In The Federalist 10, James Madison seeks
to justify a particular kind of representative democracy (‘republican
government’) on the basis that it offers the best chance of controlling the
mischief of factions. Explain and evaluate Madison’s argument.
In The Federalist 10, James Madison argues
that, as long as certain basic features of the human species obtain, there will
be a division of society into “factions” with interests inimical to other
factions and to the “public good”. His claim is that a republican government is
the best palliative to this problem because it is the ultimate compromise: like
a “pure democracy”, it can defeat minority factions “by regular vote”, and like
a more oligarchical system, it has means to prevent a majority faction from gaining too much power.
In this essay, I express strong opposition to Madison’s arguments. My
overall thesis is that, whether or not Madison’s arguments were justified pragmatically, they are badly flawed theoretical arguments. Firstly, I argue
that he was almost entirely wrong about the faction-negating effects of size, because
he ignored the role of cultural and economic unity in degrading the “mischief
of factions”. This also undermines his absolute
hostility to “pure democracy”, which is not fundamentally unstable in small communities
or societies. Secondly, I argue that, while Madison is correct that inequality
generates factions, he was seriously misguided about the inevitability of the kind of inequality that existed in his time,
and wrong to overlook the simple ‘removing-the-cause’ strategy of increasing equality. Finally, since I
disagree with Madison’s Platonic view that representatives chosen only from the
aristocratic class can know the “public good”, I argue that factional uprisings
to broaden representation are not always “improper or wicked”.
In The Federalist 10, James Madison identifies two possible types of
solution to “the mischiefs of faction, “removing its causes” or “controlling
its effects”, and argues that only the latter is viable. [Madison, 1787: 1]. He
explains that there are two methods of carrying out the first type of solution
– destroying liberty or making all citizens identical – and that both are
completely untenable. Destroying liberty would be an unthinkable overstep, and the
“second expedient” would be impossible, since “as long as the reason of man
continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions
will be formed” [1]. This leads him to the final inference that “the causes of faction cannot be removed and
that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects” [2].
For Madison, the best way of
controlling the effects of faction is, of course, a republican system – a
system involving delegation of government “to a small number of citizens
elected by the rest” over a very wide territory [2]. Madison’s central thesis
seems to be that the republican system is the best compromise between a “pure
democracy” (like Athens), which can defeat minority
factions straightforwardly, and an oligarchy (more like Republican Rome), which
opens up the possibility of weakening the power of majority factions. He illustrates this point by outlining the ways
in which a republican system differs from a pure democracy. Whilst both are
“popular governments” in some sense, a republic delegates government “to a
small number of citizens”, and Madison believes this process will “refine and
enlarge the public views” since the chosen citizens “will be least likely to
sacrifice [the public interest] to temporary or partial considerations” [2-3].
The other difference between
a pure democracy and the republic is that the republic is far larger. Madison
believes this is a significant advantage for negating the mischiefs of factions,
for two reasons: the greater number of citizens should “make it more difficult
for vicious candidates to practise the vicious arts by which elections are too
often carried”, and an extended sphere makes it “less probable that a majority
of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens”
[3].
As I explained in the
introduction, I have several problems with Madison’s arguments, and one of the biggest
concerns exactly this reasoning about the ideal size of the republic. As Robert
Dahl writes in his excellent 2005 paper, “James Madison: Republican or
Democrat?”, “if we consider the [argument about size] as an empirical
proposition in political science […] two centuries of experience since then
flatly contradicts his proposition” [Dahl, 2005: 445]. Madison went so wrong, I
believe, because he ignored one key consideration from his calculation: the necessity
of socio-cultural and economic unity– what Robert Putnam calls “social capital” [Putnam, 1993] – for
any society which hopes to avoid factional dissension. The American Civil War
broke out less than 80 years after Federalist
10 was published because there was a massive division of economic interests between the agricultural South, and
the more mercantile North. Today, as Dahl himself points out, some of the most
successful democratic societies – arguably the least faction-prone democratic societies – are ones with relatively
small populations: “the three Scandinavian countries, together with Finland,
the Netherlands, Switzerland, and New Zealand” [Dahl, 2005: 445].[1] As
Dahl also notes, this correlation between smallness of polity and cohesion even
extends to very small democratic communities.
His own evidence for this comes from a 2004 analysis of town meetings in
Vermont,[2] yet
far more significant is the evidence from the massive anarchist literature on small-scale
direct democracy: for example, the accounts of the communes in Revolutionary
Catalonia, or contemporary examples of workplace democracy, such as that of the
Mondragon Corporation in Spain.[3]
Madison’s failure to realise
the complexities of the ‘size question’ is also what leads to his simplistic
dismissal of “pure democracy”. The easier promotion of “social capital” in smaller
democratic societies clearly gives part of the explanation as to why the direct
democracy in 5th and early 4th Century Athens was able to
function at all: Athens was a polity just small enough for its citizens to have
a robust sense of civic purpose and unity of interest.
Of course, Madison was right
that a larger jurisdiction increases diversity, and thereby probably vitiates
the development of an impassioned majority faction,[4] but
this only brings us to a bigger problem: that the whole argument is premised on
a self-serving fatalism about inequality.
After proclaiming that factions “are thus sown into the nature of man”, Madison
suddenly brings up a very important truth about the role of inequality: “The
most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal
distribution of property”, which divides people “into different classes,
actuated by different sentiments and views” [Madison, 1787: 1-2]. The reason he
doesn’t see this as self-contradiction is perhaps that he took it for granted
that increasing equality (somehow) means destroying liberty. But, whatever the
case, it seems to me that this tells us something significant about the subtext
of The Federalist 10: at its heart,
the paper is an expression of Madison’s base fear that if the American
democracy was too strong, it would undermine the interests of his faction,
the landed aristocracy. Indeed, Madison’s remarks in the “Secret Debates of
the Federal Constitution”, which also took place in 1787, reveal thoughts along
exactly these lines: “In England, at this day, if elections were open to all
classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. [To
prevent this] our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the
country against innovation […] to
protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” [as transcribed by
Robert Yates, 1927 print].
As Noam Chomsky points out,
Madison differs in this way from one of his main influences, Aristotle.
Aristotle also worried about the poor in a democracy infringing upon the
property rights of the rich, but he thought the solution was increasing
equality [Chomsky, 2012: 237]. In
fact, in book VI, Aristotle writes the following: “The true friend of the
people should see that they not be too poor, for extreme poverty lowers the
character of democracy; measures therefore should be taken which will give them
lasting prosperity” [Aristotle, 1999: 147].
The extent of equality is,
of course, the other major reason that the Scandinavian countries have such high
social capital. It also gives us another part of the explanation as to why
Athenian direct democracy could succeed at all: the Gini coefficient for the
Athenian citizen population in late 4th Century Athens has been
calculated at 0.708, “more equal than Florence in 1427 (0.788) or the USA in
1998 (0.794)” [Ober, 2010: 13].
This brings me to my final
point of disagreement with Madison. I don’t, in fact, believe that all
factional uprisings are “wicked or improper” [Madison, 1787: 5]. Indeed, I
think that factional uprisings of a certain kind have, since 1787, made our
society more just. The first two waves of the feminist movement were
“factional”, as was the powerful labour activism of the early 20th
Century, as well as the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Although there is always
the danger of “an interested and overbearing majority”, in practice, I feel
that an equally significant problem throughout history has been loosening the grip of the elites on the system, who, in reality, never
possess the higher Platonic wisdom they claim.
Reference List
Aristotle
(1999). The Politics, trans. Benjamin
Jowett, Batoche Books, Kitchener.
Chomsky,
Noam (2012). Power Systems: Conversations
on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Global Threats to U.S. Empire, Metropolitan
Books, New York.
Clayton,
Edward (2002). “Aristotle: The Politics”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Accessed from:
<http://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-pol/>
Dahl,
Robert (2005). “James
Madison: Republican or Democrat?”, Perspectives on Politics, 3(3):
439-448. Accessed from:
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/3689017>
Madison,
James (1787). The Federalist 10, transcript
from the National Archives Online Portal: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=10&page=transcript.
Putnam,
Robert (1993). Making Democracy Work, Princeton
University Press.
Notes of the Secret Debates
of the Federal Convention of 1787, transcribed by Robert Yates. Accessed from:
<http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/yates.asp>
[1] It
should, of course, be noted that when talking about factions in today’s
context, anachronism is inevitable. I think Dahl here is using “faction” to
refer to extreme parties and separatist groups – perhaps Tea Partyers, Neo-nazis,
communists, etc.
[2] In
particular, Frank Bryan’s 2004 book Real
Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How it Works
[3] The
best known of these accounts of 1936 Spain is, of course, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.
[4]
Mainstream political parties in big Western countries do their best to unite
people, but even if they do, it is very often passionless, merely symbolic unity.
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