SOURCE: Burt, John. “Tyranny and Faction in the Federalist Papers.” Raritan 13, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 56-84.

In the following essay, Burt finds that the The Federalist Papers's solutions to the problems of tyranny and factions are a “species of hypocrisy,” based on mistaken assumptions.

In his 1878 essay “Kin Beyond Sea,” Gladstone distinguishes between the English and American Constitutions, noting that “the one is a thing grown, the other is a thing made.” He was at least partly wrong, but he did capture the founders' exhilarating sense of making new discoveries in political theory prompted by their experiences as English colonists and as citizens of the Confederation, their sense, that is, of having to improvise new institutions on the basis of principles they had had to invent for themselves when the assumptions they brought to politics failed them in practice. Their experiences required them to analyze their political institutions in...