Federalist 10, Part 1
Federalist 10, along with 51, are the two best-known of the 85 essays. Frequently included in American Government textbooks, these two essays, both written by Madison, make foundational arguments and do so in a rhetorically accessible fashion. It’s no accident that Madison’s essays would be the most popular, not only because he’s a more subtle thinker than Hamilton, but also a more limpid writer.
Earlier essays had already dealt with the problem of internal dissent and disagreement as a perennial problem in political life. Madison brings greater clarity to the issue in the tenth essay. At the very beginning, he reminds us that “The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity” to the vice of faction, with its tendency to create “instability, injustice, and confusion.” And those are “the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished.” Factions tend “to disregard the public good” in part because decisions are made by ”the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.” Otherwise referred to as “the tyranny of the majority,” this problem always dogs democratic governments. Two generations later, when observing the throes of Jacksonian democracy, Tocqueville opined that he would never give to a group of people power he would not give to any one person. Or, as Madison put it, majorities have a nasty tendency “to vex and oppress” minority groups, and this was a danger that needed to be guarded against.
Proper thinking about politics requires careful attendance to definitions. What exactly is a faction? Madison provides us with a definition simultaneously concise and detailed:
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.Let’s break this down to its constituent parts. First of all, a faction involves citizens, meaning mainly, but not exclusively, people who have the power to vote. In a direct democracy occurring on a small scale this power of majority factions becomes more pronounced, and part of the idea behind a representative system is that it helps filter majoritarian impulses. The principle of majority rule operates most directly when it is immediate and transparent, mainly in small group settings. The more people involved the harder it may be to discern the will of the majority, but also more difficult to resist it once expressed.
But note that Madison does not say that a faction is necessarily a majority. Republics also have minority factions. The more pluralized the system becomes, the more likely a minority faction can wield its power, particularly if it is deft at forming temporary coalitions with other factions. This problem of minority factions combining their forces is, for Madison, as significant a problem as majority factions. Then, too, democratic governments constantly face the threat of a well-organized and well-heeled minority faction that can bend the instruments of government to its will. This phenomenon is readily displayed in our concerns about campaign financing.
The key element of a faction is the ability of a group of people to unite and actuate around “a common impulse of passion, or of interest.” Let’s take this in reverse. Madison identifies the motivating factors for people engaging in political life: either passion or interest. Granted, a sense of public service plays a role, but Madison sees that as an expression, not a rejection, of passion or interest.
Madison draws much of his argument in Federalist 10 from the work of Scottish Philosopher David Hume. One of Hume’s most well-known expressions was “Reason is, and ought always to be, the slave to the passions.” This sounds strange to our ears, given what the word “passion” means to us. But Hume had a more capacious and detailed view. “Passions” result from impressions made on the mind, as reflective responses to stimuli of pain or pleasure. We can have refined (or calm) or violent passions. Think about tasting food. A refined palette responds positively to food that tastes good, while we have a violent reaction to foods that taste badly. Both are passions, but “good taste” is refined passion. Hume believed these responses, both instinctive and habituated, become the basis of “sentiments” that reside at the foundation of our moral reasoning. We desire things that produce pleasure and have an aversion to those that produce pain.
Jonathan Haidt makes a similar argument in this The Righteous Mind. Instinct is the elephant and reason is riding it. But instinct will go where it lists. Our moral judgments, Haidt claims, result from our instinctive responses to stimuli - we experience either enjoyment or disgust, and we call the one good and the other bad. Reason arrives late on the scene, trying to provide justifications for what instinct presents it. Haidt argues that our political divisions arise from the fact we don’t find the same things disgusting, and we get entrenched in our positions because we are very bad at providing rational justifications,
Madison uses passion in this Humean sense. The important factor to keep in mind is that it is essentially a reactive operation of the mind. When we use the word we mean it in an essentially proactive way. Madison’s use offers us the possibility of distinguishing between good and bad passions, while we are often helpless when it comes to trying to talk people out of pursuing ill-conceived passions. Both passion and interest are in Madison’s definition objects of prepositions: the controlling verb is “impulse.” I think he uses “impulse” here in two senses: first, in the sense that it comes from deep within us, as an instinct (etymologically related to being driven to do something); and in the second indicating that we don’t operate rationally or with perfect self-control.
Interest is a bit more straight-forward, but here too we need to strip the word of its negative connotations. I have an interest in the well-being of my children. It would be immoral not to. Interest can cause different kinds of conflict: we can conflict over competing interests, such as takes place in abortion debates; we can conflict over having the same interest, such as when we compete over scarce resources; or we can have interests that have the same form but different objects, such as when we disagree over the education of children.
Perhaps we confuse interest too much with “self-interest,” but even here it’s not necessarily negative. Food, shelter, clothing, and access to clean water all stand as examples of material self-interest, but there is no shame in pursuing them, nor in preferring the well-being of those in our charge to those not. A need to belong, a desire for love, affirmation, the pursuit of salvation, exemplify emotional and spiritual self-interest, but none are to be condemned.
When we disparage self-interest it’s usually because of an exclusive pursuit of it to the detriment of the well-being of others. This can either be intentional or unintentional. In the extreme, theft or murder would be an example of the former, while what we refer to as “the tragedy of the commons” is an example of the latter. The tragedy of the commons refers to us behaving rationally in terms of our self-interest, but our actions nonetheless work against the collective good. For example, given the scope of climate change issues, it makes no sense for consumers to alter their behavior that might contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.
Whether operating out of a pernicious or a reasonable expression out of self-interest, part of Madison’s point is that no matter how pure our motivations might be, self-interest can never be purged from our actions. Anything we do will be tainted by degree by self-interest, which is a permanent and ineradicable feature of all human conduct.
Madison does not regard self-interest as a huge problem, unless it operates “adverse to the rights of others, or to the aggregate interests of the community.” He doesn’t indicate that it never will, however. He seems to say that any “impulse of passion or of interest” will operate to the disadvantage of others or of the whole. This ineluctable feature of human nature requires a proper system to channel it into positive directions.
Part of such channeling results from the first part of Madison’s definition: not only do people have such impulses, but they will “organize and actuate” around them. An individual person pursuing self-interest presents no serious problem, but a group of people, recognizing they have the same interest, will begin organizing themselves and pursue power to advance their cause. We can imagine people organizing themselves in a benign fashion. Men may organize themselves into a golf league to the detriment of no one other than their wives.
Not just organizing, but actuating: that is, organizing with the intent to act “adverse to the rights of others.” Again, this may be benign or malignant. When mothers organize and actuate in opposition to drunk driving, the only group negatively affected are drunk drivers. Other groups, organized and actuated, can operate directly adverse to the interest of other groups. Senior citizens, via the AARP, do an exceptional job organizing and actuating themselves, and their pursuit of their interests do not work to the material interests of their grandchildren who, having a common impulse of interest (not paying nearly 20% of their compensation in social security and medicare taxes) are neither organized nor actuated. Nor does their monomaniacal pursuit of their material interests serve well “the aggregate interests of the community,” which is nearing the edge of a “fiscal cliff” resulting from the government’s inability to meet its liabilities.
Madison carefully draws our attention to “the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” These include: the need for security, for fiscal solvency, for public peace, and for tolerable levels of personal freedom. Some of the most significant conflicts involve those needs in relief against the religious practices of certain groups, whose “self-interest” may involve serious moral defense. For example, the Amish do not pay social security or medicare taxes, nor do they serve in the military, both contrary to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community, but it would take a cold heart to accuse them of viciousness or lack of community spirit.
How to deal with the problem of faction? Madison argues that you can either deal with its causes or with its effects. What are the causes of faction? The above makes it clear: “the seeds of dissension are sown into the nature of man.” In order to get rid of faction, you’d either have to get rid of human beings or you would have to transform human nature. This latter strategy was the essential program of the American Progressive movement (late 19th century forward), and one that thus doesn’t fit well with our Constitutional system, which, as Madison says, operates on the assumption that human beings are irredeemably self-interested. This remains the fundamental divide in politics: can human nature be transformed or is it fixed?
As importantly, the dangers of faction increase in conjunction with the amount of freedom that people enjoy. Religious liberty leads to religious pluralism. Political liberty results in people pursuing a greater range of their own interests. To eliminate faction, then, one would have to eliminate liberty, for “liberty is to faction as air is to fire.” Clearly, abdicating liberty would contradict everything both the revolution and the American heritage stood for.
Natural self-interest and contentiousness, fueled by the elements of free thought and free association, result in a polity that, if not anarchic, teeters on the edge of civil war. Since the causes of faction admit of no relief, one must focus attention on controlling the effects. This is not easily accomplished, however, without exercising tyrannical levels of control. Borrowing off the work of David Hume, as well Hamilton’s argument in Federalist 9, Madison offers a solution: extend the sphere. This will be the topic of the next essay.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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