Page 51 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions in American
Political Development

THE INFORMATION THEORY OF THE FEDERALIST
In December of 1787, Alexander Hamilton broke new ground in the
public-relations campaign to persuade the American states of the merits
of the proposed Constitution. His defense of federal power that we now
know as Federalist 23 landed in four newspapers in two days: in the
New York Packet and the New York Journal on the 18th, and the next
1
day in the Independent Journal and the Daily Advertiser. It was the first
essay in the Federalist series to appear in that many newspapers, and it
presumably reached the largest audience since Madison, Hamilton, and
Jay began their media blitz in October. That kind of multioutlet exposure
wouldevenpleaseamodernpoliticalcommunicationsdirector,although
Hamilton’s demands on the reader would hardly pass muster against
modern standards of political rhetoric.
In his essay, Hamilton used a remarkable phrase to describe the pro-
posed government. The new government was to be the center of infor-
2
mation for the new nation. Hamilton had in mind a far-sighted idea:
that the distribution of political information is important to the health
of democracies, and that one of the several advantages of a large, federal
republic over a system of confederated states was its superior informa-
tional properties. Hamilton believed that the U.S. government would
elicit a healthier flow of information than the system under the Articles
of Confederation, and would better wed that information to represen-
tation and policy making. With Madison, Hamilton was sketching out a
striking set of ideas about information and democracy, the foundation

1
JacobE.Cooke,ed., The Federalist (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1961). All subsequent references to The Federalist are to the Cooke edition.
2
Ibid., p. 149.
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