Mentality and Motive

Sometimes Federalists say they're glad about the economic crisis, or Shays' Rebellion, because it will convince the public to favour stronger government. Sometimes they go to the extent of seemingly wishing any number of calamities on themselves for that purpose. This obviously makes their public rhetoric suspect, when they say, 'but of course we must have stronger central government, in order to deal with the economic crisis.' It seems not to be the real reason they want reform. Historians have often responded to this double talk by positing a hidden, anterior motive: namely, consolidation of elite power for its own sake.

Is there an alternative conception? Instead of dismissing ostensible motives in favour of implicit ones, perhaps it will be possible to give the former weight by making them part of a mutually supporting framework of thought. In such a framework, each individual prop (economic crisis, military weakness, and so on) may seem insufficient and therefore suspect, but we need not necessarily look beyond or beneath the framework itself - as an interrelation of parts - for a stable explanation of the Federalists' thought. Not only might that work from a historian's perspective, but it is also characteristic of mentality itself: the structure of thought may (or must) be hidden from the mind in which it operates. How many of us are aware of our true motives?