Federalism and the Crisis of Literary Order

CIHE AUTORS of the Constitution of the United States, so the wellAl-known Federalist spokesman Fisher Ames told readers of the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review in I805, intended our government should be a republick, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. He added ominously: We are sliding down into the mire of a democracy, which pollutes the morals of the citizens before it swallows up their liberties. About two years later, the Reverend Theodore Dehon, Harvard, Class of I795, man of letters and rigid Federalist of the Ames school, put a warning to the same audience in the form of a disturbing question: Shall we be pardoned the expression, if we further observe, that through the innovating spirit of the times the republick of letters may have its dignity and prosperity endangered by sliding inadvertently into a democracy ?1 Read in conjunction with Ames's remarks, this observation suggests that the sense of crisis experienced by the latter-day Federalist mind extended from politics into literature. It indicates, furthermore, that their literary outlook led Federalist men of letters to assert an analogy between the threat of democracy to political order and the danger of democracy to the organization and control of literature. Although it was loosely conceived and only incidentally set forth, this analogy not only illustrates the Federalist literary sensibility: when it is studied in the light of the representation of literary community, it affords a glimpse into the crisis of literary order in Western culture-a crisis extending from the eighteenth century to the present day

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