The Federalist Papers

By: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay

Narrated by: Michael Edwards

The US Constitution was approved by the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787. It was to become law only if it was ratified by nine of the 13 states. New York was a key state, but it contained strong forces opposing the Constitution. A series of eighty-five letters appeared in New York City newspapers between October 1787 and August 1788 urging support for the Constitution. These letters remain the first and most authoritative commentary on the American concept of federal government.

Later known as The Federalist Papers, they were published under the pseudonym ‘Publius,’ although written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.

Public Domain (P)1989 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“The Federalist Papers stand as key documents in the founding of the United States.” (Amazon.com, Editorial Review)

Worse narrator - Of All Time - Evah!

Federalist Papers was written by lawyers, that's true and they were trying to inform people, not entertain them.

But - Come On Man! Micheal Edwards goes out of his way to make this dry listen truly horrible. It took me months to get through it all because the voice is horrible

Well written. More commercial and secular than I expected.

On a technical note, this audio version is poor. There was about 20 instances where the reader read the same sentence twice.

As to the substance, it was shockingly good. The legal analysis was persuasive. The founders were very clearheaded about future leaders need to bend the language of the Constitution to address some crisis, and they drafted the language anticipating the most tempting misconstructions. The geopolitical analysis was also impressive.

I was expecting a lot more contentless rhetoric and appeals to divine authority. The document was mostly secular. I was also surprised by the priority placed on commercial interests in the early papers.

I admit it got boring. And Hamilton got a little testy toward the end. But I hope reading good legal writing improves my writing. This was worth the investment of time.

Buy it when it goes on 2 for 1 sale

If your interested in this one, get this one when Audible has their two for one sale. It's definitely worth a half a credit for its line by line dissection of the American Constitution, good Age of Enlightenment arguments, and this makes for a much better listen than a read since there is a lot of redundancy between some of the essays and easier to tune out and focus on my bicycle riding during the redundant parts. It's hard not to like a book in which the authors assume the reader knows their Greek, Roman and 17th century European history inside and out.

The writing from 1788 sounds as if could have been written today with surprisingly few archaic words or stilted phrasing. Good argumentation never goes out of style.

Great text, flawed recording

The text is well worth listening to to understand what the issues were regarding adoption of the US Constitution and as a guide to what the founding fathers were wrestling with. The biggest surprise to me was that we're still wrestling with many of the same issues today. There are several places in the text where 10 or 20 seconds of text are repeated - editing errors that detract slightly, and the narration is a bit dry, but this is still a worthwhile listen.

Intelligently Read

I enjoyed narrator's straight and intelligent reading of this important work. I listened to the samples of all the readings of the Federalist Papers and selected this one because I found the narrator's style focused my mind on the meaning of the words. I was not disappointed.