Page 52 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Information Theory of The Federalist
of a political theory of information. Those ideas are a good place to begin
an exploration of information and American political development.
Remarkably, the term “information” appears about three dozen times
in The Federalist, within nineteen of the eighty-five essays. The term
“communication” appears another dozen. In a passage in 21 dealing
with taxation, for instance, Hamilton addresses the problem of assess-
ing the comparative wealth of states or nations. He attacks the quota
system for funding war under the Articles, which specified that states
be charged for the collective defense in proportion to their land area.
Hamilton argues for the rejection of land area or population as mea-
sures of states’ position in the union. The wealth of a state or society, he
argues, is a function of many properties beyond size, especially the state
of economic commerce. That observation comes as no surprise from
the pen of Hamilton, who would argue four years later in the Report
on Manufactures for the virtues of division of labor, improvements in
worker skills and expertise, organizational specialization and diversifica-
3
tion,andotherfeaturesofindustrialization. Morestrikingareadditional
properties in Hamilton’s list: “the genius of its citizens” and “the degree
4
of information they possess.” He could hardly have conceived of the
modern information economy, yet he clearly understands information
and knowledge to be resources, and he recognizes that their distribution
varies across states and societies. Hamilton proposes that possession of
information can be a measure of a society’s development, and that one
might compare Russia with Germany as to their information-richness, or
North Carolina with Pennsylvania, or Kings County with Montgomery
County.
Hamilton’s ideas about information continue their modern relevance
on more directly political matters. As “Publius,” Hamilton and his col-
laborators invoke information in their arguments about two of the major
principles for which their essays are known: the issue of distance or re-
moteness of the central government from the people, and the famous
defense of the extended republic as a solution to the problem of faction.
Although widely overlooked, their use of information as a political con-
cept connected to problems of remoteness and faction constitutes a latent
Federalist theory of information. This theory shows how one might con-
ceive of the federal government as the nation’s “center of information”
in more than a passing way.
3
Samuel McKee, Jr., ed., Alexander Hamilton’s Papers on Public Credit, Commerce, and
Finance (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957).
4
The Federalist, p. 133.
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