On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

Over the following summer the delegates crafted the world’s longest living but least amended constitution57—with which few of its signatories were fully satisfied. Which led the Agrippas, with some help from John Jay, to rush into print, as The Federalist, a justification for ratification thirty-four times the length of the document it defended.58 Addressed to “the People of the State of New York,” its eighty-five essays, all signed “Publius,” didn’t determine the outcome. They got little circulation beyond New York, and when that state did finally ratify, in July 1788, ten others—more than enough—had already done so.59 The Federalist’s fame rests elsewhere: as the most enduring work of political grand strategy since Machiavelli’s The Prince. The Constitution and The Federalist share the qualities of having been pressed by time in composition, but liberated from time in lasting significance. The paradox gets at the heart of what it means to hold opposing ideas in the mind simultaneously while retaining the ability—here brilliantly—to function. Wherein, then, did the brilliance lie?