The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton [11]
That the proposed Constitution needed to be vindicated on the basis of the "true principles of republican government" implied, however, that there were false principles of republicanism to be contended with, too. One of The Federalist’s main tasks, especially in the second volume, is to distinguish between the true and false notions and to refute the latter. This dispute arrays, in effect, the republicanism implicit in the Constitution against the rather different theory inherent in the state constitutions and presumed in the Articles of Confederation. At stake politically was the crucial question: Which account of republicanism was faithful to the principles for which Americans had fought the Revolution? And at the center of this controversy lay the proper relation between republicanism and responsibility.
"Responsibility" is a new word that received its classic definition in the ratification debate and, especially, in the pages of The Federalist.18 Although the term had appeared sporadically in eighteenth-century British politics, it was in America in the 1780s that it achieved its lasting political prominence. "Responsibility" is the noun form of a much older adjective, "responsible," itself related to the verb "respond," meaning to answer; its Latin ancestor is respondeo, whose root (spondeo) means to promise sacredly or to vow. To be responsible thus means to be answerable to someone else, implying the possibility of punishment; but it also means to be the cause of something, to be equal to a challenge or obligation, to live up to a vow or solemn promise. If republican government is to be responsible, it must be responsive to the people and answerable to their will. But if it is to be responsible in the more positive sense, it must go beyond mere responsiveness and be able to serve the people’s true interests or their reasonable will, even if this course of conduct is not immediately popular. The tension between these two senses of "responsibility" underlay the debate between Anti-Federalists and Federalists over the ratification of the Constitution.
For the Anti-Federalists, responsibility meant primarily and almost exclusively the first sense of the term: The essence of republican or representative government was that it be responsive to the people. In one of his great speeches denouncing the Constitution in the Virginia ratifying convention, Patrick Henry asked, "For where, Sir, is the responsibility?" "Where is the responsibility," he repeated, "that leading principle in the British government?" Under the British Constitution, malfeasance in office had cost the heads of "some of the most saucy geniuses that ever were," but under the new American Constitution "the preservation of our liberty depends on the single chance of men being virtuous enough to make laws to punish themselves."19 The problem, as he and many other Anti-Federalists saw it, was that the Constitution, though boasting an elaborate scheme of separation of powers and checks and balances, did not manage to secure the new government against the danger of minority faction—tyranny by one man, or a few men, of enterprise, ambition, and wealth. This goal had been achieved, however precariously, by the British Constitution, which was why it had so much appeal to the Anti-Federalist writers. In fact, the whole question of responsibility in government was for them an extension of the British struggle for ministerial accountability, that is,