Federalist No. 17 is an essay by Alexander Hamilton, the seventeenth of The Federalist Papers. It was published on December 5, 1787 under the pseudonym Publius, the name under which all The Federalist papers were published. No. 17 addresses the failures of the Articles of Confederation to satisfactorily govern the United States; it is the third of six essays on this topic. It is titled "The Same Subject Continued: The Insufficiency of the Present Confederation to Preserve the Union".