Publius [Alexander Hamilton]: The Federalist Number 13.
Always, Americans face two questions: the question of regime; the question of the modern state.
By ‘regime’ I mean four things: who rules; by what forms or institutions they rule; what way of life rulers and ruled will lead; and what ends or purposes the rulers intend to secure by those forms and that way. These four dimensions of the regime intertwine. If, for example, a tyrant rules, he will require such institutions as a large standing army controlled by himself for internal policing as well as for conquest, a judiciary dependent on his will alone, and a legislature without independent powers. If a tyrant rules, the way of life will encourage a moral atmosphere of mutual distrust and self-protective secrecy among neighbors, habits of fear punctuated by moments of terror. The ends served by these institutions and this way of life may range from the safety and pleasure of the tyrant to the remaking of human nature itself.
If the people rule, the same thing might happen. The popular majority might tyrannize as well as—maybe worse than—a ‘majority of one.’ Hence republicanism or representative government, a republic (in the American model) of extensive territory and population wherein no one faction may obtain a ruling majority.
The first fourteen numbers of The Federalist address the crucial question of regime—whether a people can truly govern themselves non-tyrannically, by reflection and choice, not accident and force. But they equally address the question of statism.
Modern political philosophers—in England, such men as Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes—sharply criticized feudalism. A feudal society structures itself politically rather like a cinnamon roll: Ruling authority organizes itself into swirls and morsels—an aristocrat here, a city there, with a king mixed in and a network of churches and law courts throughout, each with more or less independent sources of financial support and military power, sometimes overlapping one another but none simply superior to the others.
The statists did away with this. Statesmen organize states along the lines of a wagon wheel, with a central hub of authority and spokes radiating out to the border. Along these institutional spokes resides administrators or bureaucrats, beholden to the center for their appointments and salaries, exerting control over the population, now reconceived as the nation organized into the nation-state. From the center of the state commands and force flow out; to the center, recruits and revenues flow in, far more efficiently than under the feudal order. Wherever a state appeared, neighboring political communities more or less needed to imitate it, lest the wheel roll over them.
For Bacon and Hobbes and their royal sponsors, the best regime for the modern state was monarchy, giving unity of command to the powerful state. Having felt the pincers of monarchic statism, the Founders disagreed, with muskets.
But the defense of the natural rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence via institutions of political liberty required the strength and unity that only a modern state could provide. Only a state could muster the economic and military strength to defend itself against the surrounding European empires, contemptuous of republicanism.
Publius therefore puts the matter of federal union front and center in his introductory essays. The Founders propose to solve the problem of republican self-government in a dangerous world of centralized, monarchist, imperial states by gathering military powers in a national government under popular control, with carefully enumerated, balanced, separated powers while leaving most domestic authority firmly in the hands of the governments of the several smaller states, where citizens can more readily govern themselves—states equally represented in one house of the national legislature.
In the thirteenth Federalist, Publius warns against disunion by appealing to Americans’ sense of economy. Were we to divide into separate confederacies, the two or three new governments would nonetheless rule extensive territories, larger than those of the British Isles. Instead of one federal government, we would have at least two, with unnecessary duplication of ruling institutions and commensurately heavier expenses per capita. If jealousies arose between these confederacies, commercial tariffs and larger militaries would further degrade prosperity. North America would look more and more like the Europe from which Americans had declared their independence. To those who look askance at a national government, Publius replies, one such thing is better than two or three. To undertake to found thirteen such sovereignties would involve Americans in “a project too extravagant and too replete with danger to have many advocates.”
But can one government—even a carefully limited government—truly govern one such large territory? Publius answers this question in his fourteenth essay, concluding his introduction to the new Constitution.
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