The Proleptic Constitution: The Federalist and Constitutional Development

• In Event: The Federalist and American Constitutional Development

Abstract

The Federalist is among the texts most commonly used to understand the political system established by the Constitution. Citizens, scholars, politicians, and judges alike recur to Publius’s essays—some more opportunistically than others—to find legal, theoretical, and practical guidance or support. The dominant interpretive approach to the essays written by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay is characterized by an effort to ascertain the meaning of its central terms and, on that basis, to determine what the essential character and intended operation of the constitutional order is. This is reflected in (though by no means not limited to) originalists’ frequent invocation of The Federalist to specify the historical meaning of constitutional provisions or the proper functioning of constitutional institutions and processes. While useful in its own right and valuable in many respects, such an approach nonetheless obscures the potent dynamism of the political system Publius explicates. Laced throughout the essays is a powerful set of arguments about constitutional development—about how the compound republic might change over time, what the drivers of that change could be, and ultimately why such change would reflect the vindication rather than the subversion of constitutional values and purposes. This paper identifies three central drivers of constitutional development that are present in The Federalist—government capacity, popular attachment, and institutional consolidation—and demonstrates how Publius’s arguments, taken together, portray a proleptic Constitution, one that anticipates changes in the scope and location of political authority in the American compound republic.

Acknowledging the dynamism described by Publius’s essays is essential for understanding the political system inaugurated by the Constitution, though such an understanding departs from accounts that privilege static and historically confined meaning over dynamic operation and development. The paper thus concludes with a reflection on the relationship between political thought and political development, itself a pitched debate among scholars in the fields of American political thought and American political development. The central question for those engaged in this debate has been whether ideas are autonomous political phenomena, and therefore potential causal variables that merit attention in their own right, or whether they are dependent on or reducible to other political phenomena, and therefore properly accorded a subordinate analytical role. In contrast, the argument advanced in this essay uncovers a rather different relationship between political thought, as expressed in The Federalist, and political development. The interpretation advanced demonstrates that there are developmental dimensions of American political thought itself—aspects of key textual sources that both explicitly and implicitly suggest, contemplate, and even anticipate political development.

Author

• Connor Ewing, University of Toronto