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The little that has been written on the relation between Madison’s and Hamilton’s private views on the Constitution and those found in The Federalist tends to support the surmise of Jefferson: that in places the authors defended positions to which they did not fully adhere. In Hamilton’s case, this is a major understatement. And yet a careful reading of his Federalist essays points to something far more complex and nuanced than a simple act of concealing his actual views or putting the best face on a plan he discountenanced. Undoubtedly, there are instances where he did both, but it is far more characteristic of him to engage in something quite different and admittedly ingenious: the creative act of construing the document in such a way as to stretch its meaning to accord more closely with the high-toned plan of government he outlined in the Federal Convention.

To say that I am grateful to Christine Korsgaard, R. Jay Wallace, and Gary Watson for the care they have taken with my work and for their insightful comments and criticisms is understatement. Permit me, though, to pause over this point of professional indebtedness to reflect on its philosophical significance. Gratitude is a Strawsonian reactive attitude, one that is, in my terms, second personal. As Thomas Reid pointed out, the concept of a favor to which gratitude responds involves the idea of an intentional benefit that goes beyond anything one is owed in justice or, as I would put it, beyond anything one has any authority to claim or demand. As a result, I am now in my critics’ debt, which, as I analyze it, gives them an authority to make claims and demands of me and makes me answerable to them. Actually, I am twice answerable. By being so bold as to put ideas before the philosophical community and the “learned world” at all, one incurs an obligation to defend them in the public space. But when colleagues take the time and trouble to get inside and appreciate one’s ideas as my commentators have, especially when one has been party to an invitation to them to do so, one becomes more specifically answerable to them. In what follows, I attempt, however feebly, to begin to discharge these obligations.

Measurement of quality changes has proven to be an especially difficult aspect of calculating unbiased rates of inflation. We propose a new methodology of capturing quality improvements based on consumer focus groups and apply this methodology in an environment where quality changes might be expected to be especially rapid and extensive, a post‐Communist transition economy. We find that the methodology indicates a substantial understatement of quality improvements during transition, and, therefore, a substantial overstatement of inflation, resulting in a serious downward bias in growth rate estimates for post‐Communist economies. The move to free markets has apparently improved consumers' welfare more by improving what they can purchase than by increasing how much they can purchase. Overall, mismeasurement of quality changes may have understated Czech growth rates during the first decade after Communism by as much as 5 percentage points per year.

This paper offers legal and economic analysis of two recent Supreme Court decisions, AT&T Corporation v. Iowa Utilities Board and Verizon Communications v. FCC. The paper is written with two audiences in mind. For those unfamiliar with the cases, we offer what we hope is an accessible yet detailed account of the underlying policy issues raised by a legal regime that requires incumbent local telephone carriers to lease parts of their telephone networks to would-be rivals. To that end, we discuss the main reasons why sharing rules are sometimes imposed in markets like the market for local telephone service, and we then link those issues to the specific legal questions at issue in these cases. For those already well versed in those issues, by contrast, we have woven into our account a variety of new ideas about both the relevant legal analysis and the underlying economics. We explain, for example, how low access prices might encourage incumbents to invest in new infrastructure despite the intuitive argument to the contrary, and how the Commission's seemingly nonsensical pick-and-choose rule can actually accomplish important policy goals, working in essence as a statutory most-favored-nation clause. In the end, then, we hope this paper will have value both for those relatively well steeped in telecommunications policy and for those just beginning to learn these issues.

Disappointed that I have apparently underplayed "the most crucial of the many aesthetic and pedagogical issues raised by feminist literary study," William Morgan reveals the deeply personal nature of his analysis in his repeated concern for the spectre of "separatism." He sees a kind of "intellectual defeatism" in my call for a separation of political ideology from aesthetic judgment; and an even more dangerous "intellectual separatism," threatening "nothing less than the community of scholars," in my having so firmly placed the responsibility for feminist literary criticism into the hands of women. These flaws, he theorizes, stem from my "underestimation or understatement of the revolutionary implications of feminist literary study" (my emphasis). Reading Morgan's eloquent explanation of himself as a "feminist," self-taught and now wholly enthused at the prospect of teaching a Women Writers course, one comes away sharing Morgan's concern that he not be left out in the cold. It is, after all, exciting and revitalizing to be part of a "revolution"-especially if, like Morgan, one can so generously and wholeheartedly espouse its goals; and, at the same time, it is surely comforting and ego-affirming to experience oneself as a legitimate son of that sacred brotherhood, The Community of Scholars. What clearly disturbs Morgan is any suggestion that the two may not yet be compatible and that, further, if forced to choose, Morgan might find himself without viable options on either hand. For, if the larger academic "community" continues to close its professional ranks to women in general and feminists in particular (as it has also excluded, for example, blacks and Marxists), then Morgan, as a self-styled "feminist" will be forced to

This essay presents me with some audience problems, for I have only a fragmentary sense of who reads Critical Inquiry and an even less reliable sense of how well they know the issues raised by feminist literary study. At my home institution there are, to my knowledge, five subscribers: a senior eighteenth-century specialist (male), an associate professor of romantic and modern British literature (female and feminist), an assistant professor of philosophy working in aesthetics (male), an instructor in English completing an interdisciplinary degree in culture (female), and me. I am male, a Victorianist (though more a critic than a literary historian), and "feminist." I like to think that the distribution of age, sex, intellectual interest, and political orientation is even more various in the readership at large, for feminists like Annette Kolodny have something very important to say to the whole of the art-criticism-scholarship complex. I was, therefore, heartened to see her "Some Notes on Defining a 'Feminist Literary Criticism' " in the Autumn 1975 number.' Like Kolodny, I think feminism one of the most vital and energizing forces in literary criticism today, but for two reasons I found her exposition of the topic disappointing. It seems to me that (1) she underplays the most crucial of the many aesthetic and pedagogical issues raised by feminist literary study, and (2) she endorses a kind of intellectual defeatism when, in the conclusion of her essay, she places a "Posted" sign between the male readers of Critical Inquiry and her own area of work. Both flaws (as I would call them) arise, it appears, out of her underestimation or understatement of the revolutionary implications of feminist

THER ARE TWO PRESIDENCIES, wrote Aaron Wildavsky in 1966one for domestic affairs and the other for foreign and defense policy. "Since World War II,"' Wildavsky contended, "presidents have had much greater success in controlling the nation's defense and foreign policies than in dominating its domestic policies."' In domestic affairs, presidents are sometimes frustrated by congressional resistance and counteroffensives, but foreign affairs have historically been a presidential preserve. Wildavsky also considered the president better equipped than Congress to direct foreign policy and also argued that the imperatives of the office force any president to become more concerned with international than with domestic problems. Quoting Kennedy to the effect that "Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us," Wildavsky concluded that for presidents, "Foreign policy concerns tend to drive out domestic policy."2 Wildavsky's now-classic essay was written more than a decade ago, and it is a gross understatement to say that much has transpired since then. Events have conspired to undercut certain of his argu

THE discussion concerning Professor Alilton Friedman's permanent income hypothesis led some investigators to conclude that observable quantitative differences between so-called within-group consumption elasticities and between-group consumption elasticities support the Friedman hypothesis. I am in qualified agreement with this conclusion-qualified in that I consider the reasoning that leads to the conclusion incomplete. The explanation of my position will start with emphasis on agreement, but it will end with the emphasis shifted to the qualifications. Take for some year a cross-section of households at large and compute the consumption-income relation for this universe. This measured relationship will not depend solely on differences between the "permanent" incomes of various households and on differences between their "permanent" (or regular) consumption. The relationship will also be affected by differences between "transitory" components of income, which may be positive or negative, and by differences between "transitory" components of consumption, which are in the nature of random additions to the regular consumption flow of the household or of random subtractions from it. If we accept the permanent income hypothesis, according to which the true relationship between income and consumption is a relationship between "permanent" income and "permanent" consumption and according to which the transitory components of income do not influence either constituent of consumption (or do not influence them appreciably), then we are led to expect that the apparent consumption-income relationship, computed from a cross-section of households at large, will understate the "true" consumption elasticities with respect to income. The simplest way of expressing the essential reason for this understatement of consumption elasticities may be to point out that in a universe of households at large the spread between measured incomes must be greater than the spread between permanent incomes and that statistical measurements attribute the observable differences in consumption to the greater differences between measured incomes rather than to the smaller differences between the consumption-governing permanent incomes. Assume, for example, that, out of a permanent income of 100 units, 80 units are consumed, while out of a permanent income of 200 units, 160 units are consumed. If these were the only two existing sizes of permanent income, statistical measurements would attribute the observable 80-unit differences in consumption per household, not to the 100unit differences in permanent income, but to greater differences. Hence consumption elasticities would be understated. This is because, as a consequence of negative transitory incomes, some measured incomes would be smaller than 100 units; and, as a consequence of positive transitory incomes, some measured incomes would exceed 200 units. Instead of considering cross-sections at large, let us now classify the universe of households into groups whose permanent income-earning capacities are typically different. Occupationally or locationally defined groups are of this character, and so are groups defined by age. Within each of these groups the household-to-household comparisons will lead to an underestimate of the "true" consumption elasticities, for reasons that are identical with those explained for cross-section measurements at large. But we may now also compute consumption

IF THERE is one thing more than another which turns us today against the mystic, and makes us view his philosophy with alarm, it is his tendency to indulge in exaggerated statements. So far as we have an ideal for ourselves in these times it is that of "adjustment" and harmonious integration. Our sophisticated view of our own psychological mechanisms has led us to see life in terms of the working of glands and reflexes, and to regard enthusiasm of any sort as a sign of some kind of disorder within the functions of the body. Yet it is not difficult at the same time to observe evidences of dissatisfaction with this complacent ideal of harmony. The current popular psychology has itself shown us that the tensions of life are not so easily denied, and that if they are not expressed in enthusiasm for an idea they will find vent in other ways. We have only to notice the use which modern humor makes of sharp incongruity, or else of the understatement of an exaggerated situation, to see both how close to the surface lies our interest in the extreme and how indirect is our way of giving it an outlet. Modern life is not drab-it is highly exciting. Yet we seem to fear to become excited about it, and we try to experience its thrills in devious and roundabout ways. Our resort to stimulants is one evidence of this. We allow our interests to be physically caused instead of being intellectually aroused. We go in, also, for vicarious sensations. While our own lives are routine and uninspired, we crowd in masses to hear of daring exploits in the air or on the sea, and we find questionable relief from our own moral conflicts by allowing sordidness to be blared forth through the loud-speaker or blazoned on stage and

SINCE this essay concerns Englishmen, it may be appropriate to start with an understatement: Alfred Xlarshall and J. N. Keynes exerted considerable influence on the development of modern economic thought. These gentlemen shared nation, university, and classroom. It is my hypothesis that they also shared a common motive and method in the transmission of their ideas in written form. I shall argue that this common technique is significant, for it influenced the rate at which their ideas were understood and accepted by the profession. Both Marshall and Keynes strongly felt the need to be understood by their contemporaries. Marshall was always a little afraid of being above the head of the average businessman.2 This resulted partly from his belief that there was a high degree of relationship between economic knowledge and human welfare.3 Further, Marshall gives the impression that "the tardy growth of economic science" and therefore of human well-being was due partly to economists' expressing their ideas in a very technical form that required great effort to comprehend.4 Keynes shared this sense of urgency in presenting many of his contributions. This

MUCH of the world's history is written by history's winners, and their accounts are usually cheerful reading. Winners minimize the mistakes inevitable in human enterprises and allot credit instead of sharing blame. But winners' accounts seldom offer thoughtful descriptions of the losers-one reason for reconsidering history from the point of losers' narratives."' Since the days of Gottfried Arnold at least some historians have tried to tell the history of the church from the point of view of the losers-whether this be through the eyes of the heretics, the lives of "pious men," or the exponents of ancient humanism. But I doubt whether any Christian church historian has ever seriously tried to write the story of the ancient church through the eyes of the Jews. Indeed, were it not for the efforts of a few mavericks and the publication of a work here and a work there, most church historians would be hard pressed to say anything at all about Judaism and the church after the first or second century.2 It is not until much later that the Jews return to the scene, and when they do they have been moved to the fringe of society, cast into a ghetto, viewed as a puzzling curiosity darkly reminiscent of a forgotten past. Actually it is a colossal understatement to say that little attention has been paid to Judaism and its relation to Christianity in antiquity. Observe, for example, how slight the influence of Marcel Simon's work Verus Israel