Mods move this if you must, but this thread is just looking for a series of hands from the GD crowd, and not intended as a debate in itself.
Over winter break I began reading The Federalist, and kept thinking to myself how well they did at arguing. So well argued that I found a couple places where you could use the same argument against Communism–which didn’t exist at the time–but also where one had to consider the level of federalisation (i.e. lessened state power) that has taken place since then. Similarly, the arguments for strong states and why this works for a nation and its progress made me think of Iraq and trying to bring together several antagonistic groups.
That is to say, overall there seemed to me that the work was sufficiently thought provoking that going back through it as a modern day viewer and re-arguing everything would be something pretty fun to do.
My proposal is, each week I will post a chapter or set of chapters to read* and perhaps a few modern things I think it could pertain to, or otherwise possible leap-off points to debate. Everyone would read those chapters and then use my leap-off points or anything else and we could argue from there. At worst, it’s still a good read and this is a fun excuse to get through it all.
You can find The Federalist online for free, for instance I just found it here. The actual “chapters” are each only a few pages long (2-3 in my book)–though admittedly dense.
Is anyone interested? There are some 85 papers, so it may well take over a year to complete the series.
- Some chapters seem sufficiently linked so that, even though they do discuss separate aspects of a topic, it wouldn’t strike me as useful to debate them separately.
