Explaining America: The Federalist.

WILLS, Garry.

$450.00

Item Number: 132144

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1981.

First edition of Wills’ analysis of The Federalist. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by Garry Wills on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Lewis Friedman.

Here Wills, following the lead of the late Douglass Adair, argues that David Hume's political essays were the shared ground on which Madison and Hamilton based their political theory. Wills carefully traces both men's debt to Hume, and some of the unexpected consequences of that connection. Concepts like sovereignty, legislative supremacy, faction, and judicial review come alive with new meaning as Wills looks at them in their eighteenth century setting.