Why are The Federalist Papers So Hard to Read?

It is a common refrain among those who read The Federalist Papers (rather than just mouthing about them) that they are a very turgid read. Considering that reaction I recently found myself reading the Papers with an eye to form rather than content.

Were the Papers simply badly written? No, the pieces are generally tightly focused and well-structured--and indeed, hold up well when judged by the exacting standard the typical composition textbook sets for essay writing. Time and again when scrutinizing a selected Number I found that the authors make clear at the outset what their subject matter is and what their position on it is going to be, while typically spelling out how are they going to go about explaining themselves (previewing for us the rest); proceed to elucidate their argument in an orderly and logical succession of "point-first" paragraphs; and eschew digressions and unnecessary repetitions down to the end, where they tidily wrap up what they had to say. I will add that if the language tends to be elevated (what unlettered persons are apt to complain of as "big words," as well as complex sentences) I do not remember having to look up the definitions of any of the words they used, and I never had to go back and puzzle out what they said due to some passage having been convoluted the way I might have expected given the charge. In fact, I failed to catch any sign of pretension as such--precision and economy instead more plausible motivations for the prose. (Here is a simple test for the doubtful: take those "difficult" sentences and see if you can say the same thing, with all its exactness and nuances, at similar length, without using "big words" and complex sentence arrangements yourself.) The same goes for the authors' citation of fact. If they make historical references that can seem obscure, they do not make so many of them as one may imagine from the complaints, and never in a show-offy way, consistently explaining their relevance and even their nature so that if a reader does not know them they get the picture, if they bother to keep reading. That still leaves it far from being light reading, but it also means that the writing as such is far from explaining why so many have such a hard time with it.

It is also the case that not only are the individual Numbers well-structured, but so is the collection of those eighty-five Numbers when one takes them as a whole. They begin with an argument for the importance of Union among the thirteen states (to avoid conflicts among themselves, better deal with foreign powers, etc.), proceed to criticism of the Articles of Confederation under which those states were living and the need for a more capable Federal government than the one they had from the standpoint of the country's needs as they had identified them, and then successively discuss various aspects of the proposed Constitution (the balance between state and Federal power, the separation of powers and checks and balances at the Federal level, the functioning of its legislative, executive and judicial branches successively, and finally the protection it extended to individual liberties). Indeed, many of the essay sequences comprise a single discussion (with some fifty of the 85 essays in fact identifiable as parts of longer arguments, going by how many pieces are titled "The Same Subject Continued" or some variation thereof). It thus seems that the arrangement of the Numbers does not account for the difficulty either.

Rather what makes the numbers a demanding read has instead to do with the content the authors present, and how we tend to take it today. The Federalist Papers are, in spite of their lucid organization, still not a tidy laying out of the Constitution's workings and argument on their behalf. Instead they are one side of a national dialogue--Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay under the jointly used pseudonym Publius responding to various charges the opponents of ratification of the new Constitution were laying against it. That we are getting just one side of the dialogue makes it harder to follow than it might be otherwise, given that we are unlikely to have even heard of many of the charges they defend the Constitution against, or even imagined them previously, with the authors of the Papers themselves telling us that they are the result of misreadings of the Constitution's text that Hamilton and company repeatedly deride as "absurd." (In a footnote to Number 81, for instance, Hamilton tells us that some critics of the proposed Constitution claimed that the Supreme Court's power to establish "inferior courts" bespoke an intent to abolish the county courts in all the states, a concern unlikely to occur to anyone today.)

As all this implies, within that very sound overall structure, presented within those very well-structured individual pieces, we get a hodgepodge of argument and counter-argument, sometimes dealing with rather small and implausible-seeming issues, with all that means for the unity and flow of the work, while the way the authors (to some extent, unavoidably) respond to the charges not making it easier to follow. The discussion is heavy on the general, the abstract, the hypothetical (typically the vaguely sketched hypothetical, like "What if the President tried appointing his unfit cronies to important posts?")--all of which people generally have a hard time processing for any length of time, or even just staying interested in for long, by comparison with a discussion of concrete particulars. As if that were not enough when the discussion shifts from the more pragmatic arguments for Union (the principal theme of the first dozen Numbers after the Introduction) to the Constitution's finer points about the middle of the set (No. 37 is the point of transition), we get an increasing amount of close-reading of the Constitution, often with explicit attention to the proprieties of legal construction such as one would expect in legal scholarship (and the more technical passages in such scholarship at that) rather than anything we would today expect to see produced for popular consumption. The Federalist Papers' authors also tend to be both meticulous and exhaustive as they go about all this (counting the Numbers directly addressing the Constitution, we get some 120,000 words--regarding a Constitution that, in its then unamended state, ran to about four thousand words), with the result predictably that much denser. Meanwhile even those who can follow the arguments perfectly well may find the discussions testing their patience precisely because of their drawn-out treatment of points in which they have little interest, and frankly, sometimes because people today are likely to find at least some of the arguments the authors of these papers made objectionable. (Thus may many react reading Federalist No. 54, in which it is generally presumed to be Madison, owner of a hundred slaves at his Virginia estate, defending the notorious "Three-Fifths Compromise" while--behind that pseudonym Publius—and speaking of "our Southern brethren" as if he were not himself a Southerner and representative of the South in the Convention, and so too No. 84, where he dismisses the demands that some were making for the a Bill of Rights that was only added after ratification.)

None of this makes for high readability, and the results are predictable here, while the way in which we are likely to read the Numbers matters. The relatively short individual pieces were originally published separately over a period of about seven months (from late October 1787 to late May 1788), Publius' contemporaries chewing all this over a little at a time. By contrast most of us picking up The Federalist Papers probably expect to sit down and polish it off as we would any other book, perhaps in just a couple of days if we can make the time (not unreasonably, again, given the extent to which the whole is more than the sum of its parts), with the result that we try to take in two hundred thousand words of meticulous, exhaustive, often highly legalistic rebuttals of what can feel like a grab bag, frankly an immense grab bag, of often minute and often unfamiliar and "absurd" charges in now long dead arguments (again, in that elevated language and essay-by-essay structure that may not be the principal problems but also do not make it easier), and unsurprisingly find it tedious going, if not overwhelming, even when we are accustomed to relatively demanding material.

For all that I thought my time in the end well-spent in continuing all the way up to the end, because of what the Papers offer--the publicly stated understandings of two of the most active and consequential participants at the Constitutional Convention, including "father of the Constitution" Madison himself, and what the public thought they were voting for at the time, as well as the light it shed on the period broadly. Certainly I learned a lot about the Articles of Confederation that today we seem so prone to marginalize in our discussion of American history today (perhaps because the Confederation's failure sits uneasily with that type of history that presents the Founding Fathers as all-seeing and all-knowing demigods who unswervingly led the nation from triumph to triumph--and what is for many the uncomfortable thought that the reminder that constitutions have failed in the past and needed to be replaced).

Reading the Papers was also a reminder of just how far removed the authors of the Constitution were from the world of a quarter of a millennium later, and its application of the Constitution to problems they had scarcely imagined, reflecting as they did the concerns of a relatively small, agrarian, country in a pre-industrial, pre-digital world, where it seemed plausible to worry about the (relatively modest) physical distance of the capital from other parts of the then much smaller Union from the standpoint of transport and communication, when Big Business and Big Government were scarcely notions and the machinery of parties and media and other levers of political power we know today were no more so, and the mental toolkit for considering such matters--what we had of history, and economics, and social science--was so primitive next to what it would be not just in our time, but even just a hundred years later. I might also remark that because of all this one would be wrong to think that the Papers are of interest solely to those some deride as "Constitution-worshippers" convinced that the art and science of human governance attained perfection in the eighteenth century. More leftward thinkers have long been impressed by the Papers as an "economic interpretation of politics"--in the view of Charles Beard, the "finest study" of such kind "in any language"--with Beard inaugurating particular and longstanding attention to Federalist No. 10 as such, with all that it had to say about "factions," and in doing so what it said about the class character of both American society, and the government the Constitutional Convention proposed to give it, in his classic An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.

Still, the Papers must be accounted only part of a much larger picture where the Constitution's making and meaning are concerned, and indeed even just the debate over the Constitution's ratification. (There was not only "Publius," but also "Cato," arguing before the public.) In fact I wouldn't recommend that anyone pick up this book without having a fair amount of background in the subject beforehand, and the determination to bear with what can be a more grueling task than they may be led to believe by those insistent on a direct and full knowledge of The Federalist Papers as a prerequisite for expressing an opinion about current events in public in the United States.