James Madison and Alexander Hamilton · 1787–1788 · corpus selections: Nos. 10, 51, 78, and 84
Read The Federalist Papers: Selected Essays with context
These four essays argue for the proposed Constitution through accounts of human motives, institutional arrangements, and anticipated objections. They are interventions in a ratification debate, not descriptions of every later American practice. Follow the steps from a claim about how people act to a claim about how power should be organized, and ask which assumptions the proposed remedy requires. You can read the text, save notes and quotes, and follow the passage paths below.
Key Reading Paths
- A remedy worse than the disease: The comparison of liberty to air explains why removing faction’s cause would destroy something necessary. Test the analogy’s force and its limits.
- When more interests are expected to protect rights: The extended sphere is supposed to hinder an oppressive majority’s coordination. Identify the causal steps and the conditions under which the argument would hold.
- Judgment without sword or purse: Hamilton describes the judiciary through the powers it lacks. What does the distinction between judgment, force, and will establish, and what does it leave to be explained?
- Interpreting a higher law: A constitution is treated as fundamental law against which legislation is assessed. Follow the argument for the courts’ role without assuming interpretation is an automatic operation.
- An objection to writing an additional guarantee: Hamilton argues that listing exceptions could imply powers never granted. Reconstruct this objection in its historical setting before comparing it with arguments for explicit protections.
Questions for comparison
- Compare the treatment of faction with the Manifesto’s account of class conflict. What differences in the definition of the problem produce differences in the proposed response?
- Set institutional checks beside Hobbes’s account of sovereign authority. Where does each locate the principal danger in political life?
Teaching with these readings
Assign a single paragraph as an argument to reconstruct: identify its problem, premise, proposed mechanism, and possible objection. Require the reconstruction to retain the author’s distinctions.
Pair the account of judicial weakness with the claim about constitutional interpretation. Ask students how a power described as limited can still make consequential judgments.