Volume 28, Number 5 · April 2, 1981
Heroics
By Gordon S. Wood
Explaining America: The Federalist
by Garry Wills
Doubleday, 286 pp., $14.95
Garry Wills's new book is ostensibly about The Federalist—those eighty-five essays written in 1787-1788 to promote the ratification of the newly framed Constitution. But it is really about heroes and great men, and about the distance we have fallen in two hundred years since that near-mythical generation of founders put the country together. Indeed, not since the nineteenth century has the high-minded and noble character of the creation of the Constitution been so celebrated, and with so many different heroes. They include, first, the giants of the Enlightenment, like Montesquieu and Hume, who handed down their great thoughts to ordinary mortals, and then the Founding Fathers themselves, those 'extraordinary men,' that 'privileged few' (as Wills calls them), who had a vision of a new kind of virtuous politics conducted by noble men like themselves. Of these perhaps the most extraordinary were those classical lawgivers and principal authors of The Federalist, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. Finally the heroes include Wills himself, armed only with his sharp mind and acerbic prose, doing battle singlehandedly against the ignorance and stupidity of the scholarly world.
Review, 3457 words
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