SOURCE: "Strategies of Candor in The Federalist," in Early American Literature, Vol. XIV, No. 1, Spring 1979, pp. 91-109.

In the following excerpt, Furtwangler provides a close analysis of language and rhetorical strategy in The Federalist.

In the course of the eighteenth century an important shift occurred in the usage of the word "candor," so that it came to mean what it does today: forthrightness, frankness, direct honesty. Corresponding with this shift was a perceptible turn in the way readers and authors regarded one another or looked at the writings that stood between them. When a writer early in the century asked his readers to be candid in accepting his productions, he relied on a kind of polite deference that was to disappear in the course of succeeding decades. Yet as late as 1788, we can find the authors of the Federalist papers appealing to this earlier mood of candor. In...