The Trouble with “Public Bodies”:

On The Anti-Democratic Rhetoric of The Federalist

Jeremy David Engels

Abstract

This essay investigates the anti-democratic rhetoric of The Federalist. In The Federalist, politics is imagined via the medical logics of the eighteenth century. For Publius, democracy is an incitement to factions and incubator of disease because it requires citizens to gather in deliberative “public bodies.” In describing democratic “disease,” TheFederalist claims that the body politic is always already a threat to itself, and frames therole of governance as the management of the emergence of those threats. In so doing, The Federalist forwards an early American rhetoric of misodemia—the hatred of democracy.

The anti-democratic nature of the Constitution is well

established in the literature on the founding of the United

States.1 In turn, the Constitution’s anti-democratic slant is

most clear when it is compared not to the Articles of

Confederation that it replaced but to the state governments that

it was designed to temper and supersede. Almost all of the first

state constitutions declared that government was created for the

good of the people; even more strongly, constitutions in

Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Massachusetts and New

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Hampshire stated that government was subordinate to the people.

Bills of rights protected citizens from the rule of the rich and

from selfish representatives. Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution

encouraged citizens to watch over government and scrutinize the

decisions of representatives—a sentiment echoed by the 1776

Maryland and North Carolina constitutions. Five state

constitutions included “alter or abolish” provisions, echoing the

right of revolution as stated in the Declaration of Independence,

and such provisions were added to Kentucky’s 1792 constitution,

Tennessee’s 1796 bill of rights, and Ohio’s 1802 constitution.

The right of revolution was retained even in Massachusetts’s 1780

and Pennsylvania’s 1790 constitutions, conservative documents

intended to restrain the excesses of democracy in these states.2

The United States Constitution was written in the people’s name,

but it contained none of the language common to the

Revolutionary-era state constitutions. The Constitution did not

affirm that government was created for the good of the people,

nor did it empower citizens to watch over, scrutinize, instruct,

and ultimately alter or abolish government if it became abusive

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of the people’s rights—rights that were not (at least initially)

even protected by a Bill of Rights.

The United States Constitution was the outcome of a counter-

revolution in the middle 1780s determined to curtail popular

uprisings in the states and, more generally, to ensure that,

while the citizenry still possessed political power in the most

abstract terms, nevertheless the actual control over governance

was placed in the hands of educated and impartial representatives

capable of making good decisions. In his book Unruly Americans and

the Origins of the Constitution, Woody Holton contends that the

Constitution acts like an “invisible fence,” encouraging self-

government but frustrating its actualization. “The Framers

designed the federal government to be much less accessible than

it seems,” he concludes. “The sinister beauty of the Constitution

—in particular, the immensity of congressional districts—is that

when citizens find they cannot influence national legislation,

their tendency is not to curse the system but to blame

themselves.”3

The ratification debate considered the relative merits of

democratic government—for the demands of the rhetorical situation

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forced supporters of the Constitution to confront widespread

cultural support for this political logic in America. As George

Mason observed at the Constitutional Convention, “notwithstanding

the oppressions & injustices experienced among us from democracy;

the genius of the people is in favor of it, and the genius of the

people must be consulted.”4 The writers justifying the

Constitution to Americans faced a number of challenging

rhetorical tasks—not the least of which was that they had to

defend an anti-democratic document to an American audience that

valued democracy as a means for the majority of poor citizens to

check the influence of rich elites.

In this essay I describe the anti-democratic rhetoric of The

Federalist (often commonly misremembered as “The Federalist

Papers”).5 The Federalist was not a univocal text; it did not speak

one language. Isaac Kramnick identifies four languages—civic

republicanism, Lockean liberalism, the Protestant work ethic, and

state-centered theories of power and sovereignty—at play in the

ratification debate, and it is not hard to see these four

languages operating, interacting, and at times contradicting

themselves in The Federalist.6 The three authors, John Jay, James

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Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, were not alike philosophically

on many issues, and with eighty-five essays composed over nearly

ten months—the first essay published in New York Independent Journal

on October 27, 1787, and the last in book form on March 2, 1788,

and in newspapers on August 16 of that year—there was little time

for consistency between numbers. From October to March, the

project advanced at the overwhelming clip of over a thousand

elegantly chosen words a day.7 “Fired off three a week, the

essays overwhelmed response. Who, given ample time, could have

answered such a battery of arguments? And no time was given. As

soon as one was digested, there were two more in the coffee

house,” Garry Wills writes.8 I would add that there is at least

one more language in The Federalist that Kramnick does not describe—

the anti-democratic, or misodemic. About democracy, Publius’s

words reveal little inconsistency and contradiction. The Federalist

described the problems and terrors associated with democracy in

three missives, all written by Madison: Federalist No. 10, No.

14, and No. 58. In this essay I will illuminate The Federalist’s

portrait of democracy as described in these three compositions,

and I will demonstrate that Madison’s words about democracy

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permeated other essays in the collection, coloring how popular

politics and “the people” were imagined. Madison’s harsh words

about democracy were premised on a fear of faction, demagoguery,

rhetoric, and passion; these fears, in turn, were dependent upon

a medicalized rhetoric of “public bodies” that has not yet been

explored by historians or rhetorical scholars.

One of the most lasting consequences of Madison’s rhetoric,

I conclude, was to Americanize misodemia (or what Robert L. Ivie

has called “demophobia”).9 Misodemia was the word the ancient

Greeks coined to represent the hatred of democracy—thus in The

Republic Plato spoke of a wealthy man who was μισόδημος, a hater

of democracy, and in Antidosis Isocrates described a series of

characteristics exhibited by a speaker that a democratic audience

could justifiably resent: μισάνθρωπος (hating people), ὑπερήφανος

(being haughty and arrogant), and μισόδημος (hating the demos).10

The Federalist updated and fundamentally altered these ancient

misodemic discourses, casting aside the more traditional

vocabulary of the few and the many and, instead, medicalizing

misodemia, marking democracy as an incubator of the “diseases”

typical of “public bodies.” The Federalist provided Americans an

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early vocabulary for denouncing democracy in the United States

while cutting off an ancient rallying cry for democratic

mobilization.

“The Confusion of Names”

Scholars generally do not approach The Federalist as a work of

rhetoric. Instead, they tend to treat it as a timeless work of

political philosophy. In a letter to Madison, Thomas Jefferson

praised The Federalist “as being, in my opinion, the best commentary

on the principles of government, which ever was written.”11

Without question, The Federalist is a marvel of political wisdom

that has proven over time to be an authoritative interpretation

of the Constitution. Yet to discuss The Federalist as though its

primary purpose was to illuminate philosophical truths is to draw

attention away from the fact that the essays published under the

pseudonym “Publius” were contributions to an unfolding public

controversy with a rhetorical agenda: the essays were written to

secure ratification of the Constitution in New York.

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The Federalist was designed to achieve its immediate rhetorical

purpose by offering commentary on the principles of government. A

crucial plank in Publius’s defense of the Constitution was the

distinction between a democracy and a republic. Of course, there

were few men active in American politics in the 1780s who could

be said to be supporters of “democracy,” and while anti-

federalists at times attacked the Constitution for being

insufficiently democratic, the debate over the Constitution did

not break down into pro- and anti-democratic camps.12 Publius

found it necessary to discuss democracy not because of the

goadings of anti-federalists but instead because in the 1780s

Americans expressed widespread cultural support for more direct

popular control over government and the economy. When these post-

Revolutionary democratic desires were frustrated, especially by

economic policies designed to favor the rich at the expense of

the poor, Americans rose up in a series of rebellions that rocked

nearly all of the newly independent states, of which Shays’s

Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786-1787 was the most prominent

and terrifying to elites. With these uprisings in the background,

Publius, especially under the guise of Madison’s first two

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contributions to the series, Federalist No. 10 and Federalist No.

14, defended the Constitution by demeaning democracy.

In response to popular confusion—Americans were

discombobulated, again—Madison assumed the role of schoolmaster

in Federalist No. 14. In common with the men who wrote the

Constitution and who were active in politics in the late

eighteenth century, Madison believed that it was his job to

correct the widespread errors of the masses. Madison snapped his

rhetorical ruler on the metaphorical knuckles of those anti-

federalists who had committed the fallacy of equivocation, applying

one term, “democracy,” to the Constitution when another,

“republic,” was appropriate.13

To this accidental source of the error, may be added the

artifice of some celebrated authors, whose writings have had

a great share in forming the modern standard of political

opinions. Being subjects, either of an absolute, or limited

monarchy, they have endeavoured to heighten the advantages,

or palliate the evils, of those forms, by placing in

comparison with them, the vices and defects of the

republican, and by citing, as specimens of the latter, the

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turbulent democracies of ancient Greece, and modern Italy.

Under the confusion of names, it has been an easy task to

transfer to a republic, observations applicable to a

democracy only; and, among others, the observation, that it

can never be established but among a small number of people,

living within a small compass of territory.14

Against the anti-federalists and also contra “celebrated writers”

like Thomas Hobbes who scribbled in favor of monarchy, Madison

claimed that objections against ancient democracies did not apply

to modern republics. Moreover, Madison reiterated that the

Constitution did not create a democracy, something petty and

unstable akin to “the turbulent democracies of ancient Greece,

and modern Italy.” It created a republic that could grow, and

grow, and grow.

In Federalist No. 14, Madison schooled Americans on the

proper distinction between a republic—the form of government

guaranteed by Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution—and a

democracy. “The true distinction between these forms,” he

observed, “is that in a democracy, the people meet and exercise

the government in person: in a republic, they assemble and

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administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy,

consequently, must be confined to a small spot. A republic may be

extended over a large region.”15 In the eighteenth century, it

was received wisdom that republics had to be small. Baron de

Montesquieu was one of the Enlightenment’s foremost experts on

republicanism, and he argued that if republics became too large,

their political virtue would diminish. Distancing himself from

this commonplace, Madison claimed that the crucial distinction

between a republic and a democracy had to do with size. In a

democracy the people had to convene in person to govern, while in a

republic representatives of the people governed in their place.

This was the quarantine logic of republicanism—the republic

created by the Constitution would achieve the purification of

popular passions through sequestration. This meant that while a

democracy had to remain small, a republic could be exponentially

larger.16

Clearing up the confusion of names was a central rhetorical

aim of Madison’s first two contributions to The Federalist. There

was ample space for this rhetorical intervention because the

meaning of “democracy” was confusing and contested, open to many

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interpretations and even more political actualizations.17 Jean-

Jacques Rousseau lamented in 1764 that “la constitution démocratique a

jusqu’à present été mal examinee.”18 Believing, too, that democracy had

been gravely misunderstood, Madison attempted to rectify popular

confusion by describing democracy’s many foibles. In Federalist

No. 10 Madison introduced Americans to the benefits of a republic

like that established by the Constitution by discussing the

dangers of a “pure democracy” based on “public bodies.” The

specter of this pure democracy hung over Madison’s more general

discussion of “democracy” in Federalist No. 14 and his debunking

of classical, direct democracy in Federalist No. 58. A republic

stood in opposition to “pure democracy.” The rhetorical wedge

that distinguished the two forms of government was “faction,”

which proved democracy to be an incitement to disease. In The

Federalist, to discuss the maladies of democracy was,

simultaneously, to illuminate the administrative genius of the

republican machine.

“A Common Impulse”: On Factions

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Madison defined a “faction” as “a number of citizens,

whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are

united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of

interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the

permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”19 Faction

was a group of citizens unified by a “common impulse” of passion

or interest that stood contrary to the permanent and aggregate

interests on which the political community was based.

Madison’s wording in Federalist No. 10, which depicted

factions originating in a “common impulse of passion, or of

interest,” was curious. He had already been pontificating about

the dangers of faction for much of 1787, omitting any discussion

of “impulse.” In fact, the inclusion of the word “impulse” was a

significant deviation from a phrase that had become common in

Madison’s public discourse. In an April 1787 essay “Vices of the

Political System of the United States,” Madison claimed that

factions originated in “interest or common passion.”20 In a

speech at the Constitutional Convention on June 7, 1787, Madison

reiterated these sentiments, observing that factions sprung from

“common interest or passion.”21 In neither work did Madison talk

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about a common impulse of interest or passion. The inclusion of

“impulse” in Federalist No. 10 was therefore a significant

rhetorical deviation from a pattern that points us toward the

significance of “public bodies” in Madison’s attack on democratic

government.

The rhetoric of Federalist No. 10—and The Federalist generally—

was shaped by the assumptions of seventeenth and eighteenth

century moral philosophy, and in particular by faculty

psychology, the dominant paradigm that scholars employed to

conceptualize the mind/body relationship in the 1700s.22 To

understand what Madison meant by “impulse” in Federalist No. 10,

we can turn to the work of one of the leading proponents of

eighteenth-century faculty psychology, Thomas Reid. Reid’s moral

psychology classified human faculties in three categories:

mechanical, animal, and rational. The mechanical faculties were

involuntary and acted directly upon the will. The animal

faculties were bodily in nature and included instinctive desires,

physical appetites, and the emotions. Finally, reason, which

found its home in the mind as opposed to the body—in the cogito,

not the corpus—included conscience (what the philosophers of the

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Scottish Enlightenment often called the “moral sense”) and

prudence, or what was often called (self-)interest.

According to Reid, the human organism was divided into

irrational (mechanical/animal) and rational faculties:

There is an irrational part, common to us with brute-

animals, consisting of appetites, affections and passions,

and there is a cool and rational part. The first, in many

cases, gives a strong impulse, but without judgment, and

without authority. The second is always accompanied with

authority. All wisdom and virtue consist in following its

dictates; all vice and folly in disobeying them. We may

resist the impulses of appetite and passion, not only

without regret, but with self-applause and triumph; but the

calls of reason and duty can never be resisted, without

remorse and self-condemnation.23

In Reid’s moral psychology, the animal faculties were

fundamentally irrational, and it was the job of the rational

faculties to resist and regulate these baser faculties. What made

the animal faculties irrational was the fact that they gave a

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direct impulse to the will without the interruption of reason and

conscience.

Considering the body to be a machine, Reid and other

proponents of faculty psychology imagined that it was the job of

reason to regulate the irrational, animal faculties. Reid

repeatedly affirmed that “brutes” and “madmen” were incapable of

regulating themselves, hence drawing what is a now a distasteful

but what was then a common line between those who were

“civilized”—those capable of using their reason to regulate the

passions so they did not operate directly upon the will—and those

who were not.24 Yet even those blessed with reason—with “the

power of self-government”—could be overwhelmed by an impulse,

losing the “conflict between the dictates of reason, and the

blind impulse of passion.”25 In such a situation, the animal

faculties were (to use a favorite metaphor of the faculty

psychologists) like a billiard ball ramming into another billiard

ball, forcing the body to move without the reason having time to

intercede and stop the (re-)action.26 “Impulse” signified an

affective, non-rational force welling up from deep inside the

body and producing action that was almost always regrettable

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because it was irrational.27 Impulse upended the mind’s

discipline, acting directly on the will; impulse was “blind,”

“animal,” and “violent.”28 Overriding the discipline of reason,

impulse acted directly upon the will through both interests and

passions.

The eighteenth-century liberal imagination was concerned

with two primary types of impulse: impulses of interest and

passion.29 Enlightenment philosophers worried that certain forms

of interest, such as religious zeal or military honor, could

destabilize societies were they to become shared. Madison fretted

about many interests, including the class interests of rich and

poor, in Federalist No. 10. Early liberal philosophers, including

Madison and Hamilton, imagined government to be the agent for

regulating such interests when they stood contrary to the

interests of the community. These philosophers also worried about

the impulses of passion, welling up deep from within the animal

body and overriding reason. For many Enlightenment writers, the

civilizing process involved learning how to resist passionate

impulses and to counter such impulses with reason. To be a fully

realized human was to learn to exercise self-government. One of

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the moral lessons of this particular culture of the self was for

people to tame their irrational impulses. Though Reid cautioned

his readers to be vigilant about their impulses and to control

them if possible, he nevertheless believed that such care was

rare. For him, “appetite, affection, or passion, give an impulse

to a certain action. In this impulse there is no judgment

implied.” Often, for most individuals the force of such impulses

was “irresistible.”30

Factions were blameworthy in Madison’s judgment because they

stood counter to the common good and the permanent, aggregate

interests of the community. Equally concerning was how factions

were formed, for factions were the product of “impulse.” In

faculty psychology, “impulse” was associated with motion and

signified the action of passion directly upon the will outside of

the control of reason. In The Federalist, “impulse” was shorthand

for the irrational part of the human organism overwhelming the

rational part. When Madison discussed factions as the product of

a common impulse, then, he was describing not just a nefarious

political entity but also the complete short-circuiting of the

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type of rational civic judgment the authors of The Federalist

demanded of Americans.

Factions could be managed, Madison opined, in one of two

ways: by preventing the formation of common passions or interests

in a majority—an impossible task—or by rendering factions

incapable of doing violence. And at managing factions,

democracies failed miserably:

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a

pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a

small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the

government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs

of faction. A common passion or interests will, in almost

every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a

communication and concert result from the form of government

itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to

sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence

it is that democracies have ever been spectacles of

turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible

with personal security or the rights of property; and have

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in general been as short in their lives as they have been

violent in their deaths.31

In this passage, Madison argued that a “pure democracy”—the ideal

type in which all citizens (in this case, adult, white males) met

in person to govern—could not control faction. Madison’s “pure

democracy” was a phantom, a rhetorical fabrication made to prove

a point, but this image, adumbrated in Federalist No. 10, colored

Madison’s subsequent discussions of democracy. The problems

revealed by a discussion of pure democracy were common to all of

democracy’s possible manifestations, for democracy ex vi termini

required people to gather in public to deliberate. In turn,

democracy’s many historical articulations, though not “pure,”

actively encouraged and intensified factions—by definition, “a

common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by

a majority of the whole” in democratic contexts. For Madison,

democracy was destructive of government, for it could not

control, but in fact worked to intensify, factions.

Madison declared that the basic characteristic of democracy

was that it required citizens to “assemble and administer the

government in person.” Democracy, in short, required people to

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gather. Bodily contact made factions possible by enabling the

communication of impulses. Because bodily contact was a necessary

condition for pure democracy, faction was a disease endemic to

the “form” of democracy. In Madison’s analysis, passions and

interests were the constitutive elements, the environmental

conditions, contributing to the emergence of factional threats to

the body politic. Passions and interests were congenital

malignancies, defects of the human condition. The condition for

the malignancy of faction to develop was association, which

democracy required and republicanism supposedly cured.

Federalist No. 10 reflected the widespread concern in

eighteenth-century moral philosophy with proximity. Eighteenth

century writers concluded that humans were, at their core,

mimetic creatures: “man is an imitative animal,” Jefferson

observed.32 In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith argued that

society was a collection of “mirrors” in which citizens judged

the merit of their own actions by observing how they were

reflected in the eyes of others.33 David Hume claimed, similarly,

that “the minds of men are mirrors to one another,” reflecting

each other’s emotions and passions.34 Eighteenth century

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psychology taught that in the act of imitation passions were

transferred, often unconsciously. The fact that the mind was a

mirror led many observers in the early American Republic to worry

about “mimetic corruption”—that imitative humans might ape the

wrong sorts of people.35 This idea of mimetic corruption

underlined Madison’s theory of faction. In the act of imitating

another human being gripped by strong passion, bodily impulses

could be communicated from person to person, triggering the type

of impulsive, collective behavior Madison associated with

democracy.

These conclusions concerning imitation were reiterated in

the eighteenth-century discourse about sympathy. Eighteenth

century political and rhetorical theorists portrayed humans as

fundamentally sympathetic creatures.36 However, this sympathy

ebbed and flowed in terms of distance, both physical and

psychological. Hume explained the calculus of sympathy in the

following terms: “we sympathize more with persons contiguous to

us, than with persons remote from us: With our acquaintances,

than with strangers: With our countrymen, than with

foreigners.”37 Notice the centrality of contiguity in Hume’s

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analysis: sympathy increased with physical contact. To produce

sympathy, identification, and imitation, all that was required

was to bring people together—to make people contiguous—which was

precisely what democracy did.

By assembling people, democracy created a volatile

rhetorical situation for the exercise of rhetoric: an art that,

in the eighteenth century, became increasingly interested in

performance and passion. During the 1750s and 1760s, several

British and Scottish rhetorical theorists who would become

profoundly influential in the United States—in particular, the

elocutionists Thomas Sheridan, James Burke, and John Rice—

attempted to redefine how rhetoric was studied and practiced.

Shunning the dominant eighteenth-century schools of rhetoric,

including Aristotelian logic and Ciceronian ornamentation, they

preached a rhetorical practice aimed at moving the will by

appealing directly to the passions.38 They coached their students

to employ a plain, unadorned, musical language—the language of

the heart—and to focus extensively on gesture and theatrical

performance. The elocutionists believed that humans would react

to such natural language on a bodily level. For them, rhetoric

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was less about addressing the understanding and more about

triggering involuntary, affective responses.39 The elocutionists

attempted to teach their students to turn passions into impulses

that would act directly and immediately on the will of an

audience.

Though the rhetorical theory of the elocutionists influenced

American conceptions of rhetorical practice and citizenship

during the Revolutionary-era, Publius expressed concern about the

dangers of such rhetoric in democratic contexts.40 The nature of

common impulses formed in “public bodies” explains the persistent

fear of demagoguery voiced in The Federalist. A demagogue could

easily capture an assembled people already primed for collective

action by their contiguity and by their mimetic, sympathetic

natures. This speaker would use his words to trigger a passionate

impulse that was common and hence that worked to move the

collective will of the public body to action. And on this point

Publius was clear: such action was necessarily contrary to the

common good and the public interest.

Studying eighteenth-century moral philosophy and rhetorical

theory is necessary to understand Publius’s negative portrayal of

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democracy in The Federalist. The “impulse” Madison spoke of in

Federalist No. 10 meant the direct action of the bodily,

irrational motives on the will. Factions were created when such

impulses became common. Impulses became common due to human

nature. Eighteenth-century philosophy portrayed humans as

mimetic, sympathetic creatures—meaning that passions easily and

involuntarily jumped from one person to another when they were

gathered in one place. Democracy was unable to contain factions

because it created the necessary and sufficient condition for

their emergence: democracy required people to gather together in

public to deliberate, and in such gatherings impulses of passion

and interest were communicated from person to person, becoming

common. The idea of sympathies, and the synecdochic logic of

conveyance of passions, is key for understanding the body public

as a collective organism in The Federalist.

“Public Bodies”

Madison’s denunciation of democracy in The Federalist was

premised upon a rhetoric of “public bodies”: the gathering

together of people in public to deliberate. Both Madison and

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Hamilton used this rhetoric in their contributions to the

collection. Employing the metaphor of “the body politic” common

to the Enlightenment, the authors of The Federalist talked about the

United States as if it were a human body.41 Publius also

described the gathering of people to deliberate—a foundational

practice of democratic government—in terms of bodies: “bodies of

men” in Federalist No. 15; “public bodies” in Federalist No. 22;

“the representative body” in Federalist No. 36.42 This rhetoric

of bodies established mimetic connections of ever-greater

abstraction between individual human bodies, public deliberative

bodies, and the body politic. In turn, a metaphoric entailment of

The Federalist’s rhetoric was that each type of body could succumb

to disease. When describing the dangers to political stability

represented by democracy, Publius employed bodily metaphors of

sickness and disease. “The instability, injustice, and confusion,

introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the

mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere

perished,” Madison observed in Federalist No. 10, comparing

faction to a disease—a disease for which democracy could offer no

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“cure.” He then described the Constitution as a republican “cure”

for that disease.43

In The Federalist, the “public body” was imagined via the

medical logics of the eighteenth century. Drawing on Hippocratic

theory of the four “humours” that dominated medical thinking well

into the Renaissance, Publius repeatedly spoke about the diseases

sickening the United States as “ill humours.”44 In Federalist No.

27, Hamilton observed that the Constitution was preferable to

democracy because it would be “less apt to be tainted by the

spirit of faction” and “more out of the reach of those occasional

ill humours, or temporary prejudices and propensities, which, in

smaller societies, frequently contaminate the public

deliberations.”45 The discourse of humours located disease

squarely within the individual constitution—and, via the mimetic

links established between individual bodies and the body politic,

this rhetoric framed faction as a disease congenital to politics

as such. This meant that the demos was inherently a threat to

itself and to the stability of the Republic. The disease of

factionalism was present from the beginning, and it was the job

of politicians to prevent its outbreak. Democracy was

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impermissible not only because it failed to control faction,

though that was true; democracy was the environment, the

rhetorical situation, that allowed humoral defects to emerge.

The public body metaphor allowed Publius to frame the

argument against democracy and for the Constitution in the

language of disease and cure. The Constitution was the medical

code; republicanism the therapeutic practice. Politicians were

doctors preventing diseases from sickening the body. Politicians

were also doctors managing the spread of disease—and with this

claim, the authors of The Federalist went well beyond the classical

humoral rhetorics of bile and phlegm and spoke in the emergent

medical vocabulary of the Enlightenment.

Madison’s attack on democracy was premised on an implicit

theory of contagion, the area where humoral theory was weakest.

During Madison’s time, physicians and medical researchers came to

recognize the theory of bodily humours to be deficient in its

ability to understand the transmission of disease. In the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries disease theory ran between

contagionists and miasmists—contagionists believed that disease

spread through physical contact, while miasmists believed that

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disease could proliferate without physical contact because its

seeds were present in the air as “miasma.”46 In Federalist No.

10, Madison sided with the contagionists, for it was physical

proximity that caused the disease of faction to bloom through

sympathetic transmission.

During the Constitutional Convention and the ratification

debate, insurrections and rebellions like the Regulation in

Massachusetts in 1786-1787 came to stand in for democracy in

public discussion. In Federalist No. 28, Hamilton claimed that

“an insurrection, whatever may be its immediate cause, eventually

endangers all government,” and he compared such an insurrection

to a “contagion” that “communicated itself” to citizens.47 Here,

Hamilton announced that Americans were grappling not just with

humoral or congenital disease but also communicable illness, which

was a key medical concept in late eighteenth-century research

into pandemics like yellow fever, and which remains today the

primary category of public health. In The Federalist, the disease

went by a number of names: anarchy, disorder, faction,

insurrection. Its cause was passions and interests becoming

common. It spread through bodily contact in popular assemblies.

29

It was communicated, in short, through democracy. A grave danger

to the health of the United States, according to Publius, was

popular participation in politics.

The claim that faction was a “contagion” was a further step

in the development of the anti-democratic rhetoric of The

Federalist. In a sense, Publius was arguing that faction was both

genetic and transmissible, endemic to the body politic and caused

by democracy. Faction was an upsetting of natural humoral balance

when passion triumphed over reason; at the same time, this

imbalance was contagious and could be caught through proximity.

Here, the conflicted and convoluted medical vocabularies of the

eighteenth century offered incredibly powerful tools for seeing

and analyzing political disorder. These medical rhetorics allowed

Publius to reimagine governance as therapeutic. Republican

politicians would combat genetic illnesses and communicable ones.

The former required screening and the prescription of different

life practices to contain risks; the latter required shutting

down vectors of transmission, and it was the latter at which

republicanism was particularly proficient for Publius.

30

Publius deployed the “contagion” metaphor to describe

popular passions running amok in three other essays, Federalist

No. 16, Federalist No. 61, and Federalist No. 73.48 In the

rhetoric of contagion, Publius brought together a medicalized

discourse of communicable illness with the faculty psychology

talk of “impulse”—for in factions, passionate impulses were said

to “infect” people.49 By comparing passion to an infection,

Publius claimed that factions worked on the will without the

intercession of reason, weakening the body in spite of the

strength of the mind, just like an impulse. In The Federalist, the

disease of democracy was figured as popular “madness.”50 In turn,

the faculty psychologists held that madmen were mad precisely

because they were unable to resist the irrational impulses of the

body. Publius thus grounded misodemia in the overlapping

discourses of mental and physical disease that was at once

individual and social, congenital and contagious, a problem in

people and in politics.

The authors of The Federalist imagined people to be self-

interested animals whose rational faculties were insufficiently

developed to protect them from the impulses of passion and

31

interest. Publius worried that reason was easily corrupted by

“self-love.”51 As such, it was the job of government to restrain

people who responded more readily to passion than to reason.

Hamilton brought up the example of deliberative “bodies of men”

to prove this point:

Has it been found that bodies of men act with more rectitude

or greater disinterestedness than individuals? The contrary

of this has been inferred by all accurate observers of the

conduct of mankind; and the inference is founded upon

obvious reasons. Regard to reputation, has a less active

influence, when the infamy of a bad action is to be divided

among a number, than when it is to fall singly upon one. A

spirit of faction, which is apt to mingle its poison in the

deliberations of all bodies of men, will often hurry the

persons, of whom they are composed, into improprieties and

excesses, for which they would blush in a private

capacity.52

The rhetoric of The Federalist located the origins of factionalism

in the public body, stigmatizing collectives as sites of disease.

Hamilton, too, understood the disease of democracy and the

32

process by which it sickened the body politic. For him, when

people gathered in numbers to deliberate, they would quickly lose

sight of reason and justice because the stigma of a bad action

would be distributed across the group, making the fear of infamy

less inhibitory. Moreover, Hamilton explained that factions

“poison” discussion in “all bodies of men,” hurrying them into

excesses that they would never consider as individuals reasoning

in private. The authors of The Federalist thus married a humoral

logic of pathology—which troped disease as an individual

imbalance—to faculty psychology, which taught that reason should

regulate the passions, and to new understandings of disease as

transmitted through bodily contact.

The sympathetic nature of humans meant that passions easily

ran amok in the public body, infecting all those gathered for

deliberation. As passion brought the majority under its spell,

reason had ever-more difficulty gaining traction in the public

body. Madison wrote in Federalist No. 36: “the mild voice of

reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest,

is but too often drowned before public bodies as well as

individuals, by the clamours of an impatient avidity for

33

immediate and immoderate gain.”53 Here Madison emphasized that

shortsightedness associated with factions was a problem for both

individuals and public bodies. Yet he was also clear that the

problems faced by individuals were multiplied when they gathered.

The “form” of democracy encouraged bodily impulses—bad enough in

the individual—to become “common.” In such moments, passion or

interest worked directly on the will of a collective, corporate

body. Thus, the public body was said to suffer from “disease.”54

The Lessons of History: Democracy Disease is Congenital

In eighteenth-century civic republican discourse, it was

customary to posit a distinction between power and liberty.55

Liberty and power were said to be in perpetual tension, and thus

it was common in American public discourse to say that liberty

had to be protected from the always-overreaching hands of power.

The essays of The Federalist painted power in a more positive light.

Power might be dangerous to the liberties of Americans, but state

power was also necessary to protect them from danger. Government

was a “repository” of political power, power here being troped as

a possession, as a thing that could be transferred among

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individuals and entrusted to others. In The Federalist, Publius

suggested that power was not inherently dangerous but was subject

to certain formulations and articulations that could make it

dangerous, including when political power was entrusted to a

democratic body of significant numbers (a public body).56 Just as

liberty had to be protected from the grasping hands of power, so

too power had to be protected from the evils of democratic

assemblage.

Madison reinforced the argument about the evils of

democratic “form” by instructing Americans about classical

history. The founders of the United States were avid readers of

the classics. They studied ancient histories and imagined

themselves to be replaying old battles between freedom and

tyranny; indeed, for them, “the world of the ancient

Mediterranean was as vivid and recognizable as the world in which

they lived.”57 When writing the Constitution and imaging the

contours of American politics, the founders clearly favored the

Roman example over the Greek. Ancient Greece produced

intellectual giants, but it was too democratic. Republican Rome,

on the other hand, appealed to elite Americans’ longing for

35

social hierarchy, discipline, order.58 Where Greece was most

useful was in expounding the follies of democracy. The founders

viewed Greece through Plato’s eyes, sharing his desire for elite

control over government and his fears of ignorant masses being

manipulated by sophists and demagogues.

Ancient Greece proved central to Madison’s defense of the

House of Representatives from anti-federalist attacks that it did

not adequately represent Americans. In Federalist No. 55, Madison

admitted that “no political problem is less susceptible of a

precise solution” than representation. Nevertheless, he touted

the wisdom and the flexibility of the system established by the

Constitution—while there would initially be sixty five

representatives in the House (at a ratio of one to every thirty

thousand inhabitants of a state), there would be a census in

three years capable of augmenting this number, and then another

census every ten years thereafter, ensuring that as the number of

Americans grew, so too would their representation.59 Having

argued for the correctness of the thirty thousand to one ratio in

the previous number, Madison argued in Federalist No. 55 against

any ratio that might engorge the House of Representatives beyond

36

the bounds of wisdom and deliberation. “Nothing can be more

fallacious, than to found our political calculations on

arithmetical principles. Sixty or seventy men might be more

properly trusted with a given degree of power, than six or seven.

But it does not follow, that six or seven hundred would be

proportionally a better depository. And if we carry on the

supposition to six or seven thousand, the whole reasoning ought

to be reversed,” he averred.60 Bigger was not in this case

better. Moreover, the logic at the heart of the ancient

democracies—that the more voices and perspectives present during

deliberation the better the decisions—was fundamentally flawed.

According to Publius, the disease of democracy was congenital and

could be traced back to democracy’s birth.

To counter anti-federalist claims that the House of

Representatives was too deficient in numbers to adequately

represent citizens, Madison claimed that any politics modeled

along the lines of the ancient Greek direct democracies was

doomed to chaos and failure simply because of its structure.

According to Madison, pure democracy destroyed wisdom as the very

act of gathering in great numbers encouraged passion to triumph

37

over reason. His argument in Federalist No. 55 against more

numerous representation in the House emphasized the stupidity of

public bodies:

The truth is, that in all cases, a certain number at least

seems to be necessary to secure the benefits of free

consultation and discussion; and to guard against too easy a

combination for improper purposes: as on the other hand, the

number ought at most to be kept within a certain limit, in

order to avoid the confusion and intemperance of a

multitude. In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever

character composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter

from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates,

every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.61

Madison explained that the founders worked to strike a balance in

the House between too few in number—which would curtail

deliberation and make for easy coups—and too many. Notice, here,

that Madison suggested that “a multitude”—a word derived from the

Latin noun multitudo, which meant the common people or a crowd—was

necessarily characterized by “confusion and intemperance.” It was

as if the coming together of the private, isolated, cold-

38

calculating, rational individuals imagined by early liberal

thinkers, the mens sine affectu, into a multitude resulted in a

monstrous psychic change. The founders were haunted by this

nightmare: by liberal men becoming a democratic mob. Passion, not

reason, ruled the multitude of the public body. In the end,

Madison had no faith that even the wisest man or the greatest

philosopher could control a multitude when it was assembled in

full force; a too-numerous assembly, like those in Athens, would

corrupt even the incorruptible Socrates (who, we should recall,

chose death rather than compromise his values by escaping in

Plato’s Apology).

Having dispatched the main anti-federalist arguments against

the House—that it was too small to adequately understand the

interests of its constituents (Federalist No. 56); that it was a

bastion the rich designed to oppress the poor (Federalist No.

57); and that its numbers would not be augmented as directed by

the Constitution (Federalist No. 58)—Madison reiterated his

attack on the large deliberative bodies demanded by democratic

government at the close of Federalist No. 58:

39

In the ancient republics, where the whole body of the people

assembled in person, a single orator, or an artful

statesmen, was generally seen to rule with as complete a

sway, as if a sceptre had been placed in his single hands.

On the same principle, the more multitudinous a

representative assembly may be rendered, the more it will

partake of the infirmities incident to collective meetings

of the people. Ignorance will be the dupe of cunning; and

passion the slave of sophistry and declamation. The people

can never err more than in supposing, that by multiplying

their representatives beyond a certain limit, they

strengthen the barrier against the government of a few.

Experience will for ever admonish them, that, on the

contrary, after securing a sufficient number for the purposes of safety, of

local information, and of diffusive sympathy with the whole society, they

will counteract their own views, by every addition to their

representatives. The countenance of the government may

become more democratic; but the soul that animates it, will

be more oligarchic. The machine will be enlarged, but the

40

fewer, and often the more secret, will be the springs by

which its motions are directed.62

Adopting the idiom of historical instruction that was a common

voice in The Federalist, Madison looked back to Athens in order to

caution Americans against their democratic inclinations (or

better, “infirmities”)—for such inclinations were, in fact,

contrary to their own interests. More numerous representation

might make a government appear democratic. Because greater

political participation entailed the triumph of passion over

reason, however, in reality democracy was the perfect recipe for

oligarchic rule.

Here, Madison echoed John Trenchard’s argument in No. 103 of

the popular Cato’s Letters, “Of Eloquence,” that in Athenian

democracy the people were ruled not by themselves but by clever

demagogues who abused civic rhetoric and made the masses

“continually drunk with torrents of inflammatory eloquence.” Yet

Madison extended the assumptions of Trenchard and others to

include the concept of representation, an idea that was foreign

to the ancients. For while Trenchard criticized the demagogic

tendencies of a direct democracy, where the people gathered in

41

person, Madison argued that a large gathering of the people’s

representatives was just as rhetorically baleful as direct

democracy. There was little difference. This meant that to

counter dreadful democratic tendencies, the new Constitution had

to do more than institute a system of representation; it had to

keep the number of representatives relatively small, so that

passion could be kept in check—and so that rhetors could be

prevented from manipulating impassioned masses. In Federalist No.

58, Madison trumpeted a counterintuitive calculus: as a public

body grew more democratic, so too did the danger to the people

grow. The more the many tried to rule themselves, the easier it

would be for the few to rule them.

An American Misodemia

To justify the republic created by the Constitution, the

authors of The Federalist rhetorically framed democracy so that

their readers would denounce it. How they did this—by employing

the language of public bodies—articulated a new vocabulary for

anti-democratic sensibilities that were already aloft in the

United States. Casting off the rote emblems of the few and the

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many, and shirking the discourses of misodemia common in the West

since the time of the Greeks and Romans, Madison invented a new,

medicalized misodemic discourse for the American scene.

For the ancient Greeks, democracy referred to the κράτος of

the people as the capacity to act. Josiah Ober argues that

“demokratia, which emerged as a regime-type with the historical

self-assertion of a demos in a moment of revolution, refers to a

demos’ collective capacity to do things in the public realm, to

make things happen.”63 Democratic power was exercised in

relationship to what was believed to be an eternal, inevitable,

and ultimately unsolvable clash between the few and the many; in

fact, the empowered demos was invested primarily in keeping the

balance in check and ensuring that the poor were not tyrannized

by the rich.64 Though the Romans did not talk as much about

democracy as the Greeks, the distinction between the few and the

many—often troped in Latin as the conflict between plebs and

patricians, the people and the Senate, populares (men of the

people) and optimates (men above the people, the best men)—was

nevertheless equally important in the Roman Republic.65

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The imagery of democracy as the competition between the few

and the many, the rich and the poor, resounded far beyond the

classical era, in Machiavelli’s rhetoric, in the writings of the

Levellers during the English Civil War, and in the political

discourse of colonial and Revolutionary-era America. As it had

for the Greeks, American democracy in the early Republic meant

the fight for shared dignity, a battle that often took the form

of collective political mobilization known as “Regulation” in

agitations such as Shays’s Rebellion. According to George

Richards Minot, the first historian of Shays’s Rebellion, the

insurrection was the product of “hostilities between creditors

and debtors, between the rich and the poor, between the few and

the many”—hostilities first exposed during the Revolutionary War

that exploded into open conflict between the rich and the poor in

1786-1787.66

With Shays’s Rebellion very much on their minds, those

gathered at the Constitutional Convention acknowledged that

American politics was characterized by a number of conflicts,

including the clash between the interests of the few and the

many, the rich and the poor. In Philadelphia on June 6, 1787,

44

Madison observed that “all civilized Societies would be divided

into different Sects, Factions, & interests, as they happened to

consist of rich & poor, debtors & creditors, the landed the

manufacturing, the commercial interests, the inhabitants of his

district, or that district, the followers of this political

leader or that political leader, the disciplines of this

religious sect or that religious sect.” He then expressed his

persistent, all-encompassing worry, that “in all cases where a

majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights

of the minority are in danger.” This worry was “verified by the

Histories of every Country antient & modern. In Greece & Rome the

rich & poor, the creditors & debtors, as well as the patricians &

plebeians alternatively oppressed each other with equal

unmercifulness.”67 While Madison mentioned many group interests

in his remarks, the conflicting interests between the rich and

the poor were central to how the founders of the United States

imagined politics. Gordon Wood notes: “By the 1780s the most

common conception used to describe the society was the dichotomy

between aristocracy and democracy, the few and the many. The

essential struggle of politics was not between the magistracy and

45

the people, as the Whigs had thought, but between the two social

groups of the people themselves.”68 In the language of Federalist

No. 10, the poor shared an interest that set them against

majorities that expressed the more enduring and genuine interests

of the general population.

Hamilton echoed Madison’s thoughts in his fiery address of

June 18, 1787. He observed that “all communities divide

themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and

well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the

people has been said to be the voice of God; and however

generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true

in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge

or determine right.”69 While Madison talked at the Constitutional

Convention of providing justice for the few and the many, the

lesson for Hamilton was to balance out the pernicious influence

of the poor by increasing the power of the rich, specifically by

giving them a “permanent” interest in government (via an

aristocratic senate with long terms in office). He hoped that the

new Constitution would place its faith in the rich rather than

46

the people, for, rejecting the common proverb, Hamilton denied

that that the vox populi shared any characteristics with the vox Dei.

It is interesting, given how deeply entrenched the

vocabulary of the rich and poor was in the West for imagining

democracy since the classical period, that this was not a more

significant line of attack in The Federalist. Madison did list the

hostilities between rich and poor as one cause among many of

faction in Federalist No. 10, and in this essay he also claimed

that a system of representation like that established by the

Constitution would protect against “the cabals of a few” and “the

confusion of a multitude.”70 The only other time that Publius

talked of the conflict between the few and the many was in

Federalist No. 62. There, Madison observed that in times of

public instability caused by the absence of a strong federal

government it was possible for “the sagacious, the enterprising,

and the monied few” to dominate “the industrious and uninformed

mass of the people.” “This is a state of things in which it may

be said, with some truth, that laws are made for the few, not for

the many,” he claimed, suggesting that the Constitution would

prevent such domination.71

47

Classical Greek democracy was designed to protect the poor

from the influence of the rich: democracy, in short, was a means

to achieving balance and justice, which it did with liturgies,

ostracisms, and punitive fines against the rich leveled by

popular courts. In The Republic Plato described democracy as being

founded in fear, and, indeed, the fear of the retributive

violence by the masses at times kept the rich in check.72 Though

he admitted that the clash between rich and poor was real, in

Federalist No. 10 Madison explicitly denied that this battle

would be solved through any kind of economic justice like it had

been for the Greeks—the kind of justice demanded by the Levellers

during the English Civil War and by the Regulators in

Massachusetts. Madison was emphatic: “reducing” humans to “a

perfect equality” was not the solution.73

Many anti-federalists ridiculed the Constitution as an

instrument the rich devised to dominate the poor.74 Madison and

Hamilton generally chose not to engage anti-federalists in this

register; Publius attempted to shift the terms in which Americans

discussed democracy away from economics. Indeed, in the closing

essay, Federalist No. 85, Hamilton labeled attacks on the rich

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disgusting.75 Rather than talking about rich and poor, Madison

and Hamilton medicalized political discourse, encouraging

Americans to talk about diseases and cures. By doing this they

attempted to negate a traditional rallying cry for democratic

revolution: that the many must mobilize to protect themselves

from the few. By cutting off such arguments, Publius invented a

medicalized American rhetoric of misodemia.

Madison began Federalist No. 10 by noting his desire to find

“a proper cure” for popular government’s “propensity to dangerous

vice.”76 While democracy offered no way of healing the “disease”

of faction—and, in fact, only amplified the sickness—a republic

like that established by the Constitution “promises the cure for

which we are seeking.”77 In The Federalist, Madison redescribed

government as therapy for civic disease. By shifting registers

and troping government in medical terms, Madison was better able

to redescribe democracy as illegitimate, destructive, and wicked.

Government was not about protecting the many from the outsized

influence of the few; nor was it concerned with about achieving

equality or about promoting economic justice, as it had been for

the ancient Greeks. Now government was about curing civic

49

disease. There is a subtle disempowerment at play in The

Federalist’s medicalized discourse of governance. Madison refused

to affirm, as Americans during the Revolutionary War affirmed,

and as countless theorists going back to the Ancient Greeks and

Romans affirmed, that it was the demos’s prerogative to fight for

themselves and for justice. According to the authors of The

Federalist, the demos could not cure itself, for democracy was

damaged in “form.” In the republican schema, citizens transferred

power to government through their representatives, and it was the

job of government to provide a cure for the diseases endemic to

the demos.

In The Federalist, the benefits of republican government were

illuminated by contrast with the terrors of democracy—first, in

Federalist No. 10, “pure democracy,” and then in Federalist No.

14 and No. 58, just “democracy,” which was subject to the same

“diseases” as the abject horror of democracy in its purest state.

Republics could “cure” a “disease” that democracies incited.

About the proposed republic, Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10:

“Let us examine the points in which it varies from a pure

democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure

50

and the efficacy which it must derive from the union.”78 He made

a similar gesture using similar language in Federalist No. 14 in

the context of clarifying “the confusion of names.” Here, Madison

described the strong federal union created by the Constitution

“as the proper antidote for the diseases of faction, which have

proved fatal to other popular governments, and of which alarming

symptoms have been betrayed in our own.”79 In The Federalist, we see

the medicalization of the republican gaze as it viewed the mass

of the people as diseased and infectious.80

The Federalist troped government as a response to diseased

bodies: government became about curing disease, about the

protection, purification, and immunization of populations, about

the management of public bodies. In The Federalist, medical

figuration is not simply ornamental; this rhetoric is an

organizing logic of governance. Publius’s discussion of democracy

means the body politic is always already a threat to itself and

the role of governance is to manage the emergence of this threat.

Politics is a form of governing medicine for what ails a nation.

In The Federalist, the rhetoric of medical diagnostics and therapies

organize the political philosophy being propounded. Those who fail

51

to appreciate the medical rhetoric as more than stylistic

conceits fail to grasp the politics itself—which is a medicalized

fear of democracy that locates the seat of the nation’s disease

within Man’s soul.81 The disease is faction. And what does this

illness cause? Not hunger or death, at least at first. The

expression of the disease is violence, disorder, and rebellion,

in short the maladies of democracy, which must be controlled by

republican government.

Announcing that the body politic is always already a threat

to itself, and that the role of governance is to manage the

emergence of those threats, it seems to me that Publius’s

misodemia might well have functioned as the rhetorical

scaffolding for a very early vision of American biopolitics—for

it described the work of politics as immunization from democratic

threats.82 The conception of political power as the governing,

disciplining, and spatial plotting of populations is present

right from our nation’s birth, in documents like the Northwest

Ordinance of 1787. The point of this nascent biopolitics, if we

can call it that, was cultivating certain desirable ways of

living (patriotism, liberalism, indebtedness to the founders

52

through a “contract of blood”) that might prevent the ultimate,

terminal disease—the “contagion of some violent popular paroxysm”

that, Hamilton admitted in Federalist No. 16, government could

neither predict nor contain.83 The new government, both Madison

and Hamilton announced, would be one of calculation and measure,

but some things were beyond calculation and measure—and at times

Publius made it seem that the government was fighting a losing

battle against democratic decay.

It would be worth investigating how the rhetoric of

Publius’s misodemia influenced American biopolitics during the

nineteenth century as governing elites worked to manage any

number of “threats” to the “health” of American politics: here we

study rhetoric as a technique of governance. At the same time, it

would be worth studying how reformers worked within, and against,

this misodemic language to promote a more democratic politics in

the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:

here we study rhetoric as a tool of resistance, subterfuge, and

the construction of alternative democratic futures.

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Notes

General note: There are many useful editions of The Federalist (not “The Federalist Papers,” as it is commonly misnamed, most likely due to the popular edition of the work edited by Clinton Rossiter published under that name). I chose an inexpensive and readily available version with a helpful introduction by Robert Ferguson published by Barnes & Noble. All citations to the essays of The Federalist refer to this version: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, intro. and notes by Robert A.Ferguson (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2006).

1. A number of scholars have illuminated the undemocratic, and indeed anti-democratic, foundations of the Constitution, demonstrating that the founders wrote the Constitution in order to restrain a rowdy demos—see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (1969; rpt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (1979; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1-65; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the RevolutionaryAtlantic (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000); Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Woody Holton,Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); and Christian G. Fritz, American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Building on this work, Jeremy Engels hasdescribed several of the techniques of governance that were employed in the post-Revolutionary period to tame democracy—see Jeremy Engels, Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010).

2. Fritz, American Sovereigns, 18-20, 27, 28. He concludes: “Early supporters of the federal Constitution hoped its formation would establish a constitutional order after which little would be heard of the sovereign people except in an attenuated, symbolic, and theoretical sense” (117).

54

3. Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, 256, 273.

4. George Mason, comments of June 4, 1787, in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 1: 101.

5. And thus I build on important studies of the rhetoric of ratification: See James Jasinski, “Rhetoric and Judgment in the Constitutional Ratification Debate of 1787-1788: An Exploration Between Theory and Critical Practice,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 197-218; David Zarefsky and Victoria Gallagher, “From ‘Conflict’ to ‘Constitutional Question’: Transformations in EarlyAmerican Public Address,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 247-61; and Terence S. Morrow, “Representation and Political Deliberation in the Massachusetts Constitutional Ratification Debate,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3 (2000): 529-553; for helpful general studies of ratification, see Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Vintage, 1996), 94-160; and Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010); for a general discussion of the rhetoric of The Federalist, see Arthur Furtwangler, The Authority of Publius: A Reading of the Federalist Papers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).

6. Isaac Kramnick, “The ‘Great National Discussion’: The Discourse of Politics in 1787,” William and Mary Quarterly 45 (1988): 3-32.

7. Douglas Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers, ed. Trevor Colbourn (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), 53.

8. Garry Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist (1981; rpt. New York: Penguin, 2001), xvi.

9. Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 12.

10. Plato, Republic, 566c; Isocrates, Antidosis, 15:131.

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11. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, November 18, 1788.

12. Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 94; on the anti-federalists, see Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

13. The problem of “equivocation” was discussed most fully in Madison’s day by the Scottish philosopher, minister, theologian, and rhetorician George Campbell in his 1776 book The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Working in the Baconian tradition, Campbell was deeply concerned about the deleterious effects of linguistic confusion. Campbell noted that there were four “ends” of rhetoric, associated with the four parts of the mind: “to enlighten the understanding, to please the imagination, to move the passions orto influence the will.” These ends were often independent, yet for rhetoric to operate effectively it had to engage all four parts of the mind (1). To move an audience to action, it was not enough to influence the will; orators also had to enlighten the understanding (71-2, 78, 139). To enlighten, in turn, speakers had to be clear and concise in their use of language. Thus, Book II of Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, “The Foundations and Essential Properties of Elocution,” focused primarily on the diverse ways and forms in which language could obscure and confuse. Here, Campbell attempted to diagnose the myriad ways that language could go wrong so that speakers knew how to make itright. He treated many forms of confusion, but of particular relevance here is his long discussion of “equivocation.” George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer (1776; rpt. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 226-231.

14. James Madison, Federalist No. 14, 74. Madison’s concern with the confusion of names was widely shared in his day. Inspired by the work of Francis Bacon, the philosophers of the Enlightenment recognized that linguistic confusion was often the cause of epistemological confusion. In the Novum Organon, published in 1620, Bacon described four intellectual fallacies—the Idols of the Tribe, Cave, Marketplace, and Theatre—that frustrated

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scientific investigation. The Idols of the Marketplace (idola fori) concerned the everyday use of language, specifically the unreliability of social usage and the imprecision of many words in common parlance. For Bacon, too many words had been detached from their proper meanings; other words were badly designed from the beginning. The improper use of language had two negative consequences: first, bad language produced misunderstanding rather than understanding, impeding the goal of shared scientificinquiry; second, bad language stunted the back-and-forth of intellectual debate, for it often made it seem that one side had won an argument when in fact they had simply talked past or around their interlocutor.

15. Madison, Federalist No. 14, 73-4.

16. Representation was, for Madison, the defining feature of a republic. In Federalist No. 39, he observed: “we may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a governmentwhich derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people; and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior” (210).

17. For a helpful conversation about how the classical Greek meaning of democracy compares to more contemporary tropings, see Demokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern, ed. Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettres Écrites De La Montagne (1764), LettreVIII, in Oeuvres Complètes de J. J. Rousseau, Avec Des Notes Historiques, Volume3 (Paris: Furne, 1835), 79.

19. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 52.

20. James Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States” (April 1787), in James Madison, Writings, ed. Jack N. Rakove, Library of America Edition (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1999), 76-77. My italics.

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21. James Madison, Speech of June 7, 1787, in Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention, 1: 135.

22. Faculty psychology modeled the relationship between the mind and the body on Newtonian mechanics, describing the human organism as a machine with levers and springs that could be pulled and pressed to achieve predictable results. Morton White, Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1989), 102.

23. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man (Edinburgh: John Bell, 1788), 76.

24. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Men, 2, 68. Note that passages like this speak to Michel Foucault’s point that reason during theEnlightenment was not transhistorical but instead was defined culturally in relationship to emergent conceptions of madness—seeMichel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (1961; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1988).

25. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Men, 68, 84.

26. David Hume wrote about the mind as machine using one of Newton’s favorite metaphors: “the impulse of one billiard-ball isattended with motion in the second.” For Hume and Hobbes before him, passion was a direct spur to action—and, Hobbes wrote, “whena Body is once in motion, it moveth (unless something els hinder it) eternally.” David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London, 1758), 318; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson(1651; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1985), 88.

27. “Passion often gives a violent impulse to the will, and makesa man do what he knows he shall repent as long as he lives,” Reidconcluded darkly. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Men, 181.

28. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Men, 113, 176, 181.

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29. Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (1977; rpt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

30. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Men, 68.

31. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 55-56.

32. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), ed. William Peden (1954; rpt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 162.

33. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (1759; rpt. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1976), 84-5.

34. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (1888; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 365.

35. On “mimetic corruption,” see Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 87-127.

36. On sympathy and the American Revolution, see Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); on the importance of passion and the construction of an affective universe in the early Republic, see Peter Coviello, “Agonizing Affection: Affect and Nation in Early America,” Early American Literature 37 (2002): 439-468.

37. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 581.

38. For a helpful overview of the main schools of eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, including the Aristotelian and Ciceronian schools, see Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).

39. Jay Fliegelman argues that the elocutionists “sought to find a rhetorical equivalent to the power of beauty to trigger

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involuntary desire, or more precisely, in gender terms, a male equivalent to the power of female beauty to solicit an involuntary sexual response.” Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 31-32. The elocutionists thus diverged profoundly from the rhetorical theory espoused by GeorgeCampbell in Philosophy of Rhetoric, who suggested that all rhetoric was first addressed to the understanding and who, according to Howell, made passions are the “handmaids” of reason—Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, 589.

40. The crucial work here is Fliegelman, Declaring Independence.

41. Thus, to take just one example from the collection, in Federalist No. 39, Madison observed that for Americans, it was “essential” that the government “be derived from the great body of the people” and noted that the House of Representatives “is elected immediately by the great body of the people” (210, 211).

42. Hamilton, Federalist No. 15, 84; Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 22, 120; Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 36, 188.

43. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 52.

44. For examples of Publius using the Hippocratic medical language of the Renaissance, see Federalist No. 6, 31; FederalistNo. 27, 146; Federalist No. 35, 186; Federalist No. 64, 359; Federalist No. 71, 395; Federalist No. 78, 432, 433. On the evolving medical discourses of the Enlightenment, see Ray Porter,The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (1997; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 201-303; on the theory of the four humours, see Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).

45. Hamilton, Federalist No. 27, 146.

46. Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 259-260.

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47. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 28, 149.

48. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 16, 91; Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 61, 340; Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 73, 407.

49. Hamilton, Federalist No. 73, 407.

50. On the comparisons between democracy and madness during the early Republic, see Engels, Enemyship, 99-100.

51. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 53; Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 70, 390.

52. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 15, 84.

53. James Madison, Federalist No. 42, 236.

54. Faction is described as one of the “diseases” endemic to popular government in Federalist No. 10, 52, 53, 58; the disease metaphor is also used in Federalist No. 21, 111; Federalist No. 28, 153; Federalist No. 37, 200; and Federalist No. 50, 286.

55. Breaking with a central insight of the Whig political tradition, Madison claimed that power and liberty were not antithetical, and that governmental power could be used to promote the liberties of citizens (he, of course, did not take this theory as far as Hamilton did). In the eighteenth-century Whig vocabulary that influenced the Revolutionary generation, power was brutal, aggressive, and unstable, and “its necessary victim” was “liberty, or law, or right,” which was delicate, passive, and sensitive—Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 57, and on the discourses of “liberty,” see James Jasinski, “The Feminization of Liberty, Domesticated Virtue, and the Reconstitution of Power and Authority in Early American Political Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1993): 146-164. For a very helpful discussion of how four of the founders imagined the relationship between power and liberty, see James H.

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Read, Power verses Liberty: Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Jefferson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).

56. As a liberal theorist par excellance, Madison consistently worried that government could exceed the power granted to it by representatives of the people, which was why, in part, he was such a loud proponent of the separation of powers in government, and why he would later champion a Bill of Rights—see Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 1995).

57. Eran Shalev, Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and theCreation of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 2.

58. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that today Westerners are much less Greek than we believe and even more Roman, for the reformers of the nineteenth century found in accounts of Rome a model of disciplinary power that came to infiltrate and reorder all other techniques of governance. “One should not forget that, generally speaking, the Roman model, at the Enlightenment, playeda dual role: in its republican aspect, it was the very embodimentof liberty; in its military aspect, it was the ideal scheme of discipline,” he writes (146). Foucault focuses mainly on France, but Rome also stood as a complicated reference point for Americans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

59. James Madison, Federalist No. 55, 307. Of course, he ducked the heated controversy over the 3/5ths clause here.

60. Madison, Federalist No. 55, 308.

61. Madison, Federalist No. 55, 308-9.

62. James Madison, Federalist No. 58, 326.

63. Josiah Ober, “The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule,” Constellations 15 (2008): 5.

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64. On the centrality of the distinction between the few and the many in Athenian democracy, see Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

65. The conflict between mass and elite in Republican Rome is explored in Henrik Mouritsen, Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); on the “conflict ofthe orders,” where the tensions between the few and many are on display, see H. H. Scullard, A History of the Roman World, 753 to 146 BC, 5th Edition (1935; rpt. London: Routledge, 2003), 78-91.

66. George Richards Minot, The History of the Insurrections, in Massachusetts, In the Year MDCCLXXXVI, and the Rebellion Consequent Thereon (Worcester, MA: Isaiah Thomas, 1788), 15.

67. Madison’s remarks at the Constitutional Convention on June 6,1787 in Records of the Federal Convention, 1: 135. Madison echoed these thoughts on June 26, noting that “in all civilized Countries the people fall into different classes havg. a real or supposed difference of interests. There will be creditors & debtors, farmers, merchts. & manufactures. There will be particularly the distinction of rich & poor.” Madison’s comments of June 26 in Records of the Federal Convention, 1: 422.

68. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 503.

69. Hamilton’s speech of June 18, 1787, in Records of the Federal Convention, 1: 299.

70. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 57.

71. James Madison, Federalist No. 62, 346.

72. Plato, Republic, 557a.

73. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 56. Madison here spoke in line with a common belief shared by elites in post-Revolutionary America: that the U.S. could only compete with Europe if more

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money was centralized in the hands of wealthy investors. Terry Bouton calls this doctrine of upward financial redistribution “the gospel of moneyed men” in Taming Democracy, 70.

74. A Rhode Island anti-federalist warned Americans that the Constitution was designed to “raise the fortunes and respectability of the well-born few, and oppress the plebians.” New York’s Cato lamented that the Constitution was “a departure from the safe democratical principles”: “It is a very important objection to this government, that the representation consists ofso few; too few to resist the influence of corruption, and the temptation to treachery, against which all governments ought to take precautions.” Providence Gazette, January 5, 1788, quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 255; Cato No. 5, New York Journal, November 22, 1787, in The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification, ed. Bernard Bailyn, Library of America Series (New York: Literary Classics of the U.S., 1993), 1: 401, 402.

75. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 85, 482.

76. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 51.

77. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 56.

78. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 56.

79. Madison, Federalist No. 14, 73. The disease metaphor was prevalent in The Federalist. Hamilton also used the disease metaphorto describe factions in Federalist No. 61, 340. In Federalist No.37, Madison again used the disease metaphor when describing the virtues of the Constitutional Convention, noting that “the convention must have enjoyed in a very singular degree, an exemption from the pestilential influence of party animosities; the diseases most incident to deliberative bodies, and most apt to contaminate their proceedings.” Here, he suggested that party animosities were the worst disease of deliberative bodies—but we should remember that in 1787-88 faction was a synonym for

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political party, and the early parties of the 1790s were understood through the lens of faction. James Madison, FederalistNo. 37, 200.

80. Concerning transformations of the medical “gaze”—and especially its relationship to sovereignty—in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (1963; rpt.New York: Vintage Books, 1973).

81. On the discourses of the soul during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (2003; rpt. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005).

82. On the troubles with the immunitary logic, see Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

83. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 16, 91.

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