning “the necessity of a contracted territory for a republican government” recommends a standard “far short of the limits of almost every one of these states.” Given the thousands of local governments and their geographical separation, Hamilton continued, only one of two options were available: either become monarchists, or split “ourselves into an infinity of little, jealous, clashing, tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord, and the miserable objects of universal pity or contempt.”
Well, then. I doubt most persons at that time, or now for that matter, would describe their hometowns as “wretched nurseries of unceasing discord.” But Hamilton was not regarding these places in their historical and cultural reality, but as themselves discrete atoms in the politico-physical universe. They were of interest to him not in themselves but only in relation to the other atomic particles occupying the political universe with whom they frequently collide. In other words, they appear to him at a conceptual level, but not as places that human beings actually inhabit. If modern liberalism is atomistic, this is atomism on a slightly larger scale.
Hamilton engaged Brutus directly, for Brutus had argued that the size or number of the political units do not affect the principle of confederation, and Hamilton conceded the point. Here, Hamilton surprisingly referred to Montesquieu to make his case, quoting Montesquieu as identifying a confederate republic as a “‘form of government [which] is a convention by which several smaller states agree to become members of a larger one, which they intend to form.’” [emphasis in original] Hamilton accused Brutus of cherry-picking Montesquieu -- who, to be fair, was a rich enough thinker that one could find supports for both arguments. Hamilton was responding to Brutus, who quoted Montesquieu’s defense of small republics thusly:
The one is the Baron de Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws,[1] Chap. xvi. Vol. I [Book VIII]. “It is natural to a republic to have only a small territory, otherwise it cannot long subsist. In a large republic there are men of large fortunes, and consequently of less moderation; there are trusts too great to be placed in any single subject; he has interest of his own; he soon begins to think that he may be happy, great and glorious, by oppressing his fellow citizens; and that he may raise himself to grandeur on the ruins of his country. In a large republic, the public good is sacrificed to a thousand views; it is subordinate to exceptions, and depends on accidents. In a small one, the interest of the public is easier perceived, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen; abuses are of less extent, and of course are less protected.”Brutus continued that “history furnishes no example of a free republic, anything like the extent of the United States.” As the territory expands, so does the power of government, leading to tyranny. The people would not have the opportunity to come together to deliberate and decide.
Nor did Brutus believe that the new science of representation could solve the problem. If representatives “do not know, or are not disposed to speak the sentiments of the people, the people do not govern.” He continued that “in a large extended country, it is impossible to have a representation, possessing the sentiments, and of integrity, to declare the minds of the people, without having it [the legislature] so numerous and unwieldy, as to be subject in great measure to the inconveniency of a democratic government.”
Hamilton argued that the Anti-federalists overstated the case. The Constitutional system, he wrote, is not the “consolidation” of the states the Anti-federalists accused it of being, but was a genuine confederacy. There being “no absolute rule on the subject” of the distribution of power between the parts and the whole, one concluded from experience that too much autonomy in the parts becomes a “cause of incurable disorder and imbecility in the government.” The Anti-federalist insistence that the powers of the federal government should only apply to the states in their collective capacity and never to individual citizens, and that its powers ought only extend to foreign affairs, and that all states should have an equal voice, were, Hamilton thought, “arbitrary” claims that were “novel refinements of an erroneous theory.” This would have important consequences that Hamilton addressed later.
I think Hamilton and his critics identify more or the less the same problems that attend republican forms of government: factionalism and domestic tranquility, but Hamilton tellingly adds the ability “to increase their external force and security.” Perhaps this relates to his conception of glory, but that answer doesn’t come to us until a later essay. In any case, the Constitutional debates are reminders that to get both parties to accept the results of a fundamental dispute, a shared heritage and identification of the problem is required. Without those, separation or violence seem the only answers.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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