Rethink.

Out­line

Fed­er­al­ist 9 begins by stat­ing “a firm Union will be of the utmost moment to the peace and lib­erty of the States, as a bar­rier against domes­tic fac­tion and insur­rec­tion.” After that open­ing, and an ini­tial bar­rage against the “petty republics of Greece and Italy” which never had a sta­ble peace, there are 10 more paragraphs:

Para­graph 2. “Advo­cates of despo­tism” use the “petty republics” to decry not merely “repub­li­can gov­ern­ment,” but “the very prin­ci­ples of civil lib­erty.” How­ever, “stu­pen­dous fab­rics reared on the basis of lib­erty” have “refuted their gloomy sophisms.”

Para­graph 3. There truly are prob­lems with petty republics, and the “advo­cates of despo­tism,” um, have a point. But “the sci­ence of pol­i­tics… has received great improve­ment [!]” Thing was, the poor ancients, they under­stood pol­i­tics “imper­fectly” or didn’t know the prin­ci­ples that made pol­i­tics work at all. So what are the improve­ments in the “sci­ence of politics?”

1. “The reg­u­lar dis­tri­b­u­tion of power into dis­tinct departments”
2. “the intro­duc­tion of leg­isla­tive bal­ances and checks”
3. “the insti­tu­tion of courts com­posed of judges hold­ing their offices dur­ing good behavior”
4. “the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of peo­ple in the leg­is­la­ture by deputies of their own election”

Hamil­ton says these are “wholly new dis­cov­er­ies,” or “have made their prin­ci­pal progress towards per­fec­tion in mod­ern times,” because clearly no one could ever fig­ure out before that vot­ing for a rep­re­sen­ta­tive was a good thing, and no one cared if judges were cor­rupt before. To his “wholly new dis­cov­er­ies,” he adds a fifth “dis­cov­ery,” one that sounds sus­pi­ciously like some­thing the United States is stuck with more than depen­dent on: “the enlarge­ment of the orbit” (# 5), i.e. the Union is going to com­prised of States (a “con­fed­er­ated repub­lic”) and will be massive.

Para­graph 4. Con­fed­er­acy of this sort — for the sake of “tran­quil­ity” inter­nal and “exter­nal force and secu­rity” — isn’t new. Some peo­ple say the repub­lic should be “con­tracted,” and cite Mon­tesquieu to make this argu­ment. But Mon­tesquieu is not of so firm a belief as them.

Para­graph 5. If you want the republics to be as small as what Mon­tesquieu “rec­om­mends,” you’d have to break up the States into smaller pieces.

Para­graph 6. You could reduce the states in size, but the pos­si­bil­ity of con­fed­er­ate gov­ern­ment would not be dis­al­lowed still.

Para­graph 7. Mon­tesquieu is quoted with an eye to “rec­on­cil­ing the advan­tages of monar­chy [!] with those of republicanism.”

Para­graph 8. See? The “ten­dency of the Union [is] to repress domes­tic fac­tion and insur­rec­tion.” The quotes by Mon­tesquieu above, of course, talk about states gang­ing up on one state they don’t like in the Con­fed­er­ated Repub­lic (either it is an “usurper,” or it might expe­ri­ence “pop­u­lar insur­rec­tion”), and crush­ing it for the sake of “inter­nal happiness.”

Para­graph 9. Con­fed­er­acy vs. con­sol­i­da­tion of the States. Peo­ple argue that a con­fed­er­acy shouldn’t care for any aspect of “inter­nal admin­is­tra­tion,” and there should be “an exact equal­ity of suf­frage between the mem­bers.” Hamil­ton dis­misses these notions, sym­bolic but not nec­es­sar­ily con­sti­tu­tive of lib­erty and equal­ity gen­er­ally, as “the cause of incur­able dis­or­der and imbe­cil­ity in the government.”

Para­graph 10. Hamil­ton says that “the pro­posed Con­sti­tu­tion, so far from imply­ing an abo­li­tion of the State gov­ern­ments, makes them con­stituent parts of the national sov­er­eignty, by allow­ing them a direct rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the Sen­ate, and leaves in their pos­ses­sion cer­tain exclu­sive and very impor­tant por­tions of sov­er­eign power,” thus com­pletely attempt­ing to refute the argu­ment in the para­graph above.

Para­graph 11. An ancient exam­ple of a Con­fed­er­ate Repub­lic is given, one that seems to cor­re­spond to how rep­re­sen­ta­tives in the House are now del­e­gated. Pop­u­lar rep­re­sen­ta­tion is the order of the day, as the “largest” cities got the most votes.

Com­ments (to be changed/expanded upon later):

The cen­ter of the list — the mid­dle para­graph — is the key. It is there the issue of Union becomes that of “con­fed­er­ate gov­ern­ment” (cf. Machi­avelli, Dis­coursi Bk. 3).

What hap­pens is that “size” no longer is a con­cern for Hamil­ton in that para­graph. “Size” is metaphor­i­cal — in ancient dis­cus­sions of pol­i­tics, cf. Plato, Aris­to­tle, Cicero — size stands for whether a city will be mod­er­ate or not, whether it will edu­cate in virtue or not. A small city is not impe­r­ial. Empire is more than con­quest: it is a rejec­tion of the idea that there are lim­its in life. The city that expands is implic­itly telling its cit­i­zens that the world is their playground.

So when “size” is dis­missed, what is really being dis­missed is any con­cern for the for­ma­tion of mod­er­ate cit­i­zens. We are not going to teach a sense of value to our cit­i­zens; that’s the province of “free­dom of con­science.” Even knowl­edge in this polit­i­cal order will be a form of acqui­si­tion — i.e. the empha­sis on tech­nol­ogy, on prac­ti­cal schooling.

This is the deep rea­son why the ancients were wrong: they were con­cerned to have a happy, mod­er­ate peo­ple. The con­cern in this paper is secu­rity exclu­sively — take espe­cial note of Para­graph 4. Hence the logic of Con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism does cut against “states rights,” and even against a Bill of Rights to a degree: this isn’t Hamil­ton being sneaky, or Thomas Paine and other peo­ple who insist on “rights” being cor­rect. If there is no secu­rity, you can for­get about rights of any sort, and do notice that under “states rights” there’s always, no mat­ter how peace­fully the argu­ment is put in tone, the threat of seces­sion and insur­rec­tion, even now.

The ancient con­cern for mod­er­a­tion is a stronger ground than “states rights” or “rights” gen­er­ally, because it can not be refuted by the logic of the Con­sti­tu­tion as thor­oughly as an insis­tence on “rights” can. The ancient con­cern for mod­er­a­tion means there is a dis­tinc­tion between sim­ply liv­ing and liv­ing well. The lat­ter takes prece­dence. But “sim­ply liv­ing” is all that an insis­tence on rights adds up to ulti­mately: Who is any­one to say what is the right way to live? So what ends up hap­pen­ing is that Hamilton’s/Madison’s/Montesquieu’s/Machiavelli’s logic wins out, and it wins out in the most sub­tle way.

After all, the states are pre­served — they’re left intact more than they might be if a national coun­cil was formed. The only thing is, they play a new role in Union. They oppose the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment opposes it. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment is divided into three branches which oppose each other. Elec­tions in those branches pit peo­ple voted directly by all Amer­i­cans (rep­re­sen­ta­tives) against Sen­a­tors (from state leg­is­la­tures) against a Judi­ciary (from the Pres­i­dent and the Sen­ate) against the Pres­i­dent (the Elec­toral Col­lege, set up so there is not one pop­u­lar vote or vote by a state leg­is­la­tor directly).

Get the idea? The fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between ancient and mod­ern pol­i­tics is that we con­sign pol­i­tics to mech­a­nism. No one can truly be trusted to rule. A mod­er­ate, vir­tu­ous soci­ety, on the other hand, can the­o­ret­i­cally allow every­one to rule and obey in the high­est sense. Here, we just set peo­ple up against each other and let the sys­tem run.

What makes the mech­a­nism “work” is the same thing that always threat­ens to tear it apart: fac­tion­al­ism, or unleashed pas­sion. That’s why “states rights” suc­cumbs com­pletely to the Machi­avel­lian logic — if the desire for empire defines every sin­gle per­son, and if the insis­tence on “right” is merely a claim to domin­ion by each indi­vid­ual over the other, then the sys­tem that works best is the sys­tem that allows all to com­pete against each so no one can ever win.

Of course, there are sev­eral deep prob­lems with this logic, which we’re fac­ing now. In short:

1. We’re all dumb. There’s no way around this.
2. We’re impe­r­ial even when we try to be mod­er­ate. Where is the money for all those social­ist pro­grams Obama wants going to come from? Oh yeah, that depends on us being the most pow­er­ful and wealth­i­est coun­try in the his­tory of the world, I for­got about that.
3. How do we know when the sys­tem is work­ing, or is threat­ened? Ulti­mately, the pol­i­tics of mech­a­nism exist to instan­ti­ate the pop­u­lar will. So should I look at our cul­tural decline as not that impor­tant, and only focus on how Con­sti­tu­tional form has changed? But if I do that, how do I know exactly when Con­sti­tu­tional form has changed for the worse, given that the Con­sti­tu­tion itself was made pur­posely malleable?

• On a Sec­tion of Alexan­der Hamilton’s Fed­er­al­ist 84 (Part 2): What is a Proper Sense of Right?
• On a Sec­tion of Alexan­der Hamilton’s Fed­er­al­ist 84 (Part 1): What exactly is the pur­pose of a Bill of Rights?
• Mod­er­a­tion and Jus­tice in Alexan­der Hamilton’s Fed­er­al­ist No. 1
• Links, 3/25, and a Brief Note on C-Span
• Briefly Noted: That “Office of the President-Elect” Thing is a Dis­grace (cf. Fed­er­al­ist 70)

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