Not Always at the Helm: The Federalist and the Modern Dismissal of Statesmanship

Abstract

Except for occasional glimpses (like the one, surprisingly, in Rawls’s The Law of Peoples), the concept and ideal of statesmanship have disappeared from modern political thought. This article examines how this has happened and what reversing this would require. It concentrates on The Federalist as a text situated at the very transition from the classical appraisal of statesmanship to its modern dismissal. I show how its authors not only relegated statesmanship to a secondary role after constitutionalism but also emptied it as a moral ideal and blurred its distinctions with other types of rulership, namely, that of officials, demagogues, and ultimately tyrants. The Federalist has thus opened the way to the ensuing democratic and technocratic undermining of statesmanship (through what Storing has called “populism” and “scientific management”), processes impossible to redress without a thorough questioning of some core modern assumptions.