Federalist 10 Part II
In my last essay, part 1 of a reflection Federalist #10, I dealt with Madison’s definition of faction. One of the main takeaways of that essay is that faction is baked into the human condition, and that furthermore our Constitution assumes that we are divided and opposed to one another. Madison implies a distinction, however, between what we might call mere selfishness and enlightened self-interest. Not all self-interest is condemnable.
We concluded with Madison telling us that there were two ways of dealing with factions: eliminate the causes or control the effects. Since human nature is the source of faction, you’d either have to transform human nature (the Progressive/Socialist idea) or you’d have to snuff out the liberty that makes faction more common.
Part of our problem as human beings is that while we have the capacity for reason we can not exercise it unalloyed with other impulses that we have. These separate but interpenetrating faculties of the mind allow us to navigate the world. In 18th century thinking, the exercise of these faculties related to the acquisition of property, which Madison understood to be both a fundamental right (about half of the Bill of Rights deal with property rights in one form or another) and a source of conflict.
John Locke had argued that property resulted from individuals mixing their labor with the raw material of nature. The stream is common to all, but as soon as I put my bucket in it that which is in the bucket becomes mine. The land is common to all, but when I plant and harvest the resulting product is mine. The unequal distribution of property results from the operations of our faculties: the more rational we are and the more industrious we are, the more property we can acquire.
There are limits to such acquisition, of course. Locke had noted that the rational exercise of our labor in terms of growing and building things would be limited by spoilage and excess. There would be no point in growing more food than we could consume, nor building more things than we could use — were it not for the invention of money, which allowed us to acquire wealth beyond the limits of spoilage. The differences in our faculties and the use thereof would result in inequalities in the amount of property people own, thus becoming the foundation on which many other social divisions rests. Madison wrote: “From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.” He further observed that the “various and unequal distribution of property” is the “most common and durable source of factions.”
Note that Madison refers not only to the unequal distribution of property but also to the various uses of it. Because our labor results in different kinds of property, it also results in a complex of different and competing interests. Farmers, small business owners, manufacturers, craftspersons, builders, and financial speculators all create property, and their varying kinds of property can be a source of conflict. Organized factions arise around these shared interests. Given the essential nature of property, “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.”
Because human beings naturally disagree, we see all sorts of other kinds of disagreement existing alongside or mixed with property rights. Religion, choosing leaders, political ideologies, all have “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.” Madison’s defense of the Constitution results from the essential contentiousness and self-interestedness of human beings. Our “strong propensity to fall into mutual animosities,” no matter how petty, means that government will always be regulating human affairs.
It is a fundamental principle of liberal government, as well as common sense, that no man is allowed to be a judge in his own case. Once we organize into parties and factions the conflict between the groups can quickly become insoluble for want of an independent judge. This problem intensifies in a representative system because the representatives represent the interests of groups and parties, which means that we have no disinterested party to resolve our conflicts, for “what are the different classes of legislators but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine.” When conflict inevitably arises between factions — say, between farmers and financiers — the party that has a majority will be able to decide in its own favor. All legislative acts are therefore expressions of interest, often adverse to the interests of others or that of the public generally, typically determined by simple majorities.
Republicanism had typically tried to tame this tendency by inserting virtue into the mix. True, legislatures could be unruly and oppressive, but if the people would elect persons of high character then these leaders would have the levels of disinterested commitment to the public good that would balance all the competing interests in a wise and just way. This argument, made by some of the Anti-federalists, who feared that you could not have a healthy republic in the absence of virtuous leaders, made little impression on Madison.
“It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.”Madison draws our attention to a sad fact of political life: it works best when virtuous people run our politics, but we seldom elect such persons to office. As Chancellor Kent observed, “The fittest men would probably have too much reservedness of manners, and severity of morals, to secure an election resting on universal suffrage.” We need to sacrifice our desire for a perfect, or even a good, regime on the altar of a tolerable one.
The Anti-federalists addressed this dynamic in part by thinking of politics at scale. First of all, virtuous leaders could best be identified by friends and neighbors without having to rely on the distorting mediations provided by parties and the press. This meant, secondly, that leadership would be best exercised when exercised locally, where people had the option of leaving if it was exercised poorly. Those attracted to more centralized power would be, by definition, less trustworthy, not only because voters wouldn’t know them directly but also because power attracts ambitious glory-seekers.
Madison in this essay displays little confidence in attaining such leaders, for where “impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control.” Madison hoped he could solve this paradox of leadership and factionalism by taking the opposite tack: perhaps both problems could be solved by turning republicanism’s localist instinct on its head. Instead of doing republicanism on a small-scale, where the republics “have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths,” a large-scale republic might prove both more stable and more durable. Perhaps even more just.
The way to accomplish this was by dealing with faction’s effects, and that meant figuring out a way to keep permanent and noxious factions from forming and imposing their schemes upon others. Here Madison makes a counter-intuitive argument: the solution to the problem of faction is to create more factions. He believed that a surfeit of factions would result in them cancelling each other out.
Keep in mind that Madison said a faction can be a majority or minority of the whole. Minority factions would pose little difficulty since they could always be canceled out by majority factions — unless, we must observe, those minority factions are much better “organized and actuated.” Majority factions pose the main problem, and to secure the public good and individual rights against majority factions is the great desideratum of the Constitutional system.
As indicated, Madison’s solution resulted from changing the scale of political life, for “a society of a small number of persons … can admit of no cure for the mischief of faction.” “Extending the sphere,” both geographically and demographically, resulted in taking in a greater number of factions, thus increasing the likelihood they would cancel each other out. This was especially the case in an age that lacked modern communication and transportation technologies. Even if people did have a “common impulse of passion or of interest,” over an extended sphere they’d never become aware of it. This dispersion of interest would defang it.
The extension of the sphere meant that you could never have citizens operate in direct consort with each other, so you would require a system of representation. This system, Madison argued, not without some contradiction, would operate as a filter on popular views, it would “refine and enlarge” interests by “passing them through a chosen body of citizens” who would, because of their superior “patriotism and love of justice” have the wisdom to “discern the true interests of their country.” Madison expected these representatives to turn their attention outward, for “local prejudices” always resulted in “sinister designs” that “betray the interests of the people.” This linking, or severing of the link, between representatives and their constituents would become in many ways the central issue of debate between the Constitution’s defenders and its critics.
For neither did Madison want the system of representation to operate on a small scale. By altering the equation so that you would have more people voting for fewer representatives, you would make it “more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried,” instead ending with candidates “who possess the most attractive merit.” To Madison’s confidence that an extended republic would produce more virtuous leaders, one might reply with his own skepticism concerning the presence of enlightened statesmen. Experience has not been kind to Madison’s optimism concerning leadership in an extended republic, and it should be said that critics at the time found his confidence misplaced and, given his dismissal of concern for ones locale as a minacious prejudice, more than a little insulting. To be fair to Madison, he did stipulate that local interests should be dealt with locally and federal power should extend only to matters that are common and aggregate to the whole, and even then that those powers should be carefully enumerated. Nonetheless, when comparing a small republic to an extended one, “the advantage consist[s] in the substitution of representatives whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices and schemes of injustice.”
Madison twists his argument in another way as well. On the one hand, by taking in a greater variety of interests the system of representation attenuates the influence of factions and makes it more likely that we will end up with persons more committed to the common good; on the other hand, by taking in more interests and making it unlikely that the people being represented know either each other or their representative, you foment distrust. “Besides other impediments, it may be remarked that, where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary.”
This point requires some reflection. It’s a truism that we have more difficulty trusting those we don’t know, but it’s also the case that we often distrust people we do know. I knew some of my colleagues well enough to know that when they said they were behind me all the way it typically meant that either they had a knife in hand or were engaged in a whispering campaign. To the degree I did trust them, I trusted them to do the wrong thing. Madison turns this problem of distrust into a political virtue: not being able to trust friend or enemy alike, the persistence of distrust will make it unlikely we can successfully hatch plans of oppression. The increased number of factions, mutually distrustful, is a guarantee against their invidiousness. Diversity, he believed, is the guarantor of liberty, just as the proliferation of religious sects was a greater guarantor of religious freedom than the first amendment could ever be.
Federalist #10 displays, I think, not merely a tension concerning the role of virtue among elected representatives, but also highlights the problem of trust in a democratic society. Madison turns the distrust created by anonymity into a virtue that helps protect liberty, but experience also indicates that high levels of distrust undermines the comity that makes democratic life possible, while also eroding confidence in the very institutions that make democratic systems work. This may be another instance, borrowing Madison’s words, where the cure is worse than the disease.
Madison also brings into stark relief the central issue that continues to bedevil our politics, and that is how we think about politics at scale. Note how disparagingly Madison characterizes local politics, and how certain he is that the smaller the scale the more benighted and mendacious its practitioners, and the larger the scale the more likely we will end up with politicians preeminent for virtue. This innovation concerning republican scale not only required people to accept that claim on faith, but also required that they accepted Madison’s assumptions concerning the traditional ways in which they worked and lived together with their neighbors. While modern technology and communications may on the one hand make his optimism concerning the formation of factions more justifiable, it on the other hand had unleashed the hypermobility that fulfills his idea by undermining commitments to the local and near-at-hand.
Finally, Madison’s adversarial system requires that all interests are more or less equally “organized and actuated.” Were it to happen — as it clearly has — that some interests can, in part because of their superior resources, out-organize and out-actuate their opponents, they would be able to dominate policy areas to the detriment of their competing groups. This advent of “interest group liberalism” may be a result of Madison’s vision, but it has not resulted in the just and virtuous republic he had hoped for.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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