ABSTRACT
In 1787 the newly United States of America became only the third considerable republic in the early modern world. There were a number of small city-states with republican institutions, some with a popular or ‘democratic’ constitution, but there were only two besides America which had achieved republican government at the scale of the then prevalent dynastic states – Switzerland and the Netherlands. Curiously, these were also federal states, a point to which I shall return. Neither claimed to be democracies, although some amongst them might have claimed to be popular – that is to derive their legitimacy from that elusive entity ‘the people’. The creation and adoption of the Constitution of the United States took place in a situation of considerable political and conceptual turbulence.1 This turbulence formed the immediate context for the writing of the Federalist Papers, but the writers of those papers also contributed in no small measure, and by no means innocently, to that turbulence. For the Federalist Papers were written, not with the philosophical aim of clarifying the vocabulary of politics, but with the essentially rhetorical purpose of persuading New Yorkers to adopt the constitution which was being offered to the States. Rhetorical, or persuasive speech starts from (rather than analysing) premises that its audience accepts, and moves them towards the desired position by insinuating shifts in the denotation of contested and emotively loaded terms.2 In such polemical contests are the vocabularies of politics formed.3 The arguments of the Federalist therefore comprised not only empirical claims about the properties of organising political life in one way or another, but conceptual claims about how we should characterise those organisations. Before we can see how – and why – these moves affected the meanings of these terms we must reconstruct the language within which these vocabularies were deployed, that is to say, we must understand the language of politics which American Englishmen – and other Europeans for there were many – had brought across the Atlantic.4 In outlining this language we are also sketching sets of political possibilities and action inasmuch as political action is conducted through the speech acts that language makes available to actors, and it is at the least difficult to imagine actors setting out to perform actions which their language does not make available to them.
