THE COMMON SENSE OF POLITICAL LIFE.

CONSTITUTIONS; DEMOCRACY; KENDALL, William; FEDERAL government; STATE governments; CONSTITUTIONAL law

This article addresses the question of the constitutional potentiality of The Federalist Papers, a series of articles written under the pen name Publius. Author William Kendall speaks of the implicit constitutional morality of The Federalist's model of democracy and the competing populistic model of democracy. The author explores the question of the constitutional potentiality of The Federalist Papers in two ways. First, he examines Publius's notion of liquidation of meaning. Second, the author wants to examine the tensions within Publius's understanding of the relations between the national and state governments in the Constitution as an example of the multiple potentialities contained within the Philadelphia Constitution.