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Stumpage Reports
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Thursday, January 16, 2003 :::
Chavez! Summarize Federalist #51 in 60 seconds!: or, The Federalist Papers: A Pleasant Surprise
Well it looks like my Constitutional History class is turning out to be the most interesting of my classes this semester. I saw we were going to be reading The Federalist Papers and I was dreading that. I was pleasantly surprised today when I cracked the book and started reading. The Federalist Papers are a series of essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. The authors wrote these essays to encourage the ratification of the United States Constitution and I expected a mass of convoluted eighteenth-century political theory. Instead, so far I have encountered some practical and elegant arguments in favor of the republican form of government. The writers reinforced these arguments with examples that spoke to the situation at hand and at the same time articulated some universal truths.
In an earlier blog entry I railed against a certain long and pretentious sentence. James Madison and these other guys could pull it off though. In Federalist #10, Madison explains the propensity for people to form factions and the dangers those factions can pose to democracies. Some universal truth stuff here, and some stuff pertaining to issues they were concerned with:
"So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property."
That probably doesn't thrill you guys as much as me, but it just felt good to be reading the raw material of our government and understand it. I made nice little outlines of both the essays I had to read, so I will be ready tomorrow when my professor says: "Chavez! Summarize Federalist #51 in sixty seconds!" (He really does that shit.)
Even more exciting, I have The Anti-Federalist Papers to look forward to. I didn't even know there was such a thing. They were mostly written by Patrick Henry and John DeWitt. Who woulda thunk this would be so much fun?
Quotes of the Day: (If you are still with me, my hat's off to you)
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."
-- James Madison, The Federalist #51
::: posted by tom at 11:50 PM
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