SOURCE: Abbott, Philip. “What's New in the Federalist Papers?” Political Research Quarterly 49, no. 3 (September 1996): 525-45.

In the following essay, Abbott focuses on Publius as a storyteller, using narrative as a central means for advancing his argument in The Federalist Papers.

The centrality of the Federalist Papers in American political thought is indisputable. Even the most severe critics of Publius grant its monumental importance as a “new explanation of politics, of whose beauty and summetry the Federalists themselves only gradually became aware” and as a “masterly statement” in support of a literal or at least ideological coup d'état (Beard 1913; Wood 1969). For others, the Federalist Papers is a sacred text, a text which captured the “thought and intention of those few men who fully grasped what the ‘assembly of demi-gods’ was doing” and which Americans return to recapture “a level of thoughtfulness about fundamental political alternatives” (Diamond 1983: 88). The uniqueness...