“The Known Opinion of the Impartial World”: Foreign Relations and the Law of Nations in The Federalist
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Description
Conventional accounts of The Federalist tend to overlook a critical and uncontroversial fact about the Constitution: the principal function it assigned the proposed new government was the conduct of the Union’s foreign affairs. By neglecting this simple point, readers too often miss the forest for the trees. The central task of The Federalist was not to offer a general blueprint for republican government but rather to demonstrate the depth of the Confederation’s failures in foreign affairs and to explain why the new federal government would govern more effectively in that realm without imperiling the republican commitments of the Revolution. This insight in turn reveals another: Even when The Federalist focuses on other, very different themes—whether in analyzing the general principles of federalism or the separation of powers, the importance of energy in the executive or independence in the judiciary, or the deficiencies of popular assemblies—foreign affairs remains its ultimate subject. These explorations were so many arguments to demonstrate that the federal government would neither repeat the Confederation’s foreign affairs blunders, nor pose a threat to the states and the republican principles upon which they were founded. The tension between productive foreign relations and domestic republicanism that emerged during the Revolution had not been anticipated at its outset. The Declaration of Independence assumed that these were harmonious ends when it announced as twin goals of the Revolution independent republican government in the states and peaceful commercial relations with the larger world, governed by the principles of the law of nations. By the time the Philadelphia Convention met, however, it was widely agreed that the weak institutions of the Confederation had failed on the latter front. State violations of treaties and the law of nations, which Congress could neither control nor redress, combined with its dependence on the states for financial and military resources, left the Confederation incapable of conducting the nation’s diplomatic relations, ensuring its security, promoting its commerce, or even paying its bills, not least the foreign loans that had helped finance the fight for independence. The ensuing foreign policy fiascos, combined with a mounting sense of impugned honor among American elites—rather than a quixotic effort to reform internal governance within the states from the ground up—provided the main impetus for constitutional reform. Although there was consensus on the need to reform the Confederation, sharp controversy remained over how many and what sort of amendments to seek. The framers provided their collective if negotiated answers to these questions in the proposed Constitution. The Federalist’s improved “science of politics” was designed to answer Anti-Federalist critics by demonstrating that the proposed reforms were the minimum necessary to preserve the Revolution’s goals of robust republican government at home and full integration of the United States into the Atlantic world of “civilized nations.” According to the authors’ diagnosis, the Confederation’s dysfunctional foreign relations resulted from the failure to manage the tension between these goals properly. At the root of the problem were the twin early decisions to concentrate largely unchecked power in the states’ legislative assemblies and, conversely, to construct only weak federal institutions to unite them. Experience demonstrated that the revolutionaries had struck the balance defectively. To preserve republicanism while managing foreign affairs effectively and honorably, it was necessary to adopt the Constitution’s innovative structural arrangements, which, The Federalist argued, would resolve the tension between republicanism and international legitimacy without jeopardizing either. It was in developing a theory adequate to respond to Anti-Federalist criticisms and justify the Constitution that the authors of The Federalist were led to their deepest insights. Borrowing from Scottish Enlightenment ideas—which they filtered through their political experiences under the Confederation—they rooted their argument in theories of human nature and the social psychology of governance, which they then applied not only to diagnose the causes of the Confederation’s failings but also to explain the institutional arrangements that could overcome them. The resulting account explained how the new federal government would be able to limit the influence of the destructive passions over the making of foreign policy and thereby take advantage of the bounded possibilities of peaceable, productive international relations.
Source Publication
The Cambridge Companion to The Federalist
Source Editors/Authors
Jack N. Rakove, Colleen A. Sheehan
Publication Date
2020
Recommended Citation
Golove, David and Hulsebosch, Daniel J., "“The Known Opinion of the Impartial World”: Foreign Relations and the Law of Nations in The Federalist" (2020). Faculty Chapters. 736.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/736
