Reason and history

“It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country,” or so the first of The Federalist Papers assures Americans, “to decide … whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

Two centuries onward, these proud words of Alexander Hamilton have been covered over with unintended ironies. Hamilton means, of course, to present the proposed Federal Constitution as the crowning achievement of the American Enlightenment. After countless ages of “accident and force,” the first Federalist inaugurates a series of eighty-five essays by Hamilton, Madison and Jay that present a dramatic alternative. Adopting the evocative pseudonym Publius, the three statesmen present a remorselessly rationalistic defense of the proposed Federal Constitution. While the existence of ad hoc compromise is sometimes conceded, it is not this aspect of the Convention's work that engages Publius' interest. Instead, he tries to defend almost every aspect of his Constitution through systematic political reasoning – seeking to convince himself, no less than his fellow Americans, that a new political world of “reflection and choice” is indeed at hand.

However flattering this image, it is precisely here that the passage of history has cast its ironic shadow. Publius' rationalistic experiment has become the oldest living constitution in the world.