An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good.
—Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #1
In a recent post, I argued that Glenn Beck’s attempt to translate the Federalist Papers into “Modern English” was both unnecessary (because the text is already in English that is made difficult by its ideas, not its linguistic construction) and incompetent (because neither Beck nor his collaborator, Joshua Charles, know the first thing about how English worked in the eighteenth century). To make this point, I offered a close reading of the first paragraph of the first Federalist Paper, which the Beck/Charles translation bungles by misunderstanding the eighteenth-century usage of the word “interest”—a mistranslation that allows Beck to formulate a “main point” for Federalist #1 that is squarely at odds with the clear meaning of the text—namely, that (according to Hamilton), “America is special because our rights come from God.”
As bad as Beck’s reading of Federalist #1 is in what it proclaims, he serves Hamilton’s cause even more poorly by what he obscures--namely, the main point of the entire essay. To anyone who takes the time to read the original text (and I REALLY, REALLY suggest that you read the original text), the main point of the essay is not that God likes America best, but that a strong government is necessary to the preservation of liberty and that we have more to fear by anti-government activists who claim to be protecting individual freedoms than we do from the advocates of a strong federal government.
In his introduction to Federalist #1, Beck quotes the same passage that I did at the beginning of this post—a passage in which Hamilton argues for “efficiency” in government and criticizes “an over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people.” Right on cue, Beck ignores the (rather obvious) application of this criticism to his own ideology and dismisses it WITH YET ANOTHER INCORRECT TRANSLATION OF A COMMON WORD WHOSE MEANING HAS SHIFTED SINCE THE 18TH CENTURY:
Relevance to Today: Zealots for individual rights (which back then could be translated as anarchists) are more dangerous that those who believe that an efficient government is a good thing. But would anyone today refer to the federal government as “efficient”? After all, it took a 1,924-page bill to lay out the budget of the United States and another 359 pages simply to cut $38 billion in spending.
This time, the translation error is with the word “efficient.” In contemporary American usage, “efficient” means something like “with a minimum amount of waste”—much the way Beck uses it here. To the eighteenth-century political philosopher, however, it meant “powerful” or “capable of being an agent of action” with no hint of the contemporary emphasis on reducing paperwork—it simply does not matter to Hamilton’s argument how many pages it takes to cut $38 billion in spending.
In a passage that Beck does not quote from the original text, Hamilton takes the argument further and argues that those who argue against strong government in favor of individual rights are likely to become tyrants. For effect (and because I think it will be very instructive) I am going to place the original translation side by side with the Beck/Charles version offered as an “accurate and non-ideological” updating.
Hamilton A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants. | Beck/Charles Dangerous ambition often lurks more in those who have excessive enthusiasm for the rights of the People than those who believe in a firm and efficient government. History proves that the former more often leads to tyranny than the latter, and that the people who have trampled on the liberties of a republic often began their campaigns by being overly concerned with the rights of the People and helping to end tyranny. |
Let me belabor a few fairly obvious points here:
1. The Beck/Charles version is neither a “translation” nor an “updating.” It is simply a paraphrase that changes some words for another, simplifying the argument but not modernizing the prose. One would be very hard pressed to argue that “trampled on” is a more modern, or even a more accessible, word than “overturned. ”What Beck and Charles have done is something that most teachers see regularly: they have taken an original source and changed the words around a little bit and submitted it as something new. We call this (when we are being charitable) a “half-baked paraphrase,” and it is usually considered a form of cheating.
2. Hamilton is a much better prose stylist than either Glenn Beck or Joshua Charles.
3. There is a MAJOR PARAPHRASING ERROR in the final sentence, in the portions that I have bolded. Hamilton says that most of the men who have “overturned the liberties of republics” have begun “paying obsequious court to the people.” His conclusion, that they are guilty of “commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants” is a remarkably clear attack on people who use the rhetoric of “individual freedoms” to foster anti-government sentiment for their own political and financial ends.
But look what happens when Beck and Charles get ahold of this stunning denunciation. Gone is the significant term “demagogue” to describe the targets of Hamilton’s attack. In the new version, these are not evil-minded opportunists from the outset, but misguided people who are “overly concerned with the rights of the People.” These non-demagogues do not end up as tyrants, as Hamilton so famously argued; rather, they concern themselves (perhaps a bit too zealously) with “ending tyranny.” Once again, the translation blatantly ignores the text’s usage of the word “ending” (ending up as) and replaces it with a more modern, but utterly incorrect sense of the word (trying to bring to an end).
The error I am describing here is not an obscure mistranslation of eighteenth-century arcana. The use of “ending” to mean “ending up” should pose no difficulty to a competent 21st century reader. We use the word this way all the time. The fact that these kinds of confusing usages do occur regularly in the Federalist Papers is a strong argument for good footnotes, which are entirely appropriate in complicated texts whether old or new. It is not, however, an even remotely convincing argument for this "new translation," which, as we have seen, oversimplifies the argument without actually helping anybody understand eighteenth-century usage.
Beck's error is not just linguistic; it also has serious ideological implications, as it completely reverses Hamilton’s original meaning. The Federalist Papers were editorial rebuttals to other essays that had already been written under pseudonyms such as “Cato,” “Centinel,” and “Brutus” (collectively published these days as the “Anti-Federalist Papers”) that attacked the proposed Constitution as a destroyer of individual freedoms and the rights of states. By labeling the authors of these papers—including prominent revolutionaries such as Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, George Mason, and (in a limited way, as he was in France for the whole debate) Thomas Jefferson—“demagogues,” and charging that they would end up “tyrants,” he was opposing their ideology in the strongest terms he could think of. As the Beck/Charles “translation” puts it, however, he was gently chastising well-meaning patriots for going a little too far in their zeal to protect rights.
This distinction could not be more important in the current political climate. Beck himself, in The Original Agument and in much of his other public rhetoric, espouses views that are nearly identical to those espoused by the Anti-Federalists. He sees (as they saw) the government as an intrusive force bent on destroying individual freedoms. He argues (as they continually argued) that a strong federal system destroys the rights of states, and he has built these themes into a multimillion dollar media franchise by attacking the government, vigorously advocating for the rights of individuals to reject the authority of government officials, and demonizing anybody who disagrees with him.
Glenn Beck is, in other words, exactly who Hamilton is warning us about in Federalist #1. Is it any wonder that his version of the text removes the part about about “demagogues”?
