Unity and the Language of Energy in Hamilton's No. 70

• In Event: Executive Politics and Popular Leadership

Abstract

There is perhaps no document in American political thought more important for the argument for a powerful executive than Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 70. In addition to defending energy in the executive, Hamilton defends unity as the first ingredient of energy on the grounds that “Decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man, in a much more eminent degree, than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished.” Hamilton’s bold language has been quoted by countless scholars, some explaining the rationale behind creating the presidency and others defending executive power in contemporary political debates.
But what has received little notice is that Hamilton was not the first person to use this language. It appears that Hamilton drew on language that was already on its way to becoming well-known. In fact, the exact same language had just been used by the Cambridge utilitarian philosopher William Paley in his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, published in England in early 1785. Given all the academic attention lavished on Federalist 70, it is surprising that scholars have largely missed the fact that Hamilton borrowed this key passage from an English moral philosopher with some certain traces of monarchical tendencies.
But Paley was himself a synthesizer, and the bits and pieces of his language came from other English writers in the long royalist tradition, including important historical figures from various points of the political spectrum, such as Bacon, Filmer, Bolingbroke and Francis Hutcheson. Secrecy and Dispatch, for example, had been linked by commentators for nearly two hundred years, starting in 1592 by the English politician Nicholas Faunt. This paper also illustrates how this kind of wording/phrase strategy gradually immigrated and imbedded into the American context, via the cross-Atlantic channels such as John Witherspoon and James Wilson, both born in Britain and served in US.
This paper, the first of its kind, explores this Anglo-American tradition to offer new evidence to situate Hamilton’s argument in Federalist No. 70. In particular it helps elucidate what was likely an intellectual consensus for early Americans in 1787 and what was potentially not. In so doing, it qualifies contemporary claims made on about the constitutional design of the American presidency.

Authors

• Jeremy D. Bailey, University of Houston

• Haimo Li, University of Houston