Federalist Papers

A talk delivered on the occasion of Constitution Day at Manchester University (Indiana) on September 19, 2019.  It outlines some of the central principles sketched by Madison and Hamilton in the Federalist with some reflections on how these principles are threatened in the contemporary political context.

This second paper focuses on the claim that the United States Constitution of 1789 seems to be modeled on Isaac Newton's mechanistic cosmology of 1687, and that it should be updated to account for the sweeping evolution of physics and psychology over the past three-and-third-centuries. This whole series of papers explains why and how we need to update the Constitution to unite the Right and Left, in order to achieve for our nation what Carl Jung called individuation: the ultimate state of psychic wholeness through the union of opposites. After describing the telling parallels between Leonard Susskind's holographic string theory and Jung's archetypal psychology, including his near-death experience, the Introduction ended with two proposals: add an amendment to serve as a Preface to the Preamble explaining why We the People now identify each individual self with the central singularity and surrounding horizon of the cosmos; add a fourth branch of government tasked with helping the other three branches harmonize their decisions with this central organizing principle, Psyche = Singularity, specifically by guiding them through the process of imagining ways to help future generations realize this individuating equation ever more perfectly. In this paper, after an examination of the parallels between the political laws of the Constitution and Newton's mechanistic laws of physics-which will include a look at President Woodrow Wilson's comments on the topic-I will briefly describe the evolution of physics after Newton: from the discovery of the electromagnetic force (mid-1860s), and the absolute speed of light (1887), to special relativity (1905), general relativity (1915), quantum mechanics (1927), and, finally, holographic string theory (early 1990s). I will then analyze Federalist Paper No. 10, and explain how the synthesis of Susskind and Jung provides a way to control the cause of faction, by demonstrating that each of us is one with the same archetypal Self.

This article provides a theoretical framework to help us understand the controversies between the federalist and anti-federalists in the early history of the United States of America during the Federal Convention in 1787 as a conflict of two political philosophical traditions. The sources of these opposed traditions may be traced back to the disputes in ancient Greek philosophy, in thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle who defined politics in different ways. Plato grounds his definition of politics in epistêmê, which means that society should be ruled by the wisest. The federalist argued the best form of government is one where the people could avoid decision-making and leave the wisest representatives to handle politics. In opposition to this, Aristotle believes that politics should be inspired by the notion of phrônesis, which means that decisions should be considered collectively. Similarly, the anti-federalist believed that the government tends to be corrupted, and citizens should be suspicious of the government. They believed the ideal way to govern society is to have everyone involved in decision-making.

This work argues for a league of democracies to take over the functions of the UN Security Council, especially regarding mass atrocity prevention. The proposal is for a robust global government, with directly elected representatives and executive leaders, a standing armed forces, a small list of vital functions, and clear membership criteria.

Democracy and human rights are on the retreat. With help from Russia and Iran, the Assad regime has killed over 500,000 Sunnis in Syria and driven over five million more abroad as refugees. Partly as a result, the ultrafundamentalist Sunni terror group ISIS took over large parts of Syria and western Iraq for three years, leaving largely destroyed cities in its wake. Because Vladimir Putin's aggressions in Ukraine were not met with a strong response, Putin has seized Crimea, stoked an ethnic conflict in Eastern Ukraine, and given significant air and ground support to Assad. US and European weakness emboldened Putin to hijack American and European elections with massive cyber-propaganda campaigns aiming to destroy faith in impartial medias and gin up ideological fervor.  North Africa, Kenya and Nigeria are also threatened by armed Islamic terror organizations, while in North Korea, millions of people labor under the heavy hand of absolute tyranny which threatens its neighbors with nuclear weapons. China continues to support North Korea's atrocities and is increasingly threatening the whole south Pacific, mounting missiles on artificial islands it has built on reefs in the South China Sea.

We still face the same problem that left a million victims in Darfur and Rwanda without protection: the United Nations Security Council cannot act because Russia and China care more about defeating democratic values and the supremacy of human rights than about millions of victims. We desperately need a working system of global governance that can address international threats to security from terrorism and weapons proliferation, mitigate environmental and economic problems that span the world, and prevent mass slaughter of the kind taking place in Syria. In 2005, the United Nations endorsed the principle that the international community has a "responsibility to protect" people everywhere from mass atrocity crimes: R2P was supposed to prevent new genocides and mass ethnic cleanings. But the misguided 2003 war in Iraq has left the strongest democratic nations less willing to intervene with force when humanitarian emergencies cry out for a response: only a large coalition of nations can provide the assurance of cooperation now needed for such ventures.

Yet western nations and their democratic allies around the world are still willing to let their hands be tied by autocrats who want to prevent military interventions to protect innocents under R2P. The legal structure of our international system remains largely what it was in 1945: it is woefully outdated. Everyone agrees that the world now needs something more than a system of nation-states that cannot coordinate their efforts to achieve global public goods such as universal rights, an end to mass atrocities, development with justice, and sustainable use of our collective environmental resources. But these goods could never be supplied by the UN; and it can no longer be delivered by U.S. power supplemented with short-term alliances to deal with particular crises as they arise.

Both these alternatives are fatally flawed. More than two decades after the atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda, during which permanent Security Council nations did virtually nothing until NATO acted to stop Milosevic's atrocities, the UN has again proven ineffective in Syria, Myanmar, and Ukraine, just as it did in Darfur. Even in the case of Libya, when Russia and China bowed to pressure to stop the destruction of Benghazi, the UN was able to act only through the auspices of a NATO operation. And there was no reconstruction effort after the Libyan tyranny fell: in the resulting fragmentation, ISIS gained control of areas around Sirte, from which it coordinated the Manchester bombing in June 2017. After Qaddafi, the new Libyan regime refused to allow UN troops into Libya to secure the peace. Libya illustrates what happens if there is no multilateral reconstruction effort after a revolutionary war and regime change.

We need a new organization to coordinate democratic governments around the world to organize reconstruction efforts, respond swiftly in humanitarian crises, deal with the longer-term problems of military dictatorships in many African and Asian nations, or get to the roots of the growing threat of pseudo-Islamic fundamentalism, let alone address entrenched poverty in the southern hemisphere.  As our failed unilateral approach in Iraq proved, the United States cannot operate as world policeman without going broke, exhausting our armed forces, producing isolationist reaction at home, and appearing as a global tyrant to the peoples we most need to persuade to adopt peaceful relations with us and to move towards better human rights records. Only an organization that is widely perceived as multinational in sovereignty rather than a mere extension of U.S. power can now operate with sufficient perceived legitimacy around the world to be effective in dealing with humanitarian crises and in promoting democratic rights. The crisis of faith in the EU in Europe similarly shows that regional organizations like the EU and NATO are not enough to supplement the UN when dictatorial regimes prevent the UN from stopping massive atrocities that destabilize who regions.
If humanity is to have a bright future, then, we must now seek a way out of the false dichotomy of U.S. unilateralism or the UN Security Council. The former gives us insufficient resources and coordination and is unfair to other affected nations who get no say in US actions, while the later is outdated, unjust, and virtually impotent.  Since dramatically reforming the UN is politically impossible (the amendment process requires consent of all permanent members of the Security Council), the most viable solution is a league of democratic states. We should seek a new consensus with our European allies and democratic friends around the globe: starting with NATO nations and leading democracies in Asia, South America, and Africa, we can come together to form a permanent alliance to function as the sovereign body at the center of international law.  This new Democratic League would unite the vast military strength and moral legitimacy of the world's good governments against rogue regimes, dictatorships, and terrorist organizations.  Operating at first as a backup, it could eventually replace the Security Council: the governing body of the League of Democracies would provide the power to intervene swiftly in humanitarian crises and the credible threat to deter genocidal aggression and other crimes against humanity.  This 'new deal' at the global level would provide the United States with the multilateral support it desperately needs to act effectively for the growth of democratic justice around the world, while also meeting the legitimate demand of developing democracies in the global south and EU nations for collective decision-making that is not unilaterally ordained by any American administration. Such a league would offer qualifying democratic nations a chance to be equal partners in leading the world; it would also pressure Russia to return to a free media and political liberties, while giving China a huge incentive to democratize.

This book also reviews 60 global public goods, arguing that many of them cannot be secured by network approaches to global governance and treaty organizations. Cosmopolitan thought must be updated with a form of argument that clarifies how higher levels of actual government are justified. This argument structure is drawn from the Federalist Papers and applied to the global situation today, focusing especially on security threats and human rights.

In coming to terms about whether or not to have a Constitution of the United States, two factions formed to help deliberate issues of national and state government. These two factions were the Federalists and Anti-Federalists. With the successful ratification of the Constitution, much analysis has been given to the Federalists over the years while the Anti-federalists have not been as clearly championed. However, after examining what both factions had to say specifically in regard to the Judicial Branch, I found that Brutus’ insight and warnings were words that should have been heeded by the whole Constitutional Convention, as so many of his concerns have proven true for today. From judicial supremacy to judicial review and judicial activism, the once “weakest branch” of our government has evolved over the years to become a major concern for our republic. Perhaps it is time to do the only thing we can to stop this branch’s  encroachment of power in every sphere of our daily lives before it’s too late for our republic.

Este artigo identifica três princípios centrais do elitismo democrático, da forma como foram desenvolvidos por vários autores. Em seguida, segue a sorte dessas ideias dentro da teoria democrática. Surpreendentemente, eu encontro a aceitação quase universal, embora não reconhecida, dos princípios do elitismo democrático nas teorias contemporâneas da democracia. Entre o público, no entanto, ainda existe um forte anseio por uma democracia mais próxima do ideal e mais aberta à participação pública. Isso se reflete nas críticas públicas a políticos profissionais “distanciados”. Eu argumento que uma solução conceitual para a tensão entre o estado da teoria democrática e as expectativas do público pode, ironicamente, ser fornecida por uma corrente dentro da teoria do elitismo democrático, a saber, a teoria da poliarquia de Robert Dahl.

In this paper, I will compare the Grand Master’s Proclamation to our founding documents, the Constitution, and the history of the founding of our nation. Along the way, the reader will see a stark contrast as it relates to a fundamental truth: what does it mean to be free? In discovering the answer to this question, the reader will understand the concept of freedom and the source and security of that freedom in the United States – the Constitution.

Adrian Bejan, the author of this book and a professor of mechanical engineering, invented what he calls the "constructal law," which he defines as follows:  “For a flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve freely such that it provides greater access to its currents.”  Chapter 8 explicitly applies this physics concept to political matters, and Bejan also claims it is relevant to ethics.  The present review argues, among other things, that the application of the constructal law to ethical and political matters is a faulty analogy.

In a public dispute, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot proposed that modern political life would transcend traditional classes and the nation-state through the growth of commerce, while John Adams insisted that the American state constitutions correctly represented three “permanent” classes (democrats, aristocrats, monarchists) in their three branches of government. On the basis of Adams’ arguments many Anti-Federalists came to view the proposed national Constitution as maintaining a class-based or mixed regime, but one that, unfortunately, favored an aristocratic class. Publius proposes an alternative understanding of the Constitution; like Turgot, Publius saw  modern commerce as having the potential to abolish classes, and the many problematic passions that come with them, in a modern liberal, tolerant regime.

This paper summarizes some of the themes of my recently published book "The Electoral College: Failures of Original Intent and a Proposed Constitutional Amendment for Direct Popular Vote" (Pittsburgh: Philosophia, 2018).  The book itself contains documentation and further elaboration of these and related matters.

Alan E. Johnson, July 6, 2018

This book examines the history and present status of the US Electoral College.  It begins with the discussions in the 1787 Constitutional Convention.  The framers were not of one mind about the manner of selection of the president.  Several favored direct popular vote.  Others thought that the qualified voters among the populace were totally incompetent to select a president.  Southerners opposed direct popular vote, because their slaves did not vote.  Many thought the national legislature should pick the president.  The Electoral College emerged as a compromise in which a select group of presumably wise individuals would choose the president.

The original concept of the Electoral College was diametrically opposed to its present practice.  The founders assumed, at a time before the rise of national political parties, that the electors would exercise independent judgment in voting for president.  Today, in contrast, the assumption (and practice) is that the electors will vote in accordance with the results of the popular elections in their respective states, usually in a winner-take-all system.

The notion of electors exercising independent judgment fell by the wayside almost as soon as the new government went into operation.  The book surveys the history of these developments, culminating in the election of 2016, in which a president was elected by the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by almost three million votes.  Moreover, the president chosen in 2016 by the Electoral College was exactly the kind of president the Electoral College was designed to prevent:  a demagogue with no commitment to constitutional principles and a bizarre attachment to foreign dictators.

This book concludes with the legal text and discussion of a proposed constitutional amendment for direct popular vote (with an instant runoff voting procedure in the event no candidate obtains a majority in the first round of voting).  Although such a constitutional amendment will not be adopted at this particular time in history, it may eventually be successful, especially if a series of quasi-authoritarian candidates who lose the popular vote are made president by the Electoral College.

In an endeavor to impart reason and commonsense, the federalist papers were written to persuade the people that the new Constitution was necessary in order to create a government that would provide for stability and prosperity. The Federalist papers were a collection of 85 essays, written Fundamentally it was a political campaign to support the ratification of the Constitution and convince the people, and therefore the State's legislators, to sign the ratification of amendments. The essays were also written to support and illustrate the rationale of the necessity of the new Constitution, to establish a new government with powers in equal measure, in order to bring a democratic balance, and thereby create stability and unity to guide and govern the states. There were many who felt that they should abide by the Articles of Confederation, on which they already based the law and structure of government. James Madison was the driving force behind the validity and importance of the separation of powers.

"The federal and State governments are in fact but different agents and trustees of the people, constituted with different powers, and designed for different purposes. The adversaries of the Constitution seem to have lost sight of the people altogether in their reasoning's on this subject; and to have viewed these different establishments, not only as mutual rivals and enemies, but as uncontrolled by any common superior in their efforts to usurp the authorities of each other. These gentlemen must here be reminded of their error. They must be told that the ultimate authority, wherever the derivative may be found, resides in the people alone, and that it will not depend merely on the comparative ambition or address of the different governments, whether either, or which of them, will be able to enlarge its sphere of jurisdiction at the expense of the other. Truth, no less than decency, requires that the event in every case should be supposed to depend on the sentiments and sanction of their common constituents."

Publius, The Influence of the State and Federal Governments Compared., The N.Y. Packet, January 29, 1788, at Federalist No. 46. (ascribed to Madison).

Quite recently, Patrick J. Deneen from the University of Notre Dame has initiated a debate between neoliberal and communitarian conservatives of the United States. A certain branch of this debate, the one that takes place in the journal Public Discourse, focuses particularly on the ideas of the founding fathers of the United States. Deneen argues that the Lockean, liberal ideas of the American foundation emphasize rights too much, and pay insufficient attention to duties. The fact that the fathers were so keen on individual liberties actually causes the erosion of communities in his eyes. Deneen has put forward his own position as a MacIntyrean one, however, MacIntyre himself has stayed out of the debate. My aim in this paper is twofold. First, to assess the debate on its own, and second, to assess the positions of the two opposing sides from the perspective of MacIntyre’s writings on the United States. In other words, I try to answer the question, what would MacIntyre say was he to enter the debate in Public Discourse.
As it turns out, MacIntyre’s own views on the philosophical foundations of the States are quite nuanced. While Deneen completely denounces the ideology of the United States, and his opponents praise it in its entirety, MacIntyre both praises and criticizes it. Besides his condemnation of their liberalism, he actually commends the founding fathers for their idealism, trying to achieve nothing less than a utopia. Based on MacIntyre’s insights and textual evidence, I show that both parties in the debate in question are rather one-sided, they simplify the original ideas of the founding fathers so as to fit their appraisal or criticism.

In this paper I attempt to draw connections between the whale in Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" and Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. This is done through discussing the political leanings of Melville along with examining other works wherein he attacks Federalists.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a rising generation of British colonial administrators profoundly altered British usage of American history in imperial debates. In the process, they influenced both South African history and wider British imperial thought. Prior usage of the Revolution and Early Republic in such debates focused on the United States as a cautionary tale, warning against future ‘lost colonies’. Aided by the publication of F.S. Oliver’s Alexander Hamilton (1906), administrators in South Africa used Hamilton and George Washington, the Federalist Papers, and the drafting of the Constitution as an Anglo-exceptionalist model of modern self-government. In doing so they applied the lessons of the Early Republic to South Africa, thereby contributing to the formation of the Union of 1910. They then brought their reconception of the United States, and their belief in the need for ‘imperial federation’, back to the metropole. There they fostered growing diplomatic ties with the U.S. while recasting British political history in-light-of the example of American federation. This process of inter-imperial exchange culminated shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles when they publicly presented the Boer Generals Botha and Smuts as Washington and Hamilton reborn in the Round Table journal.