theatlantic | Madison and Hamilton believed that Athenian citizens had been swayed
by crude and ambitious politicians who had played on their emotions. The
demagogue Cleon was said to have seduced the assembly into being more
hawkish toward Athens’s opponents in the Peloponnesian War, and even the
reformer Solon canceled debts and debased the currency. In Madison’s
view, history seemed to be repeating itself in America. After the
Revolutionary War, he had observed in Massachusetts “a rage for paper
money, for abolition of debts, for an equal division of property.” That
populist rage had led to Shays’s Rebellion, which pitted a band of
debtors against their creditors.
Madison referred to impetuous
mobs as factions, which he defined in “Federalist No. 10” as a group
“united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest,
adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and
aggregate interests of the community.” Factions arise, he believed, when
public opinion forms and spreads quickly. But they can dissolve if the
public is given time and space to consider long-term interests rather
than short-term gratification.
To prevent factions from distorting public policy and threatening
liberty, Madison resolved to exclude the people from a direct role in
government. “A pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a
small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in
person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction,” Madison
wrote in “Federalist No. 10.” The Framers designed the American
constitutional system not as a direct democracy but as a representative
republic, where enlightened delegates of the people would serve the
public good. They also built into the Constitution a series of cooling
mechanisms intended to inhibit the formulation of passionate factions,
to ensure that reasonable majorities would prevail.
The people would directly elect the
members of the House of Representatives, but the popular passions of the
House would cool in the “Senatorial saucer,” as George Washington
purportedly called it: The Senate would comprise natural aristocrats
chosen by state legislators rather than elected by the people. And
rather than directly electing the chief executive, the people would vote
for wise electors—that is, propertied white men—who would ultimately
choose a president of the highest character and most discerning
judgment. The separation of powers, meanwhile, would prevent any one
branch of government from acquiring too much authority. The further
division of power between the federal and state governments would ensure
that none of the three branches of government could claim that it alone
represented the people.
According
to classical theory, republics could exist only in relatively small
territories, where citizens knew one another personally and could
assemble face-to-face. Plato would have capped the number of citizens
capable of self-government at 5,040. Madison, however, thought Plato’s
small-republic thesis was wrong. He believed that the ease of
communication in small republics was precisely what had allowed hastily
formed majorities to oppress minorities. “Extend the sphere” of a
territory, Madison wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties
and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole
will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if
such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel
it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each
other.” Madison predicted that America’s vast geography and large
population would prevent passionate mobs from mobilizing. Their
dangerous energy would burn out before it could inflame others.
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