SOURCE: Jasinski, James. “Heteroglossia, Polyphony, and The Federalist Papers.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 27, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 23-46.

In the following essay, Jasinski uses the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of heteroglossia and polyphony to examine the rhetoric of The Federalist Papers.

Introduction: the Challenges of the Linguistic Turn

In the last few decades historians have devoted significant attention to the language used by political actors during the American revolution and founding. The ground-breaking work of Bailyn, Pocock, and Wood established the importance of language as a motivating force, conceptual filter, and constitutive process.¹ The concept of ideology as a paradigm or organizing conceptual framework figured prominently in these early studies. Initially, the (re)discovery of situated language led to the recovery of a republican ideology at the core of the early American political imagination.² The claims of republican historiography were, of course, contested by other historians who located alternative ideological...