Philosophy, "The Federalist," and the Constitution (review)

456 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:3 JULY 199o comparison of the texts in Fraser and in Luce-Jessop will remove them. Fraser gives one absolutely no idea of what Berkeley's pages look like, nor of the relations of certain strata to the basic text. Jessop gives us a straightforwardly readable text--but at the price of many omissions. Beifrage deserves our thanks both for his transcription of the text and for his provocative commentary, a commentary which seeks to demonstrate the philosophical significance of Berkeley's complete text. HARRY M. BRACKEN McGiU University Morton White. Philosophy, "The Federalist," and the Constitution. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pp. xi + 273- $29.95. In this study Prof. White undertakes to "expose [the] philosophical elements of Publius 's thinking" (7) to contemporary readers. In addition, the study can be seen as the beautifully crafted product of a scholar simultaneously doing philosophy and history of philosophy. Because Jay, Madison, and Hamilton, authors of these papers, were less concerned with philosophy than with persuading Americans to ratify the new Constitution , it is not always clear who they had been reading or from whom borrowing. Nevertheless, as Prof. White puts it, "we may use the history of philosophy to clarify what Publius believed even if we are unable to document the exact genealogy of his belief" (92). It may also clarify what and how Publius's audience believed. The book is in eight parts: (1) the role of philosophy in The Federalist; (2) the legacies of Locke and of Hume compared; (3) theory of knowledge and the place of reason, experience, and history in Publius's task; (4) philosophy of history (on theory of factions and their causes); (5) psychology of motivation; (6) theory of action and metaphysics (on causality in group actions, separation of motives and opportunities); (7) ethics (being a criticism of Dahl's interpretation of Madison); (8) "A Summary View," including "A Philosophical Map of The Federalist" and a comparison of it with the "Declaration of Independence." In that "Map" section, Prof. White concludes that because The Federalist is founded on both the rationalism of Locke regarding natural rights and the empiricism or experimentalism of Hume regarding political principles and devices, a person's rights are unquestionable, whereas efforts to secure and serve the public good are inherently questionable; the two are on different foundations epistemologically. This split leads to the unresolved American tension between private happiness and public well-being and justice: in moral and political deliberations, happiness and natural rights will be seen as ends, intuitively or deductively founded, while public goods will be seen only as means to the former and only as experimental (and, I take it, instrumental). It is, then, as if the constitutional deck were stacked against there ever being a way to justice or to public well-being because a permanent trump is held by each individual's natural rights as intuited a priori. One example of the kind of moral trouble that could arise from this split was the BOOK REVIEWS 457 conflict between two equal but opposite natural fights: that to liberty, which applied to slaves as well as to free men, and that to one's own property, which included those one owned as slaves. To secure ratification, Madison had to come down on the side of the latter natural right but his reasoning was not deductively valid a priori. In discussing these "two kinds of analysis," i.e., Lockean natural-rights rationalism and Humean political experimentalism (89-1oi), Prof. White takes Hume's study of history to provide only "particular facts," which illuminate man "psychologically," while claiming that the new "science of politics" ascertains "general facts," causes, and principles of political arrangements (but apparently without any inductive move from the one to the other). ~ Thus he treats the analysis of "the ideal man" (a general concept) as done intuitively by rationalism, but the empirical study of man as done experimentally "to discover the springs of individual men as they actually are" (9o; emphasis added). This leads him to argue that Publius gets his empirical/descriptive statements from a Humean foundation, but his moral/normative statements...