Review Of The Federalist Fallacy: Popular Authority Under Elite Rule

Roxi Wessel

Professor Anderson

Political Science 232

17 March 2023

The Federalist Fallacy: Popular Authority Under Elite Rule In the fall of 1787, three men embarked on a quest of words and wits to push for the ratification of the new United States Constitution in the state of New York. Collectively known as “Publius”, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison used their 85-essay series, entitled the Federalist, to defend the constitutional approach to government, justifying choices as broad as centralized government and as narrow as the presidential age requirement. However, one of Publius’s central arguments–that the final political authority of the United States, under the Constitution, will reside solely with the people–falls

In Hamilton’s very first contribution to the Federalist, he writes that “the love of power [and] the desire of preeminence” have a “constant operation on the collective body of society”, a clear illustration that he does not believe the people to be capable of wielding power without causing a national dissolution into corruption (20). Madison, meanwhile, openly criticizes several motions supported by the majority of working class citizens at the time (including “paper money”, the “abolition of debts”, and an “equal division of property”) as “improper and wicked” (10). Hence, Publius simultaneously pays lip service to poor New York workers and significantly resists the same authority it claims to protect, further betraying the lack of trust in the working class that Hamilton so callously displays in his early papers. Publius also claims that the working class often errs in its legislative judgment, which necessitates elite intervention. One of Madison’s main arguments in support of the Senate, a body which was not elected by the people at the time, is that the institution “may sometimes be necessary, as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions” (63). This argument for using elite, state-appointed officials as a safeguard

Madison rhapsodizes at length about the dangers of factionalism under majority rule; he claims that “popular government [...] enables [the majority] to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest, both the public good and the rights of other citizens”, thus insinuating that popular rule in a system where “the causes of factionalism cannot be prevented” will ultimately devastate both the working class’s public good and the elite class’s private right (10). This fear mongering over majority rule acts as a ringing endorsement of the alternative: minority, or elite, political dominance. To ease the minds of his readers, Madison then declares that the working class of the new republic will be too spread out and otherwise divided to oppose the just government established by the upper class–or, in his words, lower classes will be “rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression” against the elite (10). In this way, Madison promotes upper class rule as a means to protect American liberty, believing that the people at large were unfit to establish this protection themselves–and that they had neither the intelligence nor the unity to carry out their corrupt schemes under properly conducted elite