Anthony Peacock's effort to vindicate the commercial republic, as it is explained in The Federalist, is both refreshing and disturbing. By calling our attention to Publius's case for a well-constructed Union, the spirit of enterprise, and the enormous extent to which The Federalist is about war and strategy, Peacock rediscovers an almost lost continent neglected by scholars who take the survival of the Union for granted, disdain commercial society, and are more concerned with controlling power than generating it. In that way, such scholars have not been true to the spirit of the work, for as James Madison explained in Federalist 51, in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the first task is to enable the government to control the governed; the next task is to oblige it to control itself.
Liberty, the most important objective of the Constitution, simply could not be secure without sufficient power to provide for the common defense and prevent war among the states, so those who treat liberty as their first principle must pay attention to generating power before they focus on controlling it. They must start with Thomas Hobbes, so to speak, in order to end with John Locke, the Baron de Montesquieu, David Hume, and others who sought to limit power for the sake of freedom. But Hobbes was the greatest English translator of Thucydides, so Peacock innovates against the current of much scholarship today by treating Thucydides as, if not a source for, then at least a fellow-traveler with, Publius's understanding of the dynamism—and warlike character—of commercial republics.
Commercial Virtues
Peacock opens with a brilliant literature review of scholarship on The Federalist since 1913, the year when Charles Beard, the progressive historian who saw the Constitution as an oligarchic conspiracy to control the masses, published his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. Following Martin Diamond, Peacock sees The Federalist as a beforehand critique of Karl Marx relying on the extended sphere of the republic to diversify interest groups so much that no one of them could govern exclusively for its own advantage.
In Peacock's telling, Beard's major, and almost unintended, contribution to discussion of The Federalist winds up being that it focused future scholars' attention on the institutional political science of Publius, as it is developed in Federalist 10 and Federalist 37 through 85 (especially Federalist 51)—at the expense of its case for Union to avoid war among the states (and deter or win war with foreign powers), and at the expense of its political anthropology and sociological analysis of commercial society. Both play a large role in the first half of The Federalist, essays 1 through 36, but essays 2 through 8,11 through 14, 15, and 23 especially.
As a result, those critics of commercial republics who see them as low but solid (merely bourgeois efforts to avoid utopian experiments) miss something extremely important about commercial society: namely, that it is a great engine for human flourishing, aka virtue, because it unleashes spirited efforts not merely in the pursuit of wealth, but also to develop the human faculties in all walks of life. Indeed, one might say the more diversified a commercial economy becomes, the more it is able to unleash this potential and the better it will be for humanity.
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