Word: federalist
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...Federalist papers, in a grandiose moment, predicted that the Constitution would "vindicate the honor of the human race." What the founders created, at any rate, was an extraordinary civilizing program, and a moral style in which conscience -- the Judiciary, the third eye -- was turned into an institution. The genius of the Constitution has been the moral restlessness it embodies, and its capacity to change even while its basic structure abides. Today, all but six of the world's nations either have or are committed to having a single-document constitution. That idea was born in Philadelphia. Reverence...
...meaning. But for an authentic and authoritative version of what the Constitution is about and how it got that way, it is hard to beat two of the original works written on the subject: James Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 and The Federalist, by Alexander Hamilton, Madison and John Jay. Both are currently in print and widely available in paperback editions. Separately and together they tell the intertwined story of Constitution and framers with the clear voice of the times, not the way present-day passions may choose to perceive...
...Federalist, a series of essays churned out for New York newspapers under the group anonym "Publius," was frankly designed as propaganda and used to persuade doubters in state conventions to ratify the nascent Constitution. The pieces appeared at the rate of two to four a week. Hamilton, who hatched the idea, dashed off "Federalist No. 1" in October 1787 aboard a sloop on the Hudson and cranked out the 85th and last in May 1788, after Jay had fallen too sick to write and Madison had decamped for Virginia to fight the ratifying battle there. "Whilst the printer was putting...
Despite such hip-shooting urgency, The Federalist proved so penetrating an explication of the Constitution that 50 years later Alexis de Tocqueville described it as a tour de force that "ought to be familiar to the statesmen of all countries." Almost 140 years after that, Historian Marvin Meyers, now retired from Brandeis University, called it the "most profound commentary on the original nature of the American regime, and the best single guide to the political mind of the founders...
...Taken in bulk, The Federalist can be heavy going for the lay reader, with its sometimes intricate marshaling of closely reasoned arguments. Madison rated it "admissible as a School book if any will be that goes so much into detail." But the brilliance of the best individual essays remains undiminished. Madison's own masterly "Federalist No. 10," for example, took issue with the received wisdom of his day that the Government would be threatened by the mutually hostile factions with which a sprawling America appeared dangerously overloaded. By their very number and variety, Madison argued, the factions would support...