Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.

And I'm Juan Dabellos. We are back with the Federalist Lecture Number 2 today, the anti-federalists.

In this lecture, Dr. Pastrido talks about the adversaries

of the ratification of the Constitution, who were given the name anti-federalists by the

federalists, a clever piece of political maneuvering. And the point that Dr. Pastrido makes in this

lecture is that the so-called anti-federalists were American patriots. They believed in the principles of the

Declaration of Independence. Many of them supported the majority of the Constitution, but disputed a few

provisions. And so as we examine their arguments, we should be thinking about them as true

American founders who had some arguments against the way the Constitution was structured. We shouldn't

think of them as the bad guys or losers or anything like that. They helped strengthen the way

the final constitution looked, including providing the Bill of Rights. American history, we've

always had strong political differences in the country. And I think to a certain degree that's healthy

as long as both sides have the same ends in mind right what the federalist it's

great they get into a definition of a people what makes a people in one of them

is they have essentially the same definition of justice, and that means that

they believe that the purpose of government is the same, in their case, to secure the rights

of citizens and lead them to a happy life.

And both the federalists and the anti-federalists believe that strongly. They just deferred

on what's the right way to achieve that end.

There were questions about means rather than ends. The founders, federalists and anti-federalists,

would wholeheartedly agree that the purpose of man is to find happiness. And they understood that

to mean piety, devotion to God, moral excellence, and the normal joy of being satisfied in your

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