****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
If you want to understand the Constitution, you should read the Federalist Papers. They present, at great length, the rationale for discarding the Articles of Confederation and adopting the Constitution. You really can't claim to understand the Constitution, how it works, how it fits together, and how it was intended to fit together without reading these articles. (I picked this up on the recommendation of Justice Scalia, and he was absolutely right about this being a must-read to understand the Constitution.)(A quick note on this particular edition of the Federalist Papers: while it self-describes as an "enriched classic", it is not especially enriched. As is proper, the book includes a copy of the Constitution and its amendments -- although strangely it omits the 27th Amendment despite being published well after its ratification. [There is no included copy of the Articles of Confederation, unfortunately -- I'd definitely have found such a copy helpful, particularly since I had no other access to them when reading the book.] A notes section which explains the cultural and historical references scattered throughout the papers. A brief 7-page "Interpretive Notes" section discusses the context for the Federalist Papers. A "Critical Excerpts" section discusses early reactions to and scholarship concerning the Federalist Papers up to the present day. And there's a couple pages of questions and a few suggestions for further learning for the interested reader. Does this spare additional material really an "enriched classic" make?There's something to be said for providing the unvarnished text, with explanatory notes that are informative but not interpretive; it's much easier for the reader to form his own opinions, uninfluenced by the biases of a commentator, when the Federalist Papers stand on their own. This is for the most part the strategy this book follows. Yet I would not call this book, for following that strategy, an "enriched classic". If you're looking for analysis of each paper in context with the papers themselves, this is not the book for you.)The entire series is long, consisting of 85 papers of various lengths. Yet it's well worth reading and slogging through, even if you have to contend with the 1780s style of highly-educated writing to do it.That said, I would strongly recommend not attempting to read it the way one might read any old book, starting at the beginning, reading a bunch at a stretch, then reading a bunch more at a stretch, until the entire series is read. Instead, read a paper at a time, then spend some time to think it over. Consider the arguments and how they fit together; look at how they relate to the modern day; consider what was missed in the initial analysis. Giving each article the time it requires will make this book take considerably longer than the average book of 630 pages (not including text after the articles) would take. But it's worth it.(For a little context, I started this book a couple weeks before an Appalachian Trail thru-hike, expecting at some point to finish it and leave it in a shelter for some other hiker to read, at which point I'd pick up another book and do the same thing, as many times as it took to finish the hike. I didn't even finish this book over those 139 days of hiking, only on the flight home -- it's that dense and worthy of thought. And it's not like I was distracted by other reading, either: I only read one other book in full during that time, plus a couple hundred pages of another. And even reading with that deliberateness, I'm sure I'd get more out of it if I spent the time to read it again.)
