Kin Term Usage in The Federalist: Evolutionary Foundations of Publius's Rhetoric

Abstract

Theorists have recently argued that use of kin terms in patriotic speech appeals to genetically based predispositions and coefficients of relatedness, thereby moving one-time strangers to do things they might not otherwise do. This study has been designed to investigate the significance of kinship language in The Federalist, a project whose end was to persuade the people of New York to ratify the American Constitution. Three hypotheses were tested and supported. First, a wider variety and larger quantity of kinship language surfaced in patriotic than in nonpatriotic discourse on ratification. Second, kinship terms appear more often in papers that address the blessings one could expect from bonding in a potential union (a new family) and in papers that criticize the Articles of Confederation (the old family) than in the remaining papers that entail mundane descriptions of constitutional particulars. And third, kinship language appears significantly more frequently in the earlier papers of The Federalist than in the later ones, presumably to steal the audience's attention straightaway and thus form a bond among the people, the states, and the new Constitution.