An eminent scholar of the present century who embraced this view was Irving Brant, a writer of liberal inclinations who tended to perceive the American Founders as the New Dealers of their day. In his six-volume Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Madison, Brant contended that his eminent subject had “flowered in a more fertile soil of national feeling than has been recognized in later periods of negation,” and that “Madison’s words and actions,” including his writings in The Federalist, “reveal him as a vigorous exponent of national sovereignty.”

Marshall’s “classic justification for an expanding Federal authority” was, said Brant, but a “paraphrase” of Madison’s Publius.  More recently, Jacob E. Cooke, whose editorial labors have provided us with what is now regarded as the definitive text of The Federalist, has contended in his biography of Hamilton that the argument of Publius contains a “political creed” featuring a “constant trust in the curative power of national supremacy” and an equally “abiding distrust of state sovereignty.” Primarily, the nationalist interpretation of The Federalist seems to appeal to certain liberals and to those scholars, whatever their personal political affiliations, whose principal orientation is the study of American history, and who are therefore led to consider the great work chiefly in relation to its own period.