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
1
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
2
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
3
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
4
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
5
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
6
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.
7
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
8
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
9
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
10
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
11
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
12
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
13
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
14
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
15
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
16
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
17
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
18
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
19
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
20
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
21
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
22
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
23
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
24
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
25
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
26
“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
27
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
28
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
34
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
42
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
43
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
48
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.
53
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.
55
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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