Other than the Declaration of Independence itself, no document was more responsible for the creation of the American republic than The Federalist. Writing under the pseudonym “Publius,” Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay produced 85 essays between October 1787 and April 1788. Their purpose was to encourage New Yorkers — who would have read the essays in newspapers — to ratify the Constitution. But thanks in a large part to the success of their effort, the collected essays have remained an invaluable tool for understanding the inner workings of the American republic — what Hamilton in Federalist 9 called “the new science of politics.” Most American students will find themselves reading The Federalist at some point. And for those who have held a copy of the book in the last three decades, it’s likely been the Signet Classics edition, a pocket-sized, mass market volume with a simple cover bearing a sliver of the American flag and a lot of text. The Daily Wire spoke with Charles Kesler, a professor at Claremont Graduate University and the editor of this ubiquitous volume, to see how he came to be responsible for this edition, why The Federalist is the most important piece of American political thought, and how the document can guide us today.
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Charles Kesler: I’m flattered that you would think to investigate such an old volume as this. The story really starts with the collection of essays on the Federalist that I put together in 1987, for the bicentennial of the Constitution and of The Federalist, which was called “Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and The American Founding.” My conceit was that we needed a volume of essays that would parallel the text of The Federalist, so you could read the essays as you were reading through The Federalist Papers. And that’s what we produced, basically.
Tim Rice: Wait, I’m sorry, I have to interrupt right away because I’ve never actually been able to get my hands on a copy of that. You’re telling me that “Saving The Revolution” mirrors The Federalist?
CK: Well, yes, in the sense that it more or less follows the order of the arguments in The Federalist. So if you read “Saving The Revolution,” you’d be reading a series of commentaries and or investigations into the themes of The Federalist as they develop in the book.
TR: I’ve already checked the Straussian box for the piece. This is fantastic — it happened earlier than I thought it was going to. But I apologize. Please continue.
CK: It was a very unusual book. It was published by The Free Press [ed note: not that Free Press], and at that time, Grant Ujifusa was an editor at The Free Press. He and Michael Barone together did that long running sort of almanac of American politics. In the old days they would publish, every year or maybe every two years, a wonderful one-volume account of who was serving in Congress and Senate, what their political careers were like, where they went to college, what they were famous for and stuff. It was a great one-volume guide to who’s who in Washington.
Anyway, Ujifusa was the editor at the Free Press who took on “Saving The Revolution.” And he was a great editor. He was above partisanship. He was just a lover of American politics and American history, the perfect kind of editor for a book on The Federalist or for an almanac of American politics as far as that goes. He helped me put together the list of contributors, which is an interesting list. We had contributors like Bill Kristol. That was back in the day when he was, you know, a scholar.
TR: I’m laughing because I feel like that gives me permission to laugh.
CK: Right. We also had [political scientist William] Allen, who was here in Claremont back in those days. We had [Hillsdale College professor Thomas] West, Murray Dry from Middlebury, who’s I think still there, still teaching there. A lot of really interesting people who knew what they were writing about, who chose the part of The Federalist that they wanted to write about. So everyone did their thing, and it was great. Because they didn’t all agree with each other, but it didn’t really matter. The disagreements were at a very high level, and you learned a lot from any disagreements that you noticed.
So I had put this conference together in the spring of 1987, and the book was published in the fall. My part of the book was the introduction and then an essay on Federalist 10, a very close reading and an unorthodox reading of it, which was designed to sort of shake it loose from Martin Diamond’s view of it and the textbook view of it as a design of a kind of soulless machine in which factions would counteract factions, and you didn’t need any sort of better motives or civic character. It was all going to be a contest of self-interested factions freezing one another and thus allowing the common good to prevail — not because it favored the common good, but because it favored stasis among the self-interested factions. That was the reigning textbook interpretation of The Federalist — still is to a certain extent — which came out of the pluralistic moments in political science in the 1950s.
So I was trying to knock that down several pegs and to build up in my own little part of the book a more sort of civic minded account of The Federalist, and especially of Federalist 10, which was not designed to be a machine that would go on its own, but was a part of a large civic education campaign. The whole book [The Federalist] is in my view a great classic of civic education, and it was meant not just to empower factions, but to teach or encourage factions to be more public spirited, and hence to strive to be good citizens more than rationally self-interested actors.
So that was my part, and it was, I thought, very successful. But what the world needed then was an addition of The Federalist that would measure up to the scholarly standards of this collection of essays. And that’s what 10 years later I finally got around to and found a way into the publisher of the old Clinton Rossiter edition of The Federalist Papers.
TR: I would have assumed that “Saving The Revolution” came after your edition. I thought maybe you became the definitive editor of The Federalist Papers and then held the conference. So, this is fascinating. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that came to be — how you got involved with the publisher of that edition?
CK: It’s a funny story because I reached out to them. What I don’t remember is how I discovered who at Penguin Putnam to contact. But I knew they had absorbed the New American Library, so they were now the publisher of this edition of The Federalist, the 1961 edition. So it had languished for a very long time with no attention, from ‘61 until ’99. That’s two generations during which nothing had been done to it, except that they made money from it by reprinting it every couple of years. It sold a lot. It was inexpensive and had a following, and Clinton Rossiter’s name was good. He had been one of the leading constitutional historians and political scientists in the country, and while he wasn’t exactly famous, he had a well-known name and good reputation.
So that edition had a following. It was certainly among the best selling editions in the country at that point, but it was just like every other edition. None of them in those days really had any notes, any historical materials, any extras, any features. They were all very bare bones and very cheap. So what I wanted to do was get in touch with someone at Penguin Putnam and propose that I take over the Clinton Rossiter edition. I would keep what he called the “Index Of Ideas,” which is a very good feature that allows you to reference the volume without reading it through. In fact, I expanded the index. But I replaced his introduction with mine, which is much longer and more controversial.
TR: Do you remember which ones you added?
CK: No, I don’t. Maybe I’ll have one of my interns look into it, because that’s interesting. But the major change was 60 pages of historical notes. No edition had anything like that. And there are many references in The Federalist that an educated 18th-century reader would have understood but that an educated college student today would not. So it was necessary to go through the text and identify every historical reference that I thought would be puzzling. That includes everything from the pseudonym Publius to the two quotations from Shakespeare to the many references to English history, of course, as well as Roman and Greek history.
TR: Was there a reason why you picked this edition to take over? Was it because of Rossiter? Because it was a mass market edition? Or did you just think you had the best chance with this one?
CK: It was, I thought, the best of the bare bones editions of the time. The index was good and the introduction was good. It was the one that most historians and political scientists would have used and assigned. It was well-known. So it had all that going for it, but it was also 30 years old and had not been changed. So it was ripe for change and improvement. And if you’re going to take over an edition, why not take over the one that you admire the most, even if it’s very imperfect? Plus, Clinton Rossiter was a kind of conservative. He had written a book on conservatism in the late 50s, maybe early 60s, which was kind of confused, but not bad.
TR: I don’t actually know much about Rossiter. I know the name, just because it’s on this edition — I think by this point my wife and I together own four.
CK: Well, it’s so inexpensive, you can afford to have one in every room.
TR: Right! But yeah, I don’t actually know much about Clinton Rossiter other than he killed himself, right?
CK: Yes, he was a kind of martyr to the protests of the late 60s. He was at Cornell with Allan Bloom when all that happened.
TR: Is there anything specific, other than the index of ideas, that the Rossiter edition has that you think makes it better than, say, the edition edited by [the late Georgetown University political scientist] George Carey?
CK: Not really. I mean, it was less expensive than Carey’s edition, which is a very beautiful, hardcover book. So it saw a lot more undergraduate eyeballs than George’s edition did. But it was affordable, it was published by a major publisher, so it was distributed widely and you could find it in bookstores, not just in college bookstores. But the drawback about this book is also that it’s so cheap. The pages are dark with ink, there are very small margins.
TR: Got it. So —
CK: There are two other things I should mention though, as long as I’ve got you on this subject. One is that the table of contents does not come from Clinton Rossiter but from the Henry Cabot Lodge edition, which is from 1896. I added all the descriptions, but didn’t change the subheads from the Lodge edition. But there are two things I’m particularly proud of. The first is that I was the first to add the preface back to The Federalist, a two-paragraph feature that Hamilton composed in the first volume of The Federalist, which had been dropped from all modern editions. So I added that back in and a lot of other people have added it in since then, but I think I was the first to actually dig it up and put it back at the front.
TR: You said there were two things you were proud of.
CK: Well, the other thing is the introduction, my introduction,
TR: Yeah, talk to me about that.
CK: I think it’s the best sort of short essay on The Federalist, certainly the best introduction to an edition of The Federalist because it goes through the book as much as it can and characterizes the argument about each topic and makes it clear that the book has an organization, it has an argument, it has a movement in it, and that it has to be read pretty carefully. It’s not just a collection of hasty op-ed pieces that these three guys threw together.
There’s a famous story Madison tells in one of his letters about composing a Federalist Paper, and the boy from the printing press is at the door waiting for the copy, you know, he’s pressuring, pressuring Madison to finish up already. But Willmore Kendall said that the Federalist Papers were composed quickly, but not hastily. And I think that’s a lovely distinction.
Hamilton and Madison in particular, and Jay also to a lesser extent, maybe, had sat through the Constitutional Convention. They knew all the arguments. They didn’t have to look anything up. They were on top of the situation. They knew the political circumstances of the time and how to phrase the delicate points to win the public over. And so even though they had to write quickly they didn’t have to think quickly. They had been arguing about the Declaration about the Constitution for the whole summer of 1787.
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TR: In your introduction, you really tackle the question of authorship. You say, essentially, we know for certain that Jay wrote these five, and these 10 have a sort of contested authorship. But ultimately, you say it doesn’t really matter who wrote which, because they’re all drawing on the same text, and everything they wrote was really an outgrowth of the Philadelphia Convention.
CK: Exactly.
TR: Sticking with your introduction for a moment, I’d like to quote from it: “Little wonder then that the political scientist Clinton Rossiter in 1961 acknowledged The Federalist is ‘the most important work in political science that has ever been written or is likely ever to be written in the United States.’ It is indeed the only product of the American mind that is rightly counted among the classics of political theory.” Do you still think that’s true?
CK: Uh, yes. Unless you have any close competitors you’d like to introduce for my consideration!
TR: I guess none of Lincoln’s speeches are long enough?
CK: I could certainly offer up a few runners up, but there I’m talking about, you know, the short shelf of classics of political philosophy. Only the cream of the crop. I mean, Adams was, next to Madison, the greatest political scientist of that generation. But his books are very bloviated. No one reads the “Defense of the Constitutions.” And there’s a reason why no one reads it: it’s unreadable! Whereas The Federalist is reasonably succinct and powerful, and also, of course, helps to get the Constitution ratified.
TR: It’s both the best original contribution of American political theory, but also had a very practical purpose, in which it succeeded.
CK: That’s right. Historians disagree about how much of a role it had in ratification. But it’s clear that, whatever, whatever historical role it played — and it did play some role, in Virginia particularly, not just in New York, because Virginia was still debating when the papers were published. But it’s also the case that it quickly became accepted as the best statement of the case for the Constitution, for republican governments, for the American experiment. George Washington said that the moment he saw it, Thomas Jefferson said it was the best commentary on the principles of government ever written. So it was well received by a very talented generation of statesmen and readers, and has basically never been knocked from that position. It has, however, become regarded as a kind of reactionary emblem, as outmoded, 18th-century. That started with the Confederates and later with the Progressives, both groups with their own Constitutional visions. In the Progressives’ minds, The Federalist was a manual for a car that no longer runs.
TR: You’ve alluded a few times to the fact that The Federalist is an exercise in civic education. And it seems like a big part of your goal in getting this edition out was making sure that students would have access to this interpretation. So, it’s been 26 years, and this remains the definitive edition of The Federalist. Did it work? Can you talk to me a little bit about the post-publication life of this book?
CK: Well, I’m lucky that it’s still in print, and doing very well, I might add.
TR: I reached out to the publisher, who told me it’s one of their best selling titles.
CK: That’s interesting because I haven’t talked to them since 2000 or so.
TR: Yeah, you’re up there in the Signet Classics. You’re ranked something like 23 out of 100, pulling your weight against “Anna Karenina” and “Wuthering Heights.”
CK: That’s good, because I didn’t really make any money from this edition, so I only have —
TR: Sorry, wait: you didn’t make any money from it?
CK: Well, I was paid to do it, you know, a set fee. But I never got any royalties from it, because as you may know, I didn’t actually write The Federalist Papers.
TR: I guess that makes sense, but it still feels a little unfair. Pretty much every person in the country has this in their house.
CK: I don’t know, maybe you just need to get out more. You know too many people who have the same books in their living room.
TR: I will work on expanding my circle. But in the meantime, tell me about the book’s post-publication life.
CK: I’ve had a distant relationship to it, and not in the sense that I don’t care. I’m certainly very proud of it, and I see it a lot. My friends and colleagues still use it in their classes every year, and I teach it myself frequently, in Claremont’s summer programs and in my undergraduate and graduate courses, too. I will say that they recently changed the cover without consultation.
TR: Different how? The one I have just has a sliver of the flag and the names of the authors, pretty boring.
CK: That’s the old cover, which I think is the most handsome of the covers. The current one is horrendous. It hardly looks like The Federalist Papers. Oh! One thing, of course, that is worth remarking on, probably because someone will bring it up in a letter: the title of this one is The Federalist Papers, and that was Clinton Rossiter’s decision. The Federalist is the actual title. That’s what Hamilton called it.
TR: Was Rossiter the first one to brand it as The Federalist Papers?
CK: I don’t know for sure. It was called mostly The Federalist in the 19th century. I’m not sure Rossiter was the first, because I bet several other people were. It’s such an easy thing to do, because there’s a bunch of papers and they’re numbered, so it’s kind of the natural move to make. I didn’t change that because even though it was not, you might say as accurate, I thought it was perfectly convenient and intelligible and it didn’t need to be changed, so I didn’t.
TR: Do you think your edition could be supplanted? Do you think there’s room for another edition of The Federalist Papers, or have you done it?
CK: I think I did a good job, but I don’t think it’s the definitive job. You could have at least an equally good one. The parts that I added are, I think, well-written, and they invite the reader in to some extent, and that’s very important for a book, you know, an inexpensive edition that students in college, sometimes even in high school, will be looking at, and a lot of ordinary citizens will be looking at, too. I think I did a good job making it accessible. You may not know this, but this is kind of amusing: there are at least two “modern” editions of The Federalist.
TR: Oh my God. No.
CK: Yeah, you can look this up. I think the first one was called “The Federalist Without Tears.” It rewrites the “difficult” 18th-century English for modern readers. But there’s at least one more, maybe there are three of these editions that purport to turn the “difficult” Latinate prose of Publius into easier, more accessible modern English.
TR: I know you’ve spent your career engaging with The Federalist one way or another, but do you ever think about returning to the subject in a real way? “Saving The Revolution” was 1987, this edition was 1999. It’s been 26 years! Are we getting a Charles Kesler re-engagement with The Federalist at any point?
CK: I say this unexaggeratedly, I have hundreds of pages of notes on The Federalist, which I use when I teach my graduate course. I do a graduate course on the Federalist every couple of years in which we read the whole thing from beginning to end, and we go over it carefully, like you would a work of great work of political philosophy. I’ve always thought that I would write a kind of commentary on The Federalist at some point. And you know, I’m not getting any younger. So that’s high on my list of projects I want to get to. I’m currently working on a book about the transformation of American politics in the 19th century, which is more about the Declaration of Independence than The Federalist.
TR: Tell me more about that.
CK: The Declaration has always been very disputed. And it’s amazing, one of the things I’ve learned while reading through a lot of 19th-century stuff is how misunderstood the Declaration was, but also how controversial it remained and how many people argued against it over the course of the 19th century. And that’s not just because of the slavery question. It is partly, of course, and famously about that.
But there was also an ongoing debate about whether, now that we have the Declaration of Independence and a Constitution based on the Declaration of Independence, is that all we need? Is that it? Is that democracy, or is this only the beginning of democracy? And do we now have to push democracy further, you know, extend it into the economy, into society, into religion, into metaphysics, into every category of life, intellectual and practical. That kind of thinking eventually launches the Progressive movement: you don’t honor the Declaration by trying to understand it as it was understood by its writers, but by continually updating it and reinterpreting it and pushing democracy forward into new lands and more. And that’s Jacksonianism, that’s Emerson and Thoreau. Before the Civil War, before slavery, because the central controversial thing, there was already a lot of impatience over American democracy and over the limits of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
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