1. James Madison, no. 55 of The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 375–76 (hereafter referred to as The Federalist).

2. James Madison, no. 39 of The Federalist, 250.

3. James Madison, no. 51 of The Federalist, 349.

4. See chap. 3 of Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).

5. See chap. 27 of Garry Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1981).

6. See Donald S. Lutz, “Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and Whig Political Theory,” Political Science Reviewer 7 (Fall 1977): 118–19.

7. Francis Joseph Grund, Aristocracy in America (New York: Harper, 1959), 212–13. We appreciate being introduced to Grund’s writing in Sydney Ahlstrom, “The Puritan Ethic and American Democracy,” in Calvinism and the Political Order, ed. George L. Hunt (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965). See also “The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations,” in America in Perspective, ed. Henry S. Cornmanger (New York: Random House, 1948).

8. See, generally, Dante Germino, “Carl J. Friedrich on Constitutionalism and the ‘Great Tradition’ of Political Theory,” in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, Constitutionalism (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 19–31; Paul Sigmund, “Carl Friedrich’s Contribution to the Theory of Constitutionalism-Comparative Government,” in Pennock and Chapman, Constitutionalism, 32–46.

9. Clinton L. Rossiter, The First American Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1956), 193, and The Political Thought of the American Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963), 195.

10. Quoted in Cecilia M. Kenyon, “Constitutionalism in Revolutionary America,” in Pennock and Chapman, Constitutionalism, 97.

11. Ibid., 101.

12. Wood, Creation, 52; see also 474–75, 507–8, 543–45, 562–63, 606–15.

13. John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 12; John Patrick Diggins, “Republicanism and Progressivism,” American Quarterly 37 (Fall 1985): 572–98.

14. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 520–26: “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology,” Journal of Modern History 53 (March 1981): 49–72; J. G. A. Pocock, “Virtue, Rights, and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought,” Political Theory 9 (August 1981): 353–68. See also Jack H. Hexter, “Republic, Virtue, Liberty, and the Political Universe of J.G.A. Pocock,” in On Historians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 255–303.

15. Diggins, Lost Soul, 16. For a more complete study of this debate, see Isaac Kramnic, “Republican Revisionism Revisited,” American Historical Review 87 (June 1982): 629–64; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment; Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas State, 1985); Robert A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra, eds., How Democratic Is the Constitution? (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1980); and Robert H. Horwitz, ed., The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, 3d ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986). Further important insights on this subject may be found in Lance Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic,” and Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (January 1986): 20–34. Appleby has also edited an informative special issue on “Republicanism in the History and Historiography of the United States,” American Quarterly 37 (Fall 1985).

16. Alexander Hamilton, no. 15 of The Federalist, 96.

17. James Madison, no. 51 of The Federalist, 349.

18. James Madison, no. 57 of The Federalist, 387.

19. Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert Henry Smyth, 10 vols. (New York: Haskell House, 1970), 8:451–52.

20. James Madison, no. 55 of The Federalist, 378.

21. Alexander Hamilton, no. 76 of The Federalist, 514.

22. The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1850–56), 6:232.

23. Ibid., 6:115.

24. Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 2:388.

25. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903–5), 14:142.

26. Adams-Jefferson Letters, 492.

27. Alexander Hamilton, no. 9 of The Federalist, 51.

28. James Madison, no. 10 of The Federalist, 65.

29. The Writings of James Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt, 9 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900–1910), 3:103.

30. Rossiter, Political Thought, 99. But see two books by Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1974), and The American Republic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959).

31. Edmund Burke, “Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 12 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1901), 4:174–75. The theory that an “elite” will, in fact, rule in any social or political organization is of long standing. According to Harold J. Laski, “What, as a matter of history, can alone be predicted of the State is that it has always presented the striking phenomenon of a vast multitude owing allegiance to a comparatively small number of men” (A Grammar of Politics [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1925], 21). Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan insist that “whether a social structure is democratic depends not on whether or not there is an elite, but on the relations of the elite to the mass—how it is recruited and how it exercises its power” (Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950], 202).

32. John Adams, “Literary Notes and Papers,” quoted in John R. Howe Jr., The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 137.

33. Alexander Hamilton, no. 36 of The Federalist, 223.

34. Alexander Hamilton, no. 73 of The Federalist, 497.

35. Alexander Hamilton, no. 71 of The Federalist, 482.

36. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson 13:396–401 (emphasis added).

37. The Writings of James Madison 2:411–12.

38. John Jay, no. 2 of The Federalist, 10–11.

39. See Jackson Turner Main, The Anti-Federalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781–1788 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); and Herbert J. Storing, The Complete Anti-Federalist, 7 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

40. Quoted in Paul Leicester Ford, Essays on the Constitution of the United States (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Historical Printing Club, 1892), 65.

41. Paul Peterson, “Republican Virtue and the Federalist: A Consideration of the Wills Thesis” (Paper presented at the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, 1–4 September 1983), 18.

42. Alexander Hamilton, no. 9 of The Federalist, 52–53.

43. Rossiter, Political Thought, 199.

44. Samuel Williams, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (Salem, Mass.: N.p., 1775), 13–14.

45. “American colonists of the latter part of the eighteenth century readily identified the English church and government with corruption—the Church with its pampered hierarchy and impoverished parish priests, and the government with its rotten boroughs and members of Parliament whose votes were bought by the monarch with sinecures” (Clarence B. Carson, The Rebirth of Liberty [New York: Arlington House, 1973], 23).

46. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927), 2:641–42.

47. Writings of Benjamin Franklin 9:569.

48. The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 30 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Washington Bicentennial Commission, 1931–44), 29:479.

49. The Washington Papers, ed. Saul K. Padover (New York: Harper, 1955), 244.

50. Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 2d ed., 5 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1876), 2:175.

51. The Writings of James Madison 5:223.

52. William V. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, 3 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1865), 1:22, 23.

53. Ibid., 3:175.

54. James Madison, no. 10 of The Federalist, 62–63.

55. James Madison, no. 51 of The Federalist, 351, 352–53 (emphasis added).

56. James Madison, no. 10 of The Federalist, 64.

57. Alexander Hamilton, no. 76 of The Federalist, 514.

58. James Madison, no. 55 of The Federalist, 378.

59. The Writings of James Madison 1:459–60.

60. James Madison, no. 10 of The Federalist, 62. In The Authority of Publius (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), Albert Furtwangler contends that The Federalist should be read first and foremost as political propaganda and not necessarily as a clear expression of political ideology. While this view may have some merit, we believe The Federalist makes a statement that both explains the basic philosophy of the writers and masterfully elicits the acceptance of the readers essentially on the basis of that philosophy.

61. James Madison, no. 10 of The Federalist, 62–63.

62. John Jay, no. 3 of The Federalist, 15.

63. James Madison, no. 57 of The Federalist, 384 (emphasis added).

64. Ibid., 385–86.

65. James Madison, no. 49 of The Federalist, 339.

66. Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1865), 3:223.

67. James Madison, no. 51 of The Federalist, 349.

68. James Madison, no. 10 of The Federalist, 60.

69. Willmoore Kendall and George Cary, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970). See also David F. Epstein, The Political Theory of The Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

70. James Madison, no. 51 of The Federalist, 349.

71. James Madison, no. 10 of The Federalist, 64.

Richard Vetterli

BYU Studies Publications