What purpose was the Federalist Papers trying to achieve?
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They served multiple purposes:
* persuading readers to vote for the new constitution
* laying out a more detailed framework for how the new constitution could operate, without that framework becoming legally binding. The Federalist Papers became a strong suggestion for how the new government would operate. Because it wasn’t legally binding, the new government could ignore Madison/Hamilton/Jay where they incorrectly predicted how things could work. For example, the Federalist Papers argues against political parties, but they proved impossible to avoid.
* setting out a new theory on how governments can work. We tend to forget that prior to the Federalist Papers, almost everyone thought that neither a democracy nor a republic could function in a country as large as the US at the time. The founders made an argument that not only could a republic function well, but that republic could have a number of democratic elements such as popularly elected representatives. We’ve been incorporating more democratic elements ever since.
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