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The Federalist

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This review applies specifically to the J. R. Pole edition of The Federalist, published by Hackett. Considering the thorough notes and fine introduction, this should be the preferred edition of The Federalist for the student and general reader. Sadly, I have found, within the first fifteen pages, an unacceptable number of errors in editing or proofreading. Assuming this rate of errors is representative of the text as a whole, it cannot be relied on as the primary edition for studying this important historical work. If you can afford several editions, by all means acquire the Pole edition for its helpful notes, but I would recommend the standard Cooke edition (from Wesleyan U. Press), the Gideon edition (from Liberty Fund), or the inexpensive Signet edition for the text itself.

Here are examples of the errors:

On p. xlii, the first essay is incorrectly attributed to John Jay, rather than Alexander Hamilton.

On pages 4 and 15, footnotes contain inaccurate cross-references to other notes.

Most serious is an apparently systematic editing problem with the text itself. The intention of the Pole edition is to present the so-called "McClean" text, which contained revisions (by the authors) to the original newspaper versions of the essays. However, these revisions are inconsistently incorporated in the Pole edition. For example, in the newspaper text of the third essay, a series of sub-arguments is set forth in separate paragraphs that each begin with the word "Because." In the McClean text, a new sentence was added to indicate that a list of reasons follows, and the word "Because" was omitted from the beginning of each paragraph in the list. But in the Pole edition, one of the paragraphs is not revised at all (the word "Because" still appears), and another is incompletely revised, so that it begins incorrectly with the words "If even if the governing party . . ." rather than "If even the governing party . . ." All this may sound arcane, but, besides being technically inaccurate, it makes the argument confusing and ungrammatical where it is not so, in a correct text of either the newspaper or the McClean versions. I should note that the text was apparently provided by the Intelex Corporation, not prepared by Professor Pole himself.