Federalist No. 10 is an essay written by James Madison as the tenth of The Federalist Papers, a series of essays initiated by Alexander Hamilton arguing for the ratification of the United States Constitution. It was first published in the New York Daily Advertiser on November 22, 1787, under the name "Publius". Federalist No. 10 is among the most highly regarded works of American political thought.
No. 10 addresses how to reconcile citizens with interests contrary to the rights of others or inimical to the interests of the community as a whole. Madison saw factions as inevitable due to human nature: as long as people hold differing opinions and possess unequal amounts of wealth and property, they will form alliances with those most similar to them and may work against the public interest or infringe upon the rights of others. He thus asks how to guard against those dangers.
Federalist No. 10 continues the defense of an extended republic begun in Federalist No. 9. Madison argues that representation and the greater variety of interests in a large republic can make it harder for a factious majority to coordinate and violate the rights of minorities. Historians such as Charles A. Beard have read No. 10 as a rejection of direct democracy and factionalism in favor of representative democracy.
The Federalist is frequently cited by scholars and jurists in constitutional interpretation, although modern scholarship disputes how much authority the essays carry as evidence of the Constitution's original meaning. No. 10 has also figured in debates over political parties and campaign finance.
Background
Under the Articles of Confederation, the states retained sovereignty while Congress depended heavily on their compliance. Congress lacked an independent power to tax and ultimately failed to raise enough revenue to meet its expenses and service the debts incurred during the Revolutionary War.
Madison, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and others feared a break-up of the union and national bankruptcy. Like Washington, Madison felt the revolution had not resolved the social problems that had triggered it, and the excesses ascribed to the King were now being repeated by the state legislatures. In this view, Shays' Rebellion, an armed uprising in Massachusetts in 1786, was one, albeit extreme, example of "democratic excess" in the aftermath of the war.
A national convention was called for May 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation. Madison regarded abuses by state legislatures as a central cause of the crisis and proposed a federal veto over state laws; the Convention ultimately rejected that mechanism and relied instead on federal supremacy and preemption. The principal questions before the Convention included whether the states should remain sovereign, whether sovereignty should be transferred to the national government, or whether a settlement should rest somewhere in between. By mid-June, it was clear that the Convention was drafting a new plan of government around these issues—a constitution. Madison's Virginia Plan placed a strong national government at the center of the deliberations, but the Constitution that emerged rested on compromises among divergent state and national proposals. In a debate on June 26, Madison said that government ought to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority" and that unchecked democratic communities were subject to "the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions".Yates
Publication
September 17, 1787, marked the signing of the final document. By its own Article Seven, the Constitution drafted by the Convention needed ratification by at least nine of the thirteen states, through special conventions held in each state. Anti-Federalist writers began to publish essays and letters arguing against ratification; for instance, "Cato" and "Brutus" debuted in New York papers on September 27 and October 18, 1787, respectively. Alexander Hamilton recruited James Madison and John Jay to write a series of pro-ratification letters in response.
Like most of the Federalist essays, No. 10 first appeared in a newspaper. It was first printed in the Daily Advertiser on November 22, 1787, under the name adopted by the Federalist writers, "Publius". In this it was unusual among the essays of Publius, as almost all of them first appeared in one of two other papers: the Independent Journal and the New-York Packet. Federalist No. 37, also by Madison, was the only other essay to appear first in the Advertiser.
Considering the importance later ascribed to the essay, it was reprinted on a limited scale. On November 23, it appeared in the Packet and the next day in the Independent Journal. Outside New York City, it made four appearances in early 1788: January 2 in The Pennsylvania Gazette, January 10 in the Hudson Valley Weekly, January 15 in the Lansingburgh Northern Centinel, and January 17 in the Albany Gazette. Though this number of reprintings was typical for The Federalist essays, many other essays, both Federalist and Anti-Federalist, saw much wider distribution.Kaminski and Saladino, Vol XIV, p. 175.
On January 1, 1788, the publishing company J. & A. McLean announced that it would publish the first 36 of the essays in a single volume. This volume, titled The Federalist, was published on March 22, 1788. George Hopkins's 1802 edition identified Madison, Hamilton, and Jay as the authors of the series, with two later printings dividing the work by author. In 1818, James Gideon published a third edition containing corrections by Madison, who by that time had completed his two terms as president of the United States.
Henry B. Dawson's edition of 1863 sought to collect the original newspaper articles, though he did not always find the first instance. It was much reprinted, albeit without his introduction.Ford, p. xl. Paul Leicester Ford's 1898 edition included a table of contents that summarized the essays, with the summaries again used to preface their respective essays. The first date of publication and the newspaper name were recorded for each essay. Jacob E. Cooke's 1961 edition reproduces the newspaper texts, records textual and numbering variants, and remains a standard scholarly edition.Throughout Storing, for instance, and relied upon by De Pauw, pp. 202–204. For Ball, p. xlvii, it is the "authoritative edition" and "still stands as the most complete scholarly edition".
Arguments Definition and causes of faction Federalist No. 10 continues the discussion of the question broached in Hamilton's Federalist No. 9. Hamilton there addressed the destructive role of a faction in breaking apart the republic. The question Madison answers, then, is how to eliminate the negative effects of faction. Madison defines a faction as "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority 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."Federalist No. 10. p. 56 of the Dawson edition at Wikisource. He also traces faction to differences of opinion in political life, including disputes over preferred regimes and religions.
Madison argues that "the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property."Dawson 1863, p. 58. He states, "Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society." Providing some examples of the distinct interests, Madison identified a landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, and "many lesser interests". Madison insists that they all belonged to "different classes" that were "actuated by different sentiments and views." Thus, Madison argues, these different classes would be prone to make decisions in their own interest, and not for the public good. A law regarding private debts, for instance, would be "a question to which the creditors are parties on one side, and the debtors on the other." To this question, and to others like it, Madison notes that, though "justice ought to hold the balance between them," the interested parties would reach different conclusions, "neither with a sole regard to justice and the public good."
Like the Anti-Federalists who opposed him, Madison was substantially influenced by the work of Montesquieu, though Madison and Montesquieu disagreed on the question addressed in this essay. Madison also drew important insights about faction from David Hume, but recent scholarship cautions against treating his thought as simply Humean: John Witherspoon, Francis Hutcheson, and Thomas Reid also shaped his understanding of self-government.
Remedies for faction Madison first theorizes that there are two ways to limit the damage caused by faction: either remove the causes of faction or control its effects. He then describes the two methods to remove the causes of faction. The first is destroying liberty, which would work because "liberty is to faction what air is to fire", but Madison rejects it as a remedy worse than the disease: liberty is essential to political life, just as air is "essential to animal life".
The second option—giving every citizen the same opinions, passions, and interests—is impracticable. Madison links unequal property holdings to differing human faculties and calls the protection of those faculties—not economic inequality itself—"the first object of government". He also identifies religious, political, and personal attachments as sources of faction. Madison concludes that the damage caused by faction can be limited only by controlling its effects.
Madison treats majority faction as the central constitutional danger: a minority faction can ordinarily be defeated by vote, whereas a factious majority can use popular government itself to sacrifice rights or the public good. He offers two ways to check majority factions: prevent the "existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time" or render a majority faction unable to act.Federalist No. 10. p. 60 of the Dawson edition at Wikisource. Madison concludes that a small democracy cannot avoid the dangers of majority faction because small size means that undesirable passions can easily spread to a majority of the people, which can then enact its will through the democratic government.
Madison states, "The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man",Federalist No. 10. p. 57 of the Dawson edition at Wikisource. so the cure is to control their effects. He argues that this is not possible in a pure democracy but is possible in a republic. By pure democracy, he means a system in which every citizen votes directly on laws, and by republic, he means a society in which citizens elect a small body of representatives who then vote on laws. Madison argues that representation may "refine and enlarge" public views, while acknowledging that representatives may themselves pursue factious interests.
The extended republic He then argues in favor of a large republic over a small republic as a means of choosing "fit characters"Federalist No. 10. p. 62 of the Dawson edition at Wikisource. to represent the public's voice. In a large republic, where the number of voters and candidates is greater, the probability of electing competent representatives is higher. The voters have a wider choice. It would also be easier for candidates to fool voters in a small republic than in a large one.
Modern voting theory has treated Madison's claim about the greater probability of a "fit choice" as a testable distinction between direct and representative democracy.