I have previously thought that what my thesis deals with is the impact of Federalism on American political thought and culture as a whole, and therefore on the 'main stream' of American history. I argue that Federalists in the 1780s developed the ideas and techniques that underpin liberal forms of social control in the modern world. This ascribes them an awful lot of influence, and perhaps creates a rather large burden of proof!
Yesterday my transferral of status interview and the fallout from that made me think again about my overall project. In fact, it made me remember some advice from another friend, who told me to make my thesis as narrow and sharply-defined as possible. I was blasé about it before, but I've been thinking about ways to do that; or to put it another way, I've been wondering if my very broad argument as outlined above is really right.
Perhaps it would be more correct to look at the emergence of Federalism as something that happens within a more constricted field of political thought - specifically the 'conservative' side of the revolutionary elite. If we see the revolution (the 'long revolution' if you like, including everything the 1760s) as the culmination of a general challenge to patriarchal thought, I think we can see the development of Federalism in the 1780s as an internal response: an effort to reconstitute patriarchal values in a new framework; a reform movement within elite thought rather than acted out publically. Even the ratification debates can be seen this way, as primarily arguments within and among a broadly-agreeing patriarchal elite.
We need not see Federalism as a coherent, unitary force gradually coming into view in the 1780s. Rather, it was a set of issues and debates about how elite control (order and hierarchy) could best be stabilised and perpetuated in the new republic. It was both a symptom of, and a response to, the revolutionary crisis of patriarchal imagination.
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