At Law & Liberty, Anthony A. Peacock (Utah State, Political Science): Debating Publius (reviewing The Cambridge Companion to The Federalist (Jack N. Rakove & Colleen A. Sheehan, eds., 2020)). From the introduction:
… The Companion, which exceeds 600 pages, consists of 16 essays by prominent academics in the fields of political science, history, and law and runs the gamut of the ideological spectrum. As the editors note in their Introduction, The Federalist is thought by many, at least in political science, to be the consummate “exposition of the original meaning of the Constitution;” perhaps the best explanation of both the theory underlying the Constitution and its meaning by those who ratified it.
But historians disagree with political scientists. So Rakove and Sheehan propose. Being much more skeptical about whether The Federalist or the ratification debates actually captured the true state of public opinion in the late 1780s, historians doubt whether ideas prevailing at any time can fix the meaning of a written text like the Constitution. “The legal fiction of originalism might have its uses within the courts of constitutional jurisprudence,” the editors remark, “but it could never provide an adequate way to assess the true meaning of the Constitution. For historians the clock of constitutional time never stops running.” We might translate the dispute here in today’s vernacular to the debate between constitutional originalists and those who advocate for a “living constitution,” a constitution susceptible to ever-changing meaning as history progresses.
To some extent this is how the contributions to the Companion read. There are those who view The Federalist as indeed the consummate guide to the Constitution. Others, like the opening essay by David Siemers in defense of the Anti-Federalists, pooh-pooh it. Indeed, one of the more mysterious features of the Companion is that its very first essay is from front to back a broadside against Publius’ work.
In conclusion:
The defects of the Companion are few while the richness of the essays and the comprehensiveness of their analysis of The Federalist is a reminder not only of just how different the founders’ political science was from the political science of today but how much more capacious their constitutionalism was. Rakove and Sheehan are to be commended for putting together a volume that addresses an old text in way that reminds us what a faithful companion Publius was to the Constitution and will continue to be well into the future.
For what it's worth, I (and I think most legal academic originalists) would disagree with both political scientists and the historians (as the review describes them). The Federalist is not the "consummate exposition of the original meaning of the Constitution" — it's an important source, to be sure, but it's not a wholly objective one; it's one side of an argument, and it's by no means infallible or incapable of guile. On the other hand, while it may be true that "For historians the clock of constitutional time never stops running" (whatever that may mean), the clock of constitutional time had a starting point, and The Federalist is an important (though not definitive) guide to meaning at the time the clock started.
Posted at 6:50 AM