The Public Good in the Rhetoric of Ratification

The Meaning of the Public Good in the
Rhetoric of Ratification
By Matthew J. Peterson
Claremont Graduate University
2013
© Copyright Matthew J. Peterson, 2013
All rights reserved.

APPROVAL OF THE REVIEW COMMITTEE
This dissertation has been duly read, reviewed, and critiqued by the Committee
listed below, which hereby approves the manuscript of Matthew J. Peterson as
fulfilling the scope and quality requirements for meriting the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in Political Science.
Dr. Joseph M. Bessette, Chair
Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Govt. and Ethics
Claremont McKenna College, Government Department
Dr. Charles Kesler, Committee Member
Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government
Dr. Ralph Rossum, Committee Member
Salvatori Professor of Political Philosophy & American Constitutionalism
Dr. Michael Uhlmann, Committee Member
Professor of Government, School of Politics and Economics
Department of Politics and Policy, Claremont Graduate University

Abstract
The Meaning of the Public Good in the Rhetoric of Ratification
Matthew J. Peterson
Claremont Graduate University, 2013
The dissertation examines the meaning of the public or common good considered as an
end or purpose of government in the public debate over the adoption of the U.S.
Constitution. Federalists and Anti-Federalists assert that the purpose of government is
to both promote the public good and protect individual rights. What did they mean by
the “public good” and related phrases? An extended commentary and textual analysis
of the published writings of five Federalists (John Dickinson, Oliver Ellsworth, Noah
Webster, Tench Coxe, and James Wilson) and five Anti-Federalists (Agrippa, Centinel,
Federal Farmer, Impartial Examiner,and Brutus), the dissertation examines the way in
which the notion of the public good played a significant part within the larger themes of
federalism, representation, licentiousness, and union during the ratification period.
Neither side’s understanding of the protection of individual rights as the purpose of
government completely forecloses the notion of the promotion of the public good. The
uniquely federal nature of the Constitution obscures the deeper understanding of the
public good of Anti-Federalists and Federalists alike, but both sides—especially the
Federalists—provide plenty of evidence. The Anti-Federalist view of representation
emphasizes that the public good must be truly public without making clear how the
public good differs from majority will; the Federalists emphasize the public good must
be truly good, the product of sound deliberation. The Federalist argument includes the
explicit claim that liberty is not license, but tied to a common notion of virtue, or what is
truly good for all. The Federalists argue that there is a public good for all the states
combined and thus the federal government must have supreme power over matters
relating to commerce—and commerce is spoken of as intrinsically connected to morality
and virtue—for the sake of this national public good.
Although the Federalist notion of the public good is limited in scope, especially in
practice if not in principle at the federal level, remaining in some way open as to the
final purpose of human beings or the ultimate questions about what is truly good, it is
nonetheless distinct from an interdependent collection of private goods.

Dedication
A dedication is justly owed to my wife, Mary, who made it come to be, and to our
Madeleine, Tiernan, and Gabriel – may the guild stamp herein granted be worth more
than its weight in loans.

v
Acknowledgements
Above all, I give warm thanks to my parents, Bob and Colleen Peterson, without whom
nothing, and to my wife’s parents, John and Celeste Gisla, who made it possible. And
to my grandmother, Virginia Peterson, who has supported me for many years in many
ways.
Without my time at Thomas Aquinas College and the works of Charles De Koninck
(http://charlesdekoninck.com), I would never have begun to think seriously about the
common good; without Claremont Graduate University I would never begun to think
seriously about how the common good relates to the reality of political life, nor
examined how it relates to American political thought in particular. Richard Ferrier of
Thomas Aquinas College was the link between the two, and remains so.
As to the content below, in various ways too deep and too broad to mention, each of my
committee members have passed on, engendered, and influenced and supported
anything that might happen to be of value below, to say nothing of shepherding an
easily distracted student through graduate school and making sure he had bread on the
table—something that Michael Uhlmann does not get paid extra for at CGU, no doubt,
although he should.
Florence Adams of the Rose Institute has also helped make this happen, in many ways.
I am also grateful for the conversations I have had with Adam Scrupski about the
nature of the common good.

vi
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................... v
Chapter 1: What is the Meaning of the Public Good?................................................................................. 1
Terms for the Public Good ...................................................................................................................... 7
What Is the Public Good?...................................................................................................................... 13
Authors Considered .............................................................................................................................. 16
Anti-Federalists................................................................................................................................. 17
Federalists......................................................................................................................................... 22
Outline of the Dissertation.................................................................................................................... 26
Chapter 2: Liberalism and the Public Good............................................................................................... 28
Introduction.......................................................................................................................................... 28
Before the Consensus ........................................................................................................................... 31
Consensus: Diamond and Kenyon......................................................................................................... 34
Consensus Developed........................................................................................................................... 42
Herbert Storing ................................................................................................................................. 42
The Problem.......................................................................................................................................... 44
Michael Zuckert ................................................................................................................................ 46
Thomas Pangle.................................................................................................................................. 47
Paul Rahe .......................................................................................................................................... 53
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 55
Chapter 3: Republicanism and the Public Good........................................................................................ 59
Introduction.......................................................................................................................................... 59
Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood........................................................................................................ 60
Wood’s Method Examined ................................................................................................................... 67
Liberalism Reconsidered....................................................................................................................... 77
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 80
Chapter 4: Origins and Ends; Individual Rights and the Public Good ........................................................ 81
Introduction.......................................................................................................................................... 81
Anti-Federalists..................................................................................................................................... 82
Agrippa.............................................................................................................................................. 82
Impartial Examiner............................................................................................................................ 87
Brutus ............................................................................................................................................... 93

vii
Federal Farmer.................................................................................................................................. 99
Centinel........................................................................................................................................... 102
Federalists........................................................................................................................................... 107
Oliver Ellsworth............................................................................................................................... 107
Noah Webster................................................................................................................................. 110
James Wilson .................................................................................................................................. 113
John Dickinson ................................................................................................................................ 118
Tench Coxe...................................................................................................................................... 121
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 123
Chapter 5: Representation and the Anti-Federalists............................................................................... 125
Introduction: Democracy and Representation.................................................................................... 125
The Anti-Federalists, Representation, and the Public Good ............................................................... 130
Brutus ............................................................................................................................................. 130
Centinel........................................................................................................................................... 145
Federal Farmer................................................................................................................................ 156
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 166
Chapter 6: Representation and the Federalists ...................................................................................... 168
Introduction: Democracy and Representation.................................................................................... 168
Noah Webster..................................................................................................................................... 170
Tench Coxe.......................................................................................................................................... 186
Oliver Ellsworth................................................................................................................................... 190
James Wilson ...................................................................................................................................... 192
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 199
Chapter 7: Virtue and Licentiousness ..................................................................................................... 201
Introduction: Licentiousness and Ratification..................................................................................... 201
License, Licentious, Licentiousness..................................................................................................... 203
Anti-Federalists................................................................................................................................... 205
Liberty & Licentiousness ................................................................................................................. 205
Commerce & The Anti-Federalists .................................................................................................. 209
Federalists........................................................................................................................................... 215
Virtue of the People........................................................................................................................ 215
Liberty & Licentiousness ................................................................................................................. 220

viii
Commerce & the Federalists........................................................................................................... 234
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 241
Chapter 8 Federalism.............................................................................................................................. 244
Introduction........................................................................................................................................ 244
Impartial Examiner.......................................................................................................................... 251
Federal Farmer................................................................................................................................ 253
Brutus ............................................................................................................................................. 258
Centinel........................................................................................................................................... 265
Federalists........................................................................................................................................... 266
Tench Coxe...................................................................................................................................... 266
James Wilson .................................................................................................................................. 268
Noah Webster................................................................................................................................. 272
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 276
Chapter Nine: Union ............................................................................................................................... 280
Introduction........................................................................................................................................ 280
Tench Coxe.......................................................................................................................................... 283
Noah Webster..................................................................................................................................... 284
Oliver Ellsworth................................................................................................................................... 285
John Dickinson .................................................................................................................................... 288
James Wilson ...................................................................................................................................... 298
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 307
Chapter Ten: Anti-Federalists, Federalists, and the Public Good ............................................................ 311
Federalists........................................................................................................................................... 326
Virtue, Constitutional Design, and Representation......................................................................... 333
Licentiousness and Commerce........................................................................................................ 337
Union .............................................................................................................................................. 341
The Public Good.................................................................................................................................. 344
Selected Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 354
Endnotes................................................................................................................................................. 357

1
Chapter 1: What is the Meaning of the Public Good?
From the founding era to the present day, Americans have referred to both the protection of
individual rights and the promotion of the public good as the purpose of government;
alternatively or simultaneously, we have always used both purposes to justify or condemn
political action. It is hard to conceive of a single American political debate outside of the
framework of either concept. Indeed, it could be justly said that American politics constitutes a
continuing debate over what these concepts mean and how they relate to each other. So long as
the structure of American government is traced back—however winding the path—to the
government which the founding generations of Americans established, scholarship of the
founding era remains a part of this political and cultural debate. An examination of the way in
which the founding generation thought about the purpose of government in the context of the
adoption of our Constitution cannot but be relevant to contemporary American life. We make
such examinations not merely on account of historical interests, but because the thought that
established the Constitution we still live under today is ever in dispute so long as its meaning and
purpose remain intertwined with our differing notions of the public good and individual rights in
contemporary political life.
The early years of the American republic are unique because they provide an obvious,
decisive and observable history of the conscious creation and consensual adoption of a specific
form of government by several large communities of human beings. The structure of the
American government we know today was formally established in the space of a mere thirteen
years, from the separation from the British Empire by means of the Declaration of Independence

2
in 1776 to the culminating act molding our government into its constitutive form by means of the
adoption of a written Constitution of the United States of America in 1789.
One of the most remarkable facts about the founding period is that one can approach the
birth of American government by almost direct contact with the participants themselves. We
possess voluminous reams of written material from most, if not all, of the major and many of the
minor participants in the events that established American government. The founding generation
left behind a vast collection of speeches, essays, letters, and other documents. What is equally
remarkable, however, is the extent to which much of this material has been neglected. Well over
two centuries later Americans are still putting these documents together into critically confirmed
and edited public editions, many for the first time. For instance, neither The Documentary
History of the Ratification of the Constitution (DHRC), the content of which historian Bernard
Bailyn rightly said, “[t]he sheer bulk is overwhelming,” nor The Papers of James Madison are
completed projects. 1
Only 30 of 45 projected volumes of Madison’s public life are currently
available, and this does not even take into consideration the planned volumes of the extended and
active retirement period of the “father of the constitution.”2
The University of Virginia Press
only recently began the first attempt to put the mass of founding texts, including the DHRC and
the collected writings of major founders into a single searchable, digital format. 3
Slowly but
surely, over the last fifty or so years thousands of pages of texts from the founding era have been
put into print for the first time since they were first written and published.
The mountain ranges of late 18th
century America writings are momentous on account of
their content, which includes layers upon layers of arguments made by human beings seriously
engaged in political thought and action during the formative years of the republic. The years
leading up to the Revolutionary War are rife with persuasive briefs from sermons to satires

3
composed by and for large segments of society. This explosion of writings concerning the nature
of government and the reasons for or against the Revolution culminates here and there in official
and quasi-official documents representing group opinions. Finally, when the decision to become
independent is made the American mind is ultimately expressed in the Declaration of
Independence itself. There follows an oft neglected fertile period of vigorous deliberation and
eventual adoption of many state constitutions as well as the Articles of Confederation.
From the revolution to ratification and beyond, the promotion of the common good and
the protection of individual rights are inextricably linked themes in American political discourse.
In the very announcement of the birth of America in the Declaration itself, one sees the two
concepts at work. On the one hand, the Declaration of Independence asserts unequivocally that
governments are instituted to secure the rights of individuals. The assertion that just government
exists to secure the rights of individuals seems defining of American political thought and
action—to the extent that, for good and ill, many understand this purpose to exclude any
substantial notion of a common or public good as the end of government. On the other hand, the
rights that the Declaration specifically asserts all men are endowed with—life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness—do not necessarily preclude the promotion of the public good as the end of
government, but could be argued to require it. The first fact submitted to a candid world to prove
a history of repeated injuries and usurpations by the “present King of Great Britain” was that
“[h]e has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good”;
the following litany emphasizes the suppression of colonial government, law, and legal custom
rather than the violation of the rights of individuals.
Yet the culminating act that determined the form of the United States of America was the
ratification of the Constitution; the ensuing debate over its adoption is perhaps the most direct

4
evidence we have of the founding generation’s understanding of the underlying purpose of the
federal government we have inherited. In the space of approximately two years, a large body of
writings again erupted from pens and presses, again composed by and for large segments of
society in an extensive, disparate regime with a relatively large population. This debate, played
out poems, protests, essays, speeches and letters reveals a spirited people deliberating by every
means possible over whether or not to adopt a specific written document as their supreme law, a
document that was itself the product of the extended formalized deliberation of an elite group of
experienced political men. From the debates leading up to the Revolution to the passage of the
Constitution, one cannot but be struck by the vision of a people constantly seeking to publicly
justify and persuade each other of the right course of political action on the basis of argument.
Indeed, the mere existence of such an extensive documentary record itself tells us much about
the character of the government such words helped create: such a record reflects attempts to
persuade others through the force of argument rather than the physical imposition of the will of a
powerful individual or faction.
The political structure the debates created still exists, with relatively few amendments,
and the Constitution remains the supreme law of the land. Rhetorically, at least, most arguments
in American politics assume its primacy or appeal to its authority. Both common and expert
opinion agree that the Constitution is still to a large extent determinative of the organization and
composition of the federal government today, regardless of the extent to which one thinks
American government has changed over time. Thus the purposes for which early Americans
designed and adopted the Constitution remain as relevant as the Constitution itself. Even if one
concludes that the Constitution is completely irrelevant today, and that the above sentence is

5
false, one must still argue to this conclusion based on an understanding of the ends for which it
was formed over two centuries ago in order to make a convincing case for its irrelevancy.
Participants in the ratification debates frequently speak of two overarching purposes of
government. Brutus, perhaps the most renowned of the Anti-Federalists, says a wise constitution
would “secure the inestimable rights of mankind” in his first essay4
and declares that “[t]he
common good…is the end of civil government” in his second.5
In Federalist 10, Publius says
that “[t]o secure the public good and private rights…is then the great object to which our
inquiries are directed.”6
Seemingly in spite of reigning interpretations, Federalist 10 mentions the
“public good” explicitly six times, and uses the phrase the “common good” and the “good of the
whole” once each. What then do Brutus and Publius mean by such phrases? What is the
meaning of the notion of the public good considered as an end or purpose of government in the
published essays of the ratification debates?
This question is not an easy one to answer. First, of course, one cannot assume that
contemporary understanding of the “public good” or the “common good” remains the same as it
was for the founding generation of Americans. Given the confusion and debate within and
across academic disciplines, not to mention political parties, as to what these seemingly
amorphous terms mean, it is not even clear as to what this contemporary understanding is. Yet
although the notion of specifically natural rights as elucidated in the Declaration and the
ratification debates is fainter in American discourse than it once was, it is still part of that
discourse. Similarly, the notion of the public good as constituting more than tangible, material
public goods is also fainter than it once was, and yet it is still part of that same discourse. It is in
some ways intrinsically harder to answer, however, what the public good might mean than it is to
explain what it means for government to secure individual rights.

6
Part of the reason for this is that discussion concerning the public good is often obscured
behind talk of the securing of rights, which, as in the Declaration itself, has always been front
and center in American political discourse. In our own time, the notion of individual rights
seems more prominently written into the Constitution itself in the Bill of Rights compared to the
appearance of “the general Welfare” in the preamble, and the same applies to our contemporary
understanding of the way in which these ideas are used throughout the history of American
political life. Some of the most disputed political issues of our time seem to revolve around
individual rights, and we increasingly teach our history in terms of an unfolding of an ever
growing parade of individual rights. Yet the fact remains that the concept of the public good has
been ever present and ever tied to discussion concerning the securing of rights, and it remains an
intrinsic part of our political discourse today.
Yet the definition and role of the public good seems more abstract and disputed than that
of individual rights to us—seemingly more closely bound up with difficult and unsettled matters
of politics and political philosophy. From Plato’s forays into the relation between the one and
the many to Aquinas’s definition of law to countless official and unofficial formulaic expressions
of political purpose throughout the ages, the notion of a common good has always played an
integral and disputed part of western political philosophy. On account of its abstraction any
verbal formulation of the idea can be used in so many senses that it possesses an intrinsic
ambiguity and mystery. The existence of the thing itself has been vehemently disputed and, even
positing its existence, its meaning is not only frequently in dispute: the full depth of that meaning
seems admittedly ever out of complete grasp of even the minds of those who espouse it.
Despite these difficulties—and because of them—there are ample and obvious reasons to
scrutinize the words left to us from the ratification debates in order to determine what the

7
founding generation thought about the purpose of government and the notion of the public good.
First, the entire debate was an extended argument over whether or not to establish the specific
form of government that has lasted to the present day. One can comfortably examine the debates
for what was specifically said about the end of government and work to uncover what was left
unsaid with the confidence that the participants’ understanding of the purpose of government is
necessarily related to their position on whether or not to actually adopt a particular government.
Second, examining the ratification debates allows one to investigate the breadth and depth of
agreement on the issue: was the rift between Federalists and Anti-Federalists caused by a
disagreement over ends involving conflicting political philosophies or was it a disagreement over
means within the framework of a shared political philosophy? Third, specifically examining the
most public part of the debate in extended published arguments from both sides reveals what
they thought the shared principles of the general reading public were. Newspaper essays and
pamphlets, as opposed to closed debates or private letters, provide revealing evidence of the
common assumptions of the time to which all sides appealed. Not only were these writings
created by their authors for the express purpose of persuading the general reading public, they
were also usually selected by partisan publishers and editors for the same reason. Thus, they
reflect arguments that their authors and publishers thought would most likely sway readers.
Terms for the Public Good
The “common good” is the philosophic phrase that seems to most clearly and simply refer to a
good that is good for many. I understand the phrase broadly, as if the “public good,” the
“general welfare,” and other like phrases all live within it. By referring to the “common good”
one makes clear one is not speaking about an “individual good” or, to be more precise, a “private
good” which cannot be shared, participated in, or possessed in common. Note that there is no

8
reason why an individual good must stand in tension with the common good. In fact, in political
speech it is often assumed that the good of the individuals is tied to the good of all in some
intrinsic or substantial manner. The good of the child or the family is not necessarily opposed to
education considered as a public good; in fact, it is assumed that the public good of education is
good for the child and the family. Yet when we refer to a private good, we usually mean a good
that cannot be shared in this way. A common good, however, refers to a good that is shared,
participated in, or possessed by many as opposed to a good that is proper only to an individual or
a specific part. These terms are generic; the “common good” could refer to any parts and any
whole.
The Federalists and Anti-Federalists themselves spoke of the “common good,” but they
also spoke of the “public” or “general” good; the “common,” “public” or “general” welfare; and
the “common,” “public” or “general” interest; the “public” or “general happiness”; as well as a
variety of other phrases such as the good, welfare, interests, or happiness “of the whole,” “of the
community,” etc. First, note that all the above adjectives are essentially interchangeable in
meaning. In Noah Webster’s 1806 dictionary, as an adjective “public” could mean “common” or
“general” as well as “open” or “notorious.” (As a noun, “public” meant “the body of a nation, an
open view.”)7
As an adjective, “general” could mean “common” or “public” as well as “usual,”
“extensive,” and “large.” (As a noun, it could mean “a whole” as well as “great military officer”
or “director.”)8
Similarly, as an adjective, “common” could mean “public” as well as “equal,”
“usual,” “vulgar,” or “mean.” (As a noun, it could mean “land belonging to a number and not
separated by fences.”)9
Regardless of overlap, however, the “public good,” is more circumscribed than the
“common good” as “public” is more limiting than “common.” Things that are public are, by

9
definition, common in a specific manner, whereas not all things that are common are necessarily
considered or said to be public. The “public good” contains within it an implicit distinction
between what is private and public that refers the reader specifically to human beings. The
phrase represents what is shared by human beings in an open, communal fashion within a
political regime; whereas a “private good” refers to what is good particular to one human being
or perhaps a small group of human beings as distinct from what belongs to or can be said of the
larger, public community. The first meaning of “publick” as an adjective in Samuel Johnson’s
last 18th century dictionary was “Belonging to a state or nation; not private”; another was
“Regarding not private interest, but the good of the community.”10
Thus although the phrase can
be used interchangeably with “common good,” by referring to a “public good,” one adds
specificity that the adjective “common” does not possess. “Public” generally indicates a relation
to a political human community related to society, the citizenry, or government and our actions
in light of this community that “common” does not necessarily imply.
Of course, the distinction between public and private in the context of the end of
government is not mere semantics. Modern scholarship maintains that one of the tenets of
“classical republicanism” is that human fulfillment is found ultimately in public action, or insofar
as an individual takes on an active political role for the polis, while liberalism refers to the idea
that the purpose of government is to fulfill the private good of the individual. This is but one
example of the fundamental difference to one’s understanding of government and its purpose the
private versus public distinction might make.
In the following pages I generally use the term “public good” in favor of other, possibly
synonymous phrases, with the understanding that the “public good” is comprehended in some
measure by the overarching meaning of the “common good.” I have chosen to use the “public

10
good” because it is the most frequently used phrase by the above authors that most clearly
hearkens modern readers to the idea under investigation; I also think it is the most accurate and
comprehensive description of the founding generation’s idea of the purpose of government other
than the protection of individual rights. To speak of the “public good” is to speak of the
common good of a political community, and this is the notion that I am examining in the
ratification debate.
Although these phrases are all related, clearly they can potentially signify vastly
different—even opposing—notions. If one accepts the general depiction of modern scholarship
described in the next two chapters one would likely think that references to the “common good”
would have classical republican connotations and link back to pre-modern political philosophy;
“public good” tends towards classical republican connotations but could be compatible with both
or either republicanism or liberalism; and “common,” “general” or “public” interest would seem
to possess a liberal connotation and bear some relation to early modern political philosophy. For
example, if one speaks of a common interest instead of a common good, one might very well be
replacing a concern for what is good and evil with a concern for unifying self-interests. Instead
of speaking about what is truly good in common, one might be speaking about a collection of
selfish desires that are in truth only accidentally considered common in that they do not have the
same or a fully shareable object. On the other hand, it is not inconceivable that one could
understand common interest as referring to the common good itself if one thought that interests
rightly understood are satisfied by a truly common good. On account of this ambiguity, when
calculating the frequency of use of phrases used referring to the public good, I have not included
related phrases that use “interests” as their base word.

11
Two other frequently used, relevant base words in phrases related to the end of
government are “welfare” (sometimes “common” or “public,” etc.) and happiness (sometime
“public,” “national,” or “of the people,” etc.). Generally, the meaning of welfare is
interchangeable with happiness—Noah Webster’s and Samuel Johnson’s dictionaries list
“Happiness” as the first meaning of the word. Yet the other meanings of “welfare” are “success,”
“prosperity” (“success,” “good fortune,” “happiness”11
), and “health,” so one might take
“welfare” to mean happiness with a slight emphasis on material well-being.12
Still, “welfare”
and its promotion among the people or public of the individual states, or all the states together, or
on its own seems very much connected with the older, classical notion of the common good, in
which happiness is understood to be achieved by attaining what is good in common. A sign of
this is found in the meanings of the “weal” and “commonweal,” which are each etymologically
related to “welfare.” “Weal” is defined as “happiness,” “prosperity,” or “state”13
; the
“commonweal” is defined as the “public good or welfare.”14
(emphasis mine) Phrases using
“welfare” as their base are used in context within the ratification debates in place of the
“common good” or the “public good” and not alongside them, whereas “happiness” seems to
bear a related but distinct meaning. One could refer to “your welfare” and “your good” almost
completely interchangeably, whereas to refer to your “happiness” is to say something different.
(For Webster, “happiness” means “blessedness,” “content,” “good fortune.”15
) Further, the state
is not a person who obtains happiness; happiness refers most properly to what is possessed by
each of the individuals that make it up. One’s happiness is fully one’s own, even if obtained
through common action. The “welfare” or “good” of the public, as opposed to their happiness,
seems to signify a more unitary notion that signifies—and depends upon the existence of—a kind
of unity or relation between all the citizens; whereas happiness refers most properly to what each

12
possesses individually, even if, again, this happiness is dependent upon and received through
their partaking in the public good or welfare. The public might be happy, but for this to be a
unitary notion that happiness must come through some good that is shared. Happiness could
potentially more easily refer to each individual’s enjoyment of their rights as well as their shared
possession of a public good. Hence, when calculating the frequency of references to the public
good, I have included all terms using “welfare,” “weal,” as their base in addition to those that
refer to a unitary “good,” but I have not included those terms with “happiness” as their base.
It must be noted, however, that happiness is referred to as the end of government
frequently, and it is often discussed insofar as it is “general” and “public.” Further, even upon a
superficial glance at the texts in question happiness seems to signify something more than
material well-being. Happiness or its variants are usually spoken of in the same breath as
“safety” or something similar as an end of government in such a way as to make clear that
happiness (and, perhaps even more obviously, “welfare”) refers to something more than, and
even more noble than, safety or material well-being.
Linguistic and etymological nuance aside, of course, all of the above terms could be used
by an author who adopts either political philosophy. Even assuming all that I have sketched
above contains some element of truth, for instance, a writer could easily use any one of the terms
used above and actually mean what another of the terms above better signifies in terms of
political philosophy. It is conceivable that an Anti-Federalist writer could say that the proposed
constitution should promote the common interest in an off-hand, general comment, but in the rest
of his essay deny the central tenets of liberalism. He might mean that it is in our common
interest to be virtuous and good. Conversely, another writer could say that the proposed
constitution must promote the common good in passing, but in the rest of his essay embrace

13
liberalism. One might say, for instance, that our common good is intrinsically related to
commerce alone and is achieved strictly through the promotion of material prosperity or that the
common good is only common insofar as everyone ought to be allowed to decide what is good
for themselves.
We ought to be wary of such loose fitting speech since, after all, the participants of the
ratification debates were not writing carefully thought out philosophical treatises, but political
rhetoric, often hastily written in the heat of passionate debate tied to the flesh and blood reality of
their lives. With these things in mind, it seems that all of the terms above point in some way,
however vague, to a shared reason and purpose for the existence of government that, whatever its
meaning, ought to be distinguished from the notion of the protection of individual rights as an
end of government (even if the two concepts are intrinsically related).
What Is the Public Good?
How ought we to interpret the meaning of these phrases? While the following chapters will look
at how the concept is used within the ratification debates in order to better understand the phrase,
we ought not to act as if, prima facie, the meaning of these phrases is a complete mystery.
Of course, the common or public good is used to signify a wide spectrum of meanings.
At one end, in economics, public goods may refer to material things that are, functionally or
practically speaking, at least, able to be used by many freely without additional cost and
diminishment. Paul Samuelson, for instance, launched a theme of modern economics when he
said: “I explicitly assume two categories of goods: ordinary private consumption goods…which
can be parcelled out among different individuals…and collective consumption goods…which all
enjoy in common in the sense that each individual's consumption of such a good leads to no
subtraction from any other individual's consumption of that good.”16
“Collective consumption
goods” are now generally referred to as “public goods”; Samuelson’s definition meant that,

14
practically speaking, what made a good public was the fact there was enough of it to go around.
Examples approximating a true public good in this sense include fresh air, free broadcast
network television, and plentiful species of fish in the ocean.
Even within economics, however, there is an acknowledged wide gradation involving the
disputed and complicated meaning of public goods. Of course, most physical goods are, in
principle at least, “subtractable” or, to use a synonymous word from economics, “rivalrous”: if I
take an apple from the tree and eat it, there is one less apple for others to take; similarly, if I use a
shovel, no one else can use it simultaneously. Physical goods are also generally “excludable”
insofar as their acquisition or use can often be controlled and limited, especially in lieu of
payment. There may be plenty of apples to go around, but they might all be on trees on the other
side of a fence. A modern retrospective on Samuelson’s paper sums up a typical economic view
today that “a pure public good is usually deﬁned as being wholly nonrival in consumption and
non-excludable, a pure private good as being wholly rival in consumption and excludable and a
mixed good represents some kind of a blend between these polar cases.”17
The problem is that,
when it comes to material goods, in principle they are not actually wholly nonrival or non-
excludable; although practically or functionally speaking these might serve as a public good, at
least most goods that are physical things are potentially rivalrous and excludable. As economist
Richard Musgrave said, “This approach has been subject to the criticism that this case does not
exist, or, if at all, applies to defense only; and in fact most goods which give rise to private
beneﬁts also involve externalities in varying degrees and hence combine both social and private
good characteristics.”18
Within the ratification debates, the word “goods” was often used to describe physical
items of trade, but a word search of the Documentary History reveals no use of the phrase

15
“public goods” or “common goods,” and it is clear from context that the “public good” and the
“common good,” etc., did not refer to physically distributable goods. A sign of this is that when
they use these terms, they refer to a single entity: the public good, or the common good, or the
good of the whole, etc. In political speech today, however, we often speak of public or common
goods, and the reason for this seems obvious: we often refer to material things as public or
common goods that ought to be divided up in accordance with some notion of distributive
justice.19
The fact that the participants in the ratification used terms that are not applicable to
material goods, however, is precisely what makes those terms interesting as evidence for an
underlying political philosophy.
Whatever the common or public good was for the founding generation, then, it was not
that of modern economics, except, perhaps, insofar as economics recognizes something like
national defense as a public good. The economic definition, however, is revelatory in the sense
that it attempts to ascribe properties to the public good that can only be said in principle to apply
to non-physical things. One can see that the less bodily and the more unitary the good, the more
“nonrivalrous” and “nonexcludable” it becomes. The aesthetic beauty of a public building, for
example, or free broadcast television thus seem like more perfect public goods than an apple or a
fish, and the reason for this seems related to the fact that the former two goods are more “one
thing” and also more related to human reason or understanding while the latter two are more
bodily in nature.
In traditional western philosophy, the common good generally refers in the highest and
most strict sense to that which is good for one person only if it is good for another, such as the
victory of an army in a battle, or the harmony of a choir. In both examples the good of victory or
harmony is either achieved by all or none of the soldiers or singers. In the same way, one could

16
call justice in a political regime—insofar as this means the right relation between all the
citizens—a common good. Justice is good for many at the same time, albeit in different ways—
and yet it remains what it is; peace or tranquility, i.e., the harmony or concord arising from this
right relation between the citizenry, is a common good in the same way. These public goods in
the more perfect sense are not fully possessed by any one person, but all share in them. The
peace of the city or the justice of the laws cannot be said to be mine personally, although I
possess them and participate in them personally if I am part of the city. They exist insofar as
they exist in individuals, but the individual can only seek and love them insofar as they are
common, for they cannot be had in any other way. The more people live in justice and peace, the
more justice and peace are increased. Without other people there is no justice or peace in the
political sense. Even in an interior sense, in one person, the two notions’ definition and
existence depend upon a harmony and right relation of parts within a person.
The public good, then, in the highest or most perfect sense refers to a good of a political
community that remains one thing, or is unitary and irreducible, even as many participate in it or
possess it in common. At the same time, it is not separate from the individuals who share in it.
They possess it insofar as it is common or public. The public good in this older sense is not a
material thing, nor a sum total of individual goods. Peace and justice are traditionally
understood to be the public goods that comprehend all others for the political regime.
Authors Considered
In the following pages I examine the understanding of the public good in the founding era in
relation to the Constitution by analyzing ten major authors, five Federalists and five Anti-
Federalists, of the ratification debate. Three criteria governed the choice of authors. First, the
selection must have been either widely reprinted by multiple papers or printed repeatedly over a
length of time by one paper. Second, the selection must have been more than a few paragraphs.

17
Although investigating what were perhaps the most widely read arguments of the ratification
debates—the short, unsigned editorials or “squibs” that were reprinted in newspaper after
newspaper—would undoubtedly prove fruitful, the dissertation avoids these in favor of
examining more sustained efforts. Third, essays for both Federalists and Anti-Federalists were
sought from the northern, middle and southern states, with preference given to states within
which significant debate occurred.
Anti-Federalists
Given these criteria, I examine the complete works published during the ratification
debates of five Anti-Federalists: Agrippa, Brutus, Centinel, Federal Farmer, and Impartial
Examiner. They constitute five of the nine authors whose writings appear in the one volume
edition, selected by Murray Dry (1985), of Herbert Storing’s Complete Anti-Federalist (1981).
With the exception of Impartial Examiner, who was reprinted by Storing for the first time in
1981, all five appear in most selections of the Anti-Federalists published over the last 40 years.
Although several of the essays were reprinted across state lines and included in nationally
distributed pamphlets, they were originally published in Massachusetts (Agrippa), New York
(Brutus and Federal Farmer), Pennsylvania (Centinel), and Virginia (Impartial Examiner).
The Virginia Independent Chronicle published five essays signed Impartial Examiner
(and sometimes “P.P.” in addition) from February 20, 1788 to June 18, 1788. This is the
lengthiest published series of Anti-Federalist essays in the crucial Virginia debate. As with
Agrippa, Impartial Examiner was not widely reprinted across state lines, but anyone within the
state reading about the convention would have come in contact with the essays. Storing calls
them “interesting and important,” singling out the discussion of representation as “one of the

18
good Anti-Federalist discussions of this matter.”20
The author was likely a well educated,
politically savvy Virginian.
The Massachusetts Gazette published sixteen essays signed Agrippa from November
23rd
, 1787 to February 5th
, 1788. Although just three of his essays were reprinted a total of only
four times (one essay twice and two once each), Agrippa’s essays represent the most sustained
and substantial effort of all the Anti-Federalist writings originating in Massachusetts during a
crucial focal point of the ratification period. Agrippa’ essays played an important role within this
debate; Federalists routinely and vociferously attacked them. As the DHRC relates, “[f]ew
Antifederalist writers were so universally condemned.”21
Agrippa was known at the time as James Winthrop, a descendant of John Winthrop and
the son of a prominent professor at Harvard. Although the irascible New Englander was perhaps
not as prominent a political figure as many of the other authors this dissertation considers, he
was a part of the Massachusetts intellectual establishment in more than name. He took part in
the Revolution and assisted in militia efforts to suppress Shays Rebellion. At the time the essays
first appeared Winthrop was a thirty three year old independent scholar and register of probate
for the county of Middlesex, for which he would in later years become a judge. He began his
studies at Harvard when he was thirteen; after failing to obtain a Harvard professorship as chair
of mathematics and natural philosophy, he had recently resigned as librarian when the
ratification debates began. A brilliant polymath (he made efforts in astronomy and knew
Hebrew and Chinese, among other languages), his obituary in the proceedings of the
Massachusetts Historical Society, of which he was a founding member, says he failed to receive
the professorship in part because at the time “[h]is manners were peculiar and eccentric, and not
the most conciliating. He was very independent in his sentiments; and by some was considered

19
obstinate and conceited.” He was not helped by the fact that during this period of his life there
was “apprehension of him becoming addicted to intemperance,” although apparently he
overcame this proclivity as he grew older.22
Agrippa is included in most modern compendiums of Anti-Federalist writings and is
frequently cited in debates over the character of the founding period. Storing introduces his
essays as “important,” characterizing them as “vigorously and well argued.”23
William B. Allen
and Gordon Lloyd assert that Agrippa’s essays, seven of which are included in The Essential
Antifederalist, “are among the most coherent of all in the Antifederalist literature.”24
The New York Journal published sixteen essays signed “Brutus” from October 18th
, 1787
to April 10th
, 1788. His individual essays were, like Agrippa’s, reprinted somewhat less than
most of the other authors analyzed below. Yet “newspaper reprinting does not adequately
illustrate the extent of circulation” since he was “criticized and defended by newspaper writers in
towns…where the essays are not known to have been published.”25
The extent of his influence
is apparent from numerous statements made by Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike. James
Madison took immediate note of this “new Combatant, … with considerable address &:
plausibility” and on occasion Publius seemingly wrote in direct response to Brutus, starting
perhaps with the very first Federalist Paper.26
Fellow Anti-Federalists Cato and Centinel treated
Brutus’ accounts of certain subjects as authoritative.27
Nor has respect for Brutus faded with time. Cecilia Kenyon (1966) gave the
“outstanding” essays high praise.28
Following Paul Leicester Ford, she attributed them to Robert
Yates, of whom she said “[t]he Antifederalists had no publicist more able.”29
While Storing
expressed doubts as to whether the author was Yates, his judgment that the essays offer “the
most direct Anti-Federal confrontation of the arguments of The Federalist,” and that Brutus

20
provides the “best” Anti-Federalist argument on a number of topics, is not uncommon among
scholars.30
Morten Borden calls Brutus, “[t]he most brilliant of all Antifederalist writers,” also
arguing that Yates was not the author.31
Ralph Ketcham lists him as one of four “major” Anti-
Federalists32
and the DHRC ranks his essays “among the finest Antifederalist writings.”33
Shortly after they were published various people guessed that Brutus was everyone from
Richard Henry Lee to John Jay, but for many years scholars have generally accepted Ford’s
claim that Robert Yates was the author. Yates was a surveyor and lawyer active in the
revolution, a member of the committee that wrote the New York state constitution and a New
York Supreme Court judge besides being a dissenting member of the Constitutional
Convention.34
Although an increasing number of scholars have seen little evidence for Yates’s
authorship, few have suggested alternatives. The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton
Smith Circle, published in 2009 and edited by Derek Webb and Michael Zuckert, argues that
Melancton Smith was either Brutus or the Federal Farmer, but most likely Brutus. Smith was a
prominent politician and merchant who famously led the opposition to Hamilton at the New
York ratifying convention. His reversal of his position and vote for the Constitution likely
damaged his future political career in New York State even as it ensured the adoption of the
Constitution.
Four Philadelphia newspapers published eighteen essays signed Centinel from October
5th
, 1787 to April, 9th 1788. Centinel’s feisty essays were a central part of the Anti-Federalist
canon, reprinted more on average per essay than The Federalist Papers. The first essay was
printed in nineteen newspapers in sixteen towns; many of them made appearances in multiple
pamphlets and broadsides. There is ample evidence that Samuel Bryan, who turned thirty in
1789 and held a number of positions in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia government throughout

21
his life, was the author. It is likely that his father, a well known Pennsylvanian judge and
legislator, influenced the writing of the essays.
Centinel presents the reader with the most strident rhetoric against the Federalists of any
of the Anti-Federalists considered here. Bailyn refers to the series as a “foaming diatribe,” but he
also acknowledges that, at least compared to even more vehement Anti-Federalists, Centinel
“included some reasoned arguments” amidst his rhetorical flourishes.35
Beneath the sometimes
shrill tones one finds clear and consistent principles of political thought that are representative of
how the Anti-Federalists think one ought to guard against a tyrannical federal system. As one of
the best known Anti-Federalists he was frequently attacked and answered by Federalists,
including James Wilson in his State House Yard Speech. Centinel is inevitably included in most
collections of Anti-Federalist thought published over the last half century.
The pamphlet signed “Federal Farmer”, composed of five letters dated within the month
of October, 1787 was first mentioned as available for sale in New York on November 8th
, 1787.
At least four editions would be published, and the pamphlet was no doubt one of the most widely
circulated of the debates. Publius himself calls the Federal Farmer “the most plausible” of the
Anti-Federalists in Federalist 68.36
The editors of the DHRC call the Federal Farmer “the best
Antifederalist writing” and, as with Brutus, virtually all scholars who speak of the essays, such as
Storing and Ketcham, give them high praise.37
Richard Henry Lee has been traditionally understood to have been the Federal Farmer, a
view voiced by some Federalists at the time the essays were published. Lee, a well known
revolutionary and nationally known political leader (and future senator) from Virginia, was a
major figure in the Continental Congress. Lee’s authorship has been increasingly questioned,
however, notably and initially by Storing and Wood. The current editor of the DHRC, John

22
Kaminski, makes a case for Elbridge Gerry, but the most frequently mentioned alternative is
Melancton Smith. Joseph Kent McGaughy38
and Robert H. Webking39
suggested that the author
was Smith before Webb and Zuckert’s recent argument that if it was not Smith it was one of his
“circle.”40
Federalists
The inquiry below purposefully omits the writings which compose The Federalist
Papers. The eighty five essays by Publius have received more attention over the last 50 years
than the rest of the writings in that debate combined and since they are the most known, they are
also the most encrusted with over two centuries of commentary, having entered the canon of
western political thought ripped from the context of the rest of the ratification debates. Their
status is justified, both due to their authorship and their content; since their first printing The
Federalist Papers have been recognized as the best articulation of Federalist thought. In many
respects the debate over the underlying political philosophy of the Constitution revolves around
them, with little attention paid to the writings of the Anti-Federalists, while the “other
Federalists” receive even less attention.
Yet the intense focus on the Federalist Papers sometimes obscures the vision of the
modern scholar, making it easier for various extremes to stand firm on well-trod ground rather
than explore larger themes of the ratification debates. The oft-cited words of The Federalist
Papers are wielded as weapons in larger debates as much or more as the essays are analyzed on
their own terms. To understand the meaning of The Federalist Papers, however, like any other
serious work, it is important we understand its context in order to comprehend its intent and
accomplishment —especially considering that it is not an abstract treatise of political philosophy,
but a series of periodic essays written to persuade in the midst of a highly unique public debate.

23
The thick forest of arguments that have grown up around The Federalist Papers need to be dealt
with by any serious interpretation of the work; given this fact and the comparative length and
substance of the essays, it is impossible to give Publius his due while also examining the other
major texts of the ratification debates in a dissertation of reasonable size.
I examine five Federalists: Tench Coxe, John Dickinson, Oliver Ellsworth, Noah
Webster, and James Wilson. Each are represented multiple times in Colleen Sheehan and Gary
McDowell’s Friends of the Constitution: Writings of the Other Federalists.41
Although the
writings of the “other Federalists” are not as well known as the major Anti-Federalists are today,
all five authors are known as prominent early Americans. Despite the fact that their writings
were widely read during the ratification debate, Herbert Storing’s essay printed in Sheehan’s
compendium is one of the only substantial scholarly attempts to discuss them as a group. Their
writings were originally published in Pennsylvania (Coxe, Dickinson, Webster, Wilson), New
York (Webster and Coxe), and Connecticut (Ellsworth) but the work of each author was widely
republished throughout the states.
Tench Coxe, a politically active Pennsylvanian merchant, was a one man propaganda
machine. Coxe was a delegate to the Continental Congress and the Annapolis Convention who
would serve in the Washington, Adams, and Jefferson administrations in various capacities,
contributing substantially to Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures as Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury. The only real Federalist rival to Publius’ prodigious word count, Coxe
was possibly the most widely read of any Federalist author. There are at least 8 separate series of
essays or single essays published by Coxe in the DHRC under various pseudonyms, and a
combined total of over 150 total printings and reprintings of individual essays. Although several
of these were published in Pennsylvania in various papers, Coxe routinely sent his writings to

24
various papers in multiple states throughout the ratification period, targeting states like New
York and Virginia during their conventions.
The Hartford Connecticut Courant and the Hartford American Mercury published
thirteen essays signed “Landholder” from November 5, 1787 to March 24, 1788. All evidence
points to Oliver Ellsworth, a lawyer, politician and judge who played an integral part in the
Constitutional Convention, as their author. Ellsworth would go on to become a Connecticut
Senator and major author of the Judiciary Act, a diplomat, and the third Chief Justice of the
United States Supreme Court. His essays were among the most popular and widely reproduced
of all the Federalist writings, likely read by more people than The Federalist Papers during the
debates. The Landholder essays were individually printed a combined total of 146 times
throughout the nation, an average of a little over 11 times an essay. His letter written with Roger
Sherman submitting the Constitution for consideration to the Governor of Connecticut and two
selections of his speeches were printed a combined total of 65 times in various publications.
Although Ellsworth protested the quality of the transcription and the fact it was printed, both
Hartford papers published a speech he made on January 4, 1788 (reprinted 21 times and in seven
other states) and January 7, 1788 at the Connecticut ratifying convention (reprinted 13 times and
in four other states). Both Elbridge Gerry and Luther Martin, who had refused to vote for the
Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention, responded to the Landholder essays in the public
press.
The Pennsylvania Mercury published nine essays signed “Fabius” between April 12 and
May 1, 1788. John Dickinson, a lawyer turned eminent politician both nationally and in
Delaware and Pennsylvania (serving as governor in each state) for over two decades prior to
ratification, wrote the essays. His writings were enormously influential throughout the

25
revolutionary period, after which he chaired the committee that drafted the Articles of
Confederation, served as chair of the Annapolis Convention and played a notable role in the
Constitutional Convention. Taken individually his essays, praised by the likes of George
Washington and Benjamin Rush, were separately printed a combined total of 58 times in various
papers throughout the country, an average of slightly more than 6 reprints for each essay.
Dickinson went on to help draft a revised Delaware constitution and promote abolitionism in his
retirement.
It is remarkable that James Wilson’s “State House Yard” speech, given on October 6,
1787, is one of the earliest and widely known federalist arguments and is mostly “a refutation of
the charges that are alleged” rather than a positive argument. Reprinted a combined total of 38
times, it appeared in multiple pamphlets and 34 separate newspapers in 27 towns. Wilson’s
speech delivered on November 24 to the Pennsylvania Convention was first published in
summary form in the Pennsylvania Packet the 27th
of November and the next day in the
Pennsylvania Herald; some version of it was reprinted a total of 40 times throughout the states.
Probably no other Federalist speeches or writings made an impact as visible in the press as
Wilson’s speeches did; Anti-Federalists specifically cited and criticized them far more often than
The Federalist Papers and likely any other single Federalist author. Many of Wilson’s speeches
in the Pennsylvania Convention were also published individually in newspapers as well as being
collected together and published as a pamphlet. Wilson, a lawyer and experienced figure in
national and Pennsylvanian politics, was one of the most significant figures of the Constitutional
Convention as well as the Pennsylvania ratifying Convention. Likely more known to scholars
today than the other authors examined here, he was to become a Supreme Court Justice.

26
Noah Webster, “a native of Connecticut who had recently moved to New York City from
Philadelphia” to launch American Magazine, had published arguments for a stronger centralized
government years before the Constitutional Convention convened.42
A graduate of Yale,
Webster was a lawyer turned educator who, besides his dictionary and textbooks, would continue
to keep up an active role as a political polemicist in future years. Throughout his life he edited
and wrote publications on a wide variety of topics, as well as eventually serving in the
Connecticut House of Representatives. On October 17, 1787 he published a substantial,
nationally circulated pamphlet as “A Citizen of America.” During the ratification debates he
published at least four anonymous essays which were reprinted at least 8 times.
As a whole, this collection of essays provide a fine, uncontroversial sampling of the most
public part of the ratification debates. Each of these ten authors provides a substantial body of
arguments within which they touched on the most significant themes of the debate. Each one of
these texts warrants extended study in a search for clues as to what the ratification debates reveal
about the founding generation’s understanding of the purpose of government.
Outline of the Dissertation
On the one hand, although it is a necessary, right, and fitting task, the following chapters will not
attempt to place the thought of the ratification debates within a larger philosophic context. On
the other hand, this is not a work of history nor a word search that presents words relating to the
public good out of context. The following chapters will instead steer a middle course, examining
the way in which the public good plays a part in major themes of the ratification debates while
treating each author’s printed words as an organic whole. Chapter 2 questions the extent to
which the liberalism camp can adequately account for the way in which both sides in the
ratification debate speak in the print of the common good. Chapter 3 questions the extent to

27
which the scholarship of classical republicanism, with special attention paid to the thought of
Gordon Wood, adequately accounts for the way in which both sides in the ratification debate
speak in the press of the common good. Chapter 4 will juxtapose the idea of rights with the use
of phrases referring to the public good in Federalist and Anti-Federalist writings. Upon this
foundation, chapter 5 through 9 look more closely at the way in which the public good arises in
the central theme of the ratification debate. Chapter 5 looks at the public good in the Anti-
Federalist conception of representation; chapter 6 looks at the public good in the Federalist
conception of representation. Chapter 7 turns to the role of virtue and licentiousness in Anti-
Federalist and Federalist thought. Chapter 8 does the same for federalism; chapter 9 for union.
Chapters 10 and 11 conclude with a summary judgment of the meaning and role of the public
good in Anti-Federalist and Federalist thought.

28
Chapter 2: Liberalism and the Public Good
Introduction
Despite its enormous quantity and wide variety, and despite the groans in multiple fields of
scholarship that the simplicity of such binary categorization induces, over the last fifty years or
so those scholars asserting the existence of an underlying political philosophy or philosophies
during the founding era can generally be divided into two groups.
Not coincidentally, these groups are roughly organized by the two overarching purposes
of government that the founding generation repeatedly referred to in the ratification debates.
One group sees the founding as a product of “modern” western political theory, or “liberalism,”
which rejects older political traditions and seeks to establish a government with the ultimate goal
of protecting individual rights. The other group sees the founding as a product of political
thought that evolved out of older traditions, or “classical republicanism,” which seeks to
establish a government with the ultimate goal of promoting the public good. When it comes to
the debates over the underlying philosophy of the founding, Alan Gibson has performed some
proverbial yeoman’s work summarizing the literature in his two recent volumes.43
When it
comes to a summary depiction of those who find a liberal consensus at the heart of the founding,
his account is as good as any:
Broadly speaking, this interpretation suggests that the core of the Founder’s political
thought is encapsulated in the Lockean variation of the principles of classical liberalism.
The Founders, according to proponents of this interpretation, believed men “created
equal,” possessed of “natural” rights, and motivated primarily by the pursuit of their
passions and interests…
Since men were naturally equal and intractably self-interested, governments should
promote stability and personal security, protect individual rights (especially property
rights), and promote economic prosperity.
Conversely, government should not try to foster virtue among the citizenry, promote
some organic conception of the common good or “good life” . . . governments should

29
divide powers between different branches of the government and use diverse social
interests to prevent both governmental tyranny and the tyranny of the majority.
Finally, this interpretation also stresses the acceptance by the Founders of an early form
of commercial capitalism.44
The tenets of the other modern conceptual category—classical republicanism, to be
discussed in the next chapter—are harder to categorize, but there is common agreement among
these scholars that early American political thought did wish to promote an “organic conception
of the common good” and actively sought to “foster virtue among the citizenry.” This camp
claims that early Americans, especially before the adoption of the Constitution, held civic and
moral education to be a vital part of good government and viewed the “commercial republic” of
liberalism as a corrupting influence. In this view, liberty is vital not necessarily as an end in
itself but is to be protected largely for the sake of allowing civic participation in the shared way
of life of the regime. Citizens ought to be taught to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of
the public good; the securing of individual rights was not the ultimate purpose of government.
Ultimately, at the heart of the scholarly understanding of liberalism is a government that
aims at protecting individual rights; at the heart of the scholarly understanding of classical
republicanism is a government that aims at promoting the common good. Republicanism, which
is said to judge human beings as virtuous or vicious, seeks to promote civic virtue through law,
education and/or religion. Liberalism, which is said to judge human beings as self-interested,
seeks to channel and check those interests, in part by promoting a commercial republic and
protecting individual rights, but ultimately by allowing such individual interests to be fulfilled.
Republicanism possibly hearkens back to Aristotle and pre-modern thought through either
Machiavelli or pre-enlightenment English thinkers, while liberalism is said to be an early modern
idea arising from John Locke and the others during the Enlightenment period.

30
Both sides usually claim that early American Christianity bolstered their version of the
era’s reigning political thought, although liberalism is sometimes depicted by both sides as being
in possible contradiction, implicitly or explicitly, with Christianity. It is, perhaps, worthy of note
that most of those on both sides of this debate see Christianity’s influence as a subset of which
outline above they subscribe to—in other words, it is said that Christian political thought was
subsumed or incorporated by early Americans into one of the above camps. Indeed, the
longstanding philosophy and practice of western religion when it comes to politics are generally
studied today as a subset of political history or thought rather than the other way around; yet one
might plausibly argue that many Americans of the period did not think that their religious beliefs
grew out of their political thought.
To some degree during the late seventies to the early nineties, these two camps have
warred with each other. Since the early nineties till the present day this debate has died down,
although the truce is uneasy; there is no clear “third way” to which any large camp ascribes.
There are, of course, other major scholarly understandings, but these either hold that there was
not a developed political philosophy underlying the regime or such a political philosophy is not
the focus of their study. The heirs of the progressive scholars, “neo-progressives,” the new left,
multiculturalists, and Rogers Smith’s view of shifting inegalitarian and ascriptive ideologies, for
instance, all understand the founding as a product of power struggles, or factional will.45
These
scholars either do not focus on American political thought writ large, or, as Gibson aptly says of
Smith, they understand it as “centerless, amorphous, kaleidoscopic, and often self-contradictory
and incoherent.”46
Although it may be impossible or highly problematic to point to a single,
unifying body of political thought that gave the Constitution its form, given the basic facts of the
historical record, such a body of thought ought to be assumed before it is asserted to be non-

31
existent. This dissertation assumes that there is an underlying political philosophy of the regime
in the sense that it seeks to discover one. Even to conclude that its object is severely fragmented,
does not exist, or is undiscoverable, one must go through the same sort of investigation as
proposed above (unless, as may increasingly be the case, one’s premises lead one to deem the
task as inherently impossible or futile).
The descriptions above are sharply drawn depictions setting in opposition two of the most
powerful conceptual categories developed by modern scholars over the last fifty years or so in
their attempts to understand the underlying political philosophy of the American founding. This
clean presentation of neat conclusions conceals intellectual difficulties in the complicated and
varied manner in which said conclusions are argued to by various figures. This chapter questions
the way in which the liberalism camp explains the notion of the public good in the ratification
debates.
Before the Consensus
In order to understand the last half century or so of modern scholarship on the underlying
political philosophy of the founding that encompass the liberalism versus republicanism debate,
one must understood the ashes from which the both arose: the conscious neglect of such topics in
the earlier progressive era.
Political scientists such as Woodrow Wilson thought government was instrumental, an
ever-changing means to reflect and implement the ever-changing ends dictated by “the prevailing
popular thought and need” rather than a more static means to protect an accepted body of
individual rights and to promote permanent public goods.47
Historians like Carl Becker might
investigate such outdated ideas, but political thought was understood to be primarily the product
of political action.48
For Becker and others like him, the ideas underlying the founding were
ultimately understood to be based on a faith which had long since died out. One also sees this

32
denigration of ideas as causal of action in the extended economic interpretation of that
touchstone of American political science literature reviews, Becker’s friend and associate in the
so called “revolt against formalism,” Charles A. Beard. It is often said, with good reason, that
the refutation of Beard was the start of the scholarly camp espousing liberal consensus. Beard
thus profoundly shaped the focus of the liberalism side of the republicanism versus liberalism
debate before its conception in the 1950s.
While many in the progressive camp did think that the Declaration and the early republic
may have begun in the democratic fashion they argued was needed in their own time, they
claimed that the Constitution jettisoned these salutary principles. Famously, as Douglas Adair
and others were to point out decades later, it was Beard’s understanding of American
government that led him to direct the attention of countless scholars, and ultimately America
itself, to the argument of Federalist 10 as indicative of the function and purpose of American
government. Whatever one thinks of Federalist 10, the economic mechanics Beard found in it
are not surprising given his denial of the primacy of ideas or thought over political action based
on economic self-interest. Although he was a much more complex thinker than he is often made
out to be (and like Becker, he modified his views over time), he made clear why such premises
enervate any understanding of a common good. If political thought is driven primarily by will or
individual desire for the sake of wealth or power, individuals who stand to gain can only speak of
a common good as a mere rhetorical device to cover their own interest. As Beard puts it:
Of course it may be shown that the "general good" is the ostensible object of any
particular act; but the general good is a passive force, and unless we know who are the
several individuals that benefit in its name, it has no meaning. When it is so analyzed,
immediate and remote beneficiaries are discovered.49

33
For Beard, the common good seems set within the context of material or economic benefits and
is only a nominal entity whose real meaning is found in various individual interests. It is not truly
common nor objectively good.
Wilson, Becker and Beard do not comprise the sum total of their era, and many scholars
at the time disagreed with them on fundamental points. A traditional school of thought very
much alive at the time and too often unmentioned today understood the founding as the
culmination of the western political tradition as it passed through England. Wilson, Becker and
Beard even subscribed to various parts of this understanding. Yet as the progressive era evolved,
a dedicated, prominent and widely accepted school of thought seeking to explicate the founders’
political philosophy began to die out. The impact of this neglect of the fundamental ideas
espoused by the founding generation upon the last fifty or so years of scholarship can scarcely be
overstated, as the birth of more recent attempts to describe these ideas can be traced to a reaction
against the progressive era’s denial of their importance. The geography of the battle was thus
inevitably chosen by the progressive scholars, who for the most part focused on what they
viewed as the negative results of the founding in the context of their efforts to reform American
scholarship and government.
After America had weathered the Great Depression, throughout World War II and its
aftermath, the focus of the discipline of political science shifted, allowing for a revitalized
investigation of American political thought. Becker’s introduction to a reprinting of his volume
in 1941 stated that the rise of Hitler had “forced men everywhere to re-appraise the validity of
half-forgotten ideas, and enabled them once more to entertain convictions as to the substance of
things not evident to the senses.”50
There were occasional albeit increasing appearances of the
notion that a coherent set of ideas of the founding era were determinative of American political

34
action during and surrounding the war years: texts like Gunner Myrdal’s An American Dilemma:
The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.51
Although influenced by progressive scholarship,
Myrdal approvingly described a benign “American Creed,” egalitarian in nature, working itself
out over the course of American history for the good. Of course, Myrdal was not himself an
American or a political scientist, two facts which likely help account for his exception to the
general rule.
Consensus: Diamond and Kenyon
Yet by the mid-twentieth century, at the onset of the cold war—although the progressive
paradigm was still alive and well—many turned towards understanding the success of a nation
that had become an unparalleled superpower. The growing sense among many American
scholars in middle of the century was that there was indeed an underlying political philosophy of
American government. The first heralded, major expression of this understanding is Louis
Hartz’s book, The Liberal Tradition in America, and his corresponding articles.52
Taken together
with the work of Richard Hofstadter,53
Douglas Adair,54
Martin Diamond,55
Forrest McDonald,56
Robert Brown,57
Clinton Rossiter,58
Cecilia Kenyon59
and many others who argued against
progressive scholarship, Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America marks the beginning of the
modern era of scholarship concerning the political philosophy of the founders. As many of the
progressives’ claims (especially Beard’s) were refuted or drastically moderated by these scholars
and others, a growing number of adherents of “liberal consensus” argued that the creation of the
Constitution was largely driven by political thought or ideology—principled ideas that could not
be simply reduced to economic or group interests.60
These scholars generally saw the founding
as an expression of Lockean political philosophy in which the principles and end of government

35
revolve around the protection of the individual rights and property of the citizenry, for the most
part ascribing to some version of the summary given by Gibson above.
Since the view that the founding was a product of the tenets of liberalism is born in
refutation of the progressive thesis, it is essential to understand its point of departure from
progressivism. There is no dispute that Hartz had enormous impact; he is another landmark of
any serious literature review in the field. He exemplifies the tone of much of the “Lockean
consensus” or liberal interpretation of the American founding: part ambiguous acceptance, part
outright lamentation. This helps explain, in part, why the classical republican thesis would soon
be received glowingly by academics within the social sciences and humanities.
Unlike the tradition he broke from, Hartz unapologetically argues from the assumption
that ideas form action, yet the thrust of his argument explains American thought by informing the
reader what ideas were not present within it. In a sentence, his claim is that, largely due to the
lack of feudalism in the clean slate provided by the New World, “the master assumption of
American political thought” is “the reality of atomistic social freedom. It is instinctive to the
American mind, as in a sense the concept of the polis was instinctive to Platonic Athens or the
concept of the church to the mind of the middle ages. Catastrophes have not been able to destroy
it, proletariats have refused to give it up, and even our Progressive tradition, in its agonized
clinging to a Jeffersonian world, has helped to keep it alive.”61
The implication, or, perhaps
better stated, the foregone conclusion is that there is simply no such thing as a notion of the
common or public good in the thought of the founders or in the fabric of the American regime:
rather, the founders and everyone else sought to promote the atomistic interests of individuals.
In the wake of the Constitution the capitalist mythos—the commercial republic, or “Algerism”
after the Civil War—reigns supreme for Hartz. In fact, the founding generation was simply

36
doing what came to them naturally after a long history of colonial understanding which largely
circumstantially, due to the fresh start the New World provided, caused them to simply assume
Lockean premises in ways impossible for Europeans due to the inherited institutional and
cultural baggage that Europe had to confront directly.
Like Becker, Hartz understood the philosophy undergirding America government at the
time of the founding as a faith, but instead of a faith that died in a few generations it was a faith
that still burned zealously in every American heart. Similar to Beard and many other
progressives, he thought what he understood to be troubling aspects of American society
(everything from commercial changes associated with the industrial revolution to red scares)
were inherent in an atomistic individualism present in the founding itself. Hartz pined for the
transcending of the very ideas he was ostensibly revealing as the all-encompassing philosophy of
America and lamented the fact that the progressives, in his opinion, never went far enough to
eradicate it.
The context in which Hartz’s thesis was born is made hazy as time removes us from the
context within which he wrote. Hartz’s lively quest to uncover the reason America seemed
impermeable to socialism, his fixation on the roots of red scares and “McCarthyism,” and his
urgent antipathy to what he repeatedly referred to as an irrational Lockean consensus has to be
read in his own frenetic words rather than whitewashed in scholarly summary to be fully
comprehended today. He saw what he understood to be the Lockean liberalism of America as an
all pervasive faith, a product not of reason, reflection or deliberation but rather the result of a
unique conflux of circumstances (again, predominantly the absence of feudalism in the New
World) that made America an anomaly, a freakish quirk of circumstance at his time in need of
correction rather than worthy of emulation.

37
…after McCarthyism and a series of frustrations in world communication, there can be
no doubt that we are yearning again to crack the shell of ‘Americanism’: not in the
undisciplined fashion of the twenties, but on a higher level of national purpose and need.
We are still a long way off, despite some deep discontents in our academic life, from the
kind of social theory that will define the American experience in terms that are
meaningful for those who seek to transcend it.”62
This sort of manic animus is glaring in retrospect, and it reveals why one might question the
extremes of thought within the claims of the liberalism of the founding. Hartz wears his heart on
his sleeve, and he gives the distinct impression that his agenda is not so much to explain what
liberalism is as to question and transcend it. When criticizing the progressives and “iconoclasts”
of the twenties for not going far enough, for agreeing too easily to the New Deal—which also did
not go far enough for Hartz—and ceasing their criticism of the Democratic Party, Hartz says
mournfully that “the sad fact is that you cannot criticize the Republicans without criticizing the
Democrats too.”63
All sides are tainted, unable to transcend atomistic individualism, and “[t[he
outcome of the battle between intensified ‘Americanism’ and new enlightenment is still an open
question.” He wonders “whether a nation can compensate for the uniformity of its domestic life
by contact with alien cultures outside it…whether American liberalism can acquire through
external experience that sense of relativity, that spark of philosophy which European liberalism
acquired through an internal experience of social diversity and social conflict.”64
Hartz maintained that Lockean liberalism and its set of assumptions were pervasive and
causal of the way America always was, is, and likely will be unless they were questioned: unless
they were seen as idiosyncratic in light of comparison with other regimes. Hartz spoke for many
scholars when he argued that the founders ideas were peculiar, spawned in part from abnormal
accidents of geography and circumstance. More significantly, these ideas were still with us in
part on account of the same causes, causing us to be who we are: a state of being with which he
and many of his sympathetic readers were not altogether comfortable. Throughout the history of

38
the liberal consensus camp that followed him, a long string of scholars have harbored similar
sentiments.
Long before Martin Diamond’s description of the “solid but low” American regime,65
many scholars from the late nineteenth century right up until his time would have tended to agree
with his second adjective even if they might have disagreed with the first. Diamond’s description
was novel at the time in that it claimed the founding was solid; many already agreed it was low.
The founding was either of no account due to irrelevance as in Becker; low due to base economic
interests and power struggles as in Beard; low due to false and outdated premises as in Wilson;
or low because of some combination of these factors. Progressives were (and are) inclined to say
the Constitution is not solid but rather a decrepit foundation in desperate need of radical reform,
whereas Hartz and others in the liberal consensus school sometimes suggest it is too solid or
solid enough, and fundamental reform is either impossible or undesirable.
Over time the consensus or liberalism school began to make positive arguments offering
a revivified view of the American founding that went far beyond merely refuting progressive
scholarship. Many thought it obvious that after a devastating civil war, near economic collapse,
and successful engagement in two world wars the American founding had turned out to be
“solid.” The question at hand was, “Why?”
This effort to refute Beard renewed interest in the texts of the ratification debates and
began an extended discussion of the ends of American government with considerably more depth
and focus than occurred in the progressive era. Martin Diamond’s landmark 1959 APSR article
entitled “Democracy and The Federalist: A Reconsideration of the Framers' Intent” is a good
early example of the fruit of that refutation. Diamond’s goal in the article is to demolish one of
the central progressive tenets: the notion that while the Declaration of Independence espoused

39
true democratic principles, the Constitution betrayed these principles in favor of an elite
economic class and thus the revolution and the federal government it ultimately established
contradicted each other in spirit. Further, in part because he saw the Constitution as truly
democratic, albeit qualifiedly and prudently so, Diamond sought to disprove arguments like that
of Robert Dahl, who saw The Federalist Papers as largely irrelevant for modern American
political science.
In order to make his case, Diamond presented a positive argument based upon a close
reading of The Federalist Papers. In so doing, although he acknowledges both that The
Federalist Papers is not a philosophic treatise and that he is positing an uncertain and developing
opinion, he gleans a skeletal theory of the founders’ understanding of the ends of government
from an interpretation of the text. In stark contrast to Louis Hartz, his method consists in a
careful reading of the writings of the founders themselves; Diamond investigated the deeper
philosophic ideas at play within these writings. Yet, like Hartz, Diamond’s initial version of
consensus theory is also laden with lamentation.
For Diamond, although The Federalist talks about justice and happiness as the ends of
government, the words do not have the same meaning as they do in pre-modern political
philosophy. Instead, the meaning of happiness or justice as understood by The Federalist “seems
to consist primarily in physical preservation from external and internal danger and in the
comforts afforded by a commercial society.”66
One can presume that Diamond is saying that if a
common or public good existed for the government of the founders it was relegated to the realm
of shared self-preservation and the widespread possession of material goods. Diamond takes up
the topic of the ends of government explicitly:

The Public Good in the Rhetoric of Ratification

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