Book Review: The Federalist by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

The Federalist Or, the New Constitution by Alexander Hamilton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The United States was in dire need of a form of government that worked better than the Articles of Confederation, in the summer of 1787 a convention in Philadelphia produced what would become the Constitution of the United States but its ratification wasn’t guaranteed especially by the most important states in the Union. The Federalist is a collection of 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to convince the citizens of New York to support the ratification of the Constitution that also explained for the historical record what two of its framers believed how the government it created would work and why.

The essays making of The Federalist are a look into both political theory, as three men expound how the proposed government would work in practice and refute allegations against it, and also political history as with two of the Constitution’s Framers and another prominent Founding Father defending it we see how important in the time and day they believed this document was. This is the culmination of almost a quarter century of political writing since the start of the tax dispute with Britain in which the arguments of political thinkers Locke and Montesquieu were prominent as they were within the writings of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. There are several famous essays known by their numbers (#10, 14, 39, 51, 70, and 78) that become the standards of American political thought to this day. While students of political history and readers of political theory read The Federalist to understand the arguments for the Constitution and to glimpse the thinking that lay behind the document, was it’s intended purpose successful? While New York ratified the Constitution, it was the last of the big four and the overall eleventh state to do so, the Constitution was operational, and the state convention was packed with opponents but being left out of the new government was too much to handle. It could be argued that the essays didn’t sway New York, political reality did, but why is this collection famous? Hamilton and Madison, two young men instrumental in getting the Constitutional Convention called, attended and debated, and then influenced the new government they created over the course of the next quarter century.

The Federalist is a collection of 85 essays planned out to show the need for and defend the Constitution sent to the 13 states to be ratified and create a new government. Written by three prominent Founding Fathers, these essays are in the words of history Richard B. Morris, “a classic in political science unsurpassed in both breadth and depth by the product of any later American writer.”

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