Bill Caughlan

“Madison followed Condorcet in expressing faith that a class of enlightened journalists and public officials, whom he, too, called the literati, could serve as “cultivators of the human mind,” using the new media to teach the public how to pursue happiness through reason rather than passion. As Madison put it in a crucial passage: “The class of literati is not less necessary than any other. They are the cultivators of the human mind—the manufacturers of useful knowledge—the agents of the commerce of ideas—the censors of public manners—the teachers of the arts of life and the means of happiness.”68 When he wrote about the literati, Madison had in mind elite journalists such as Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard or his own essays in The Federalist; the modern equivalent would be essays in the Atlantic or the New Yorker. Madison was confident that the literati could teach the public to converge around shared principles—such as a national attachment to republicanism, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—rather than descending into “prejudices, local, political, and occupational, that may prevent or disturb a general coalition of sentiments.”
― Jeffrey Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America