One thing I got from reading the Federalist Papers is an understanding the the government we have is what the founders warned about and did their best to prevent/delay. Understanding the reasoning behind the words that are in the Constitution should be required. The Federalist papers show how much thought went into writing the Constitution.
Read the Anti-Federalist Papers too. Both sides were part of the public debate. The Federalists "won" but the criticisms from the Anti-Federalists are relevant.
> The electronic text of The Federalist used here was compiled for Project Gutenberg by scholars who drew on many available versions of the papers.
Project Gutenberg is right up there with the Internet Arrive in the pantheon of critical projects for preserving the commons.
I'm not from the US and I am not a native English speaker.
The federalist papers are, in my opinion, a true work of art. I find the linguistic elegance and finesse of these texts highly admirable.
Unfortunately, to my dismay, the usage of such "complex" language is discouraged nowadays. Or to express it in the appropriate linguistic style: Our modern era seems to espouse a predilection for accessibility and brevity, often at the expense of the stylistic grandeur and intellectual richness that was once the hallmark of our written and spoken discourse.
Fun experiment to run: go through the Federalist Papers and find places where they make psychological observations/predictions about how people in government/politics do, should, or will act. Note that these observations/predictions typically underlie, or provide justification for the structure of the Constitution they are advocating for. Also note that these observations/predictions are completely wrong in the modern world.
It's mind-blowing to me that Alexander Hamilton wrote the vast majority of these. Unreal impact
Notable that both Hamilton and Madison both later went against some principles espoused in the Fed Papers, Hamilton in his support for a national bank that overreached the constitution and Madison in his support for the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, which proposed states’ nullification of federal laws.
See also https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/alexander-hamilton_john-ja... for a high quality ebook version
I read the essays, intriguing history, rather difficult to digest, but changed my world view for the better.
It is mandatory reading — if you can't be bothered, just read the top five or ten.
The Federalist Papers may be the most successful trolling operation of all time. They were published anonymously, intended to provoke, and changed the world.
A year or so ago I published the Federalist Papers on IPFS and connected the hash to an ENS accessible on native web3 browsers at https://federalistpapers.eth or legacy browser gateway https://federalistpapers.eth.limo
I find myself questioning the value of studying documents like the Federalist Papers. I'd certainly learn a lot, but I don't have any power to use what I learn to change how society operates; so what good is it? Knowledge that can't be utilized doesn't seem meaningfully different from a lack of knowledge.
"Putting the Federalist Papers on the Internet will eventually provide free access to all, but to have this great collection of arguments be slightly more accessible in the 21st century than it is today in public libraries will make no change in how many decide to read its difficult but worthwhile prose." –Alan Kay
For those interested in such things, ConSource has a wonderful collection[0] of historical materials relating to the U.S. Constitution, including contemporaneous state constitutions, notes from states' ratification debates, and records from the Constitutional Convention.
[0] https://www.consource.org/library/
On the Federalist Papers, my current obsession is Federalist 36, on the taxing power: "Let it be recollected that the proportion of these [direct] taxes is not to be left to the discretion of the national legislature, but is to be determined by the numbers of each State..., a circumstance which effectually shuts the door to partiality or oppression."
The original publications were signed Publius and the authorship of each is only statistically inferred. So maybe the LOC should only say that Alexander Hamilton probably wrote Federalist 1.
I’d love for them to publish a ePub of this material.
Anyone looking for a quick guid to the Constitution? Highly recommend this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dnZYnyYlrw
Fun fact: According to famed programmer Brian Kernigan: one day a colleague at Bell Labs was doing textual analysis on *The Federalist Papers* but it was proving challenging due to the full-text of the document being around 1mb—far more memory than most machines at the time.
Kernigan mentioned the dilemma To Ken Thompson—of Unix fame. The next day he came to work with a new program that could quickly find strings in a text document without having to load the entire document into memory. It became known as grep.