The Federalist: Design for a Constitutional Republic.

The Federalist: Design for a Constifutional Republic

Throughout This scupulously researched interpretaion of The Federalist papers, George Carey provides a glimpse of our Republic's original design. He shows us what kind of federal union The Federalist's authors had in mind, and inidicates how we have strayed from their intent.

Prepared by Publius (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay) for the citizens of New York on the eve of the ratification vote, The Federalist reflects the overriding interest Publius had in the short-term goal of obtining votes, yet his observations have been correctly recognized as a timeless statement of politcal thought. Mr. Carey begins his study by looking at the dominant interpretation of the Constitution (derived, to be sure, partly from a study of Publius) that the Founders wished to frustrate the popular will by imposing mulitple "filters" on the Federal Government. Countervailing branches, a judiciary intended as a check on elected representatives, and the indirect election of senators have all been seen as measures designed by the Founders to defend against a mojority's attacks on propertied citizens. Mr. Carey notes that both conservatives and liberals having clung to this itnerpretation, for their different reasons: conservatives because of a fear of popular government and an interest in proving that the Founders, like themselves, favovered a mixed regime with aristoratic elements; and liberals because of their eagerness to reconstruct the Constitution on the basis of an egalitarian ideal.

Mr. Carey's own reading is clearly majoritarian. He argues that Publius intended the proposed federal union to be an "unmixed republic," and that, moreover, "there [were] to be no qualifications [for office] of wealth, of birth, of religious faith, of of civil profesion." If the new federal union was subject to fractional struggles, what was needed was a "republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government." Publius, as interpreted by Mr. Carey, hoped to find such a remedy "in the extent and proper structure of the Union."

Mr. Carey's detailed study rests on three recurrent premises. First, the Founders were setting up an "extended republic," which by its inclusiveness could control the problems of factionalism. A republic containing sufficiently varied itnerests would not become easily polarized or produce a constant, overbearing majority that would crush dissenters.

Second, the Founders did not establish filters in order to cope with

majoritarian and fractional threats to liberty. Publius identifies tyranny not with willful majorities but, as The Federalist makes explicit, with "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive. and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective." The Founders were more afraid of intitutions' concentrating power than of the impact of majorities because they believed that in an extended and representative republic, as opposed to a small and direct democracy, compact majorities would not easily form.

Third, the Founders never doubted that Congress would be the strongest branch of government and attached to it both their deepest concerns and their highest hopes. Congress at its best, it was thought, would stand above the intrigues of state governments, mediate factional disputes, and draw from the best elements of the states. All the same, the Founders were concerned about the danger of tyranny inherent in congressional rule. The other branches of government were seen as necessary, albeit not always sufficient, checks on the actions of the federal legislature. Like his mentor, Willmoore Kendall, Mr. Carey takes congressional supremacy in the Constitution as a self-evident truth. The other branches of government were designed not to supplant congressional authority but rather to restrain it.

Mr. Carey's populist interpretation of The Federalist will certainly not please all of his conservative readers, some of whom will desperately reach for the customary arguments about filters and mixed regimes. I, too, would like to believe in those arguments, but I am genuinely impressed by the thoroughness of Mr. Carey's unbiased scholarship. Yet his populist, majoritarian reading of The Federalist should giv e the Left even less comfort. He mentions that Publius was indifferent to a Bill of Rights and paid no heed to the issued of federally enforceable civil liberties. His Publius was outlining only those specific functions that the federal union was meant to carry out, and was therefore unconcerned with expanding liberties, or with "the intellectual and moral improvement of the citizenry" as a specified end of the Federal Governemnt. Piblius also av oided the language of communal virtue associated with ancient republicanism. He sought to establish a regime that secure life and property, while leaving other tasks to local authorities and civil society.

Mr. Carey speaks of Publius as intentionally "lowering the horizon" of government by focusing on operational rather than moral and theoretical questions. But despite this presumed shortcoming, he praises the "unique character of American political thinking," its independence of "abstract rights or claims," and its quest for "ordered liberty" through a study of historical example.

The one limitation of the system expounded by Pulius is its necessary dependence on a largely self-sufficient civil society. The weakening of the social bond and of social authority has engendered the crisis of consitutional government lamented by Harry V. Jaffa and Gottfried Dietze, as well as Mr. Carey. Both Publius's commonsense virtues and his "realistic assessments" may be needed to understand how to old balance between a limited constitutional republic and a cohesive society can be restored.