Part ten can be found here.

In this post I examine the classical influence on the founding of America and the vision of James Madison.

Now we must jump many years to the founding of the American republic. It is not surprising to find that the founders of America were influenced by classical thought – and all the values of the Western intellectual and political tradition can be seen in the American State Papers and Federalist Papers, including debate, dissent, civic virtue, and the free exchange of ideas. The classical influence of early America can be discovered from the works they read, the architecture they built, and the documents they wrote. One obvious piece of evidence rests in the fact that the authors of the Federalist Papers wrote under the names of significant Roman leaders. Furthermore, many of the founders such as John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, were well versed in the classics and read Latin.

In America, constitutional government evolved from the idea of constitutional monarchy found in Europe. Although the founders envisioned a republic and not a democracy (they were very cautious of an extreme democracy), America finally became a popular democracy in 1828 with the election of Andrew Jackson. Nonetheless, at the beginning of American Republicanism was the conviction that consensual rule was possible and that governments existed to protect citizen’s natural rights and to promote the common good of all people.¹ This is the idea of classical liberalism and has become the social-political theory that stresses freedom from undue governmental interference and views the state as the guarantor of the basic liberties and rights of the individual. This is basically a classical idea; however, a thinker like Aristotle would see a closer relationship between the individual and the state.

In the early days of the American republic, there was much debate about the constitution itself. The parties were divided between those who wanted a stronger national government, the federalists, and those who wanted more sovereignty among the individual states – the antifederalists. The friends of the Constitution (the federalists) had the advantage of superior intellectual firepower. Among the federalists were the two most eminent men in America at the time, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.² Washington himself declared that the choice lay between the Constitution and disunion. Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay, under the joint pseudonym “Publius,” wrote a long series of newspaper essays explaining and extolling the new document.³ These essays were later published in book form and are considered the greatest intellectual defense of the Constitution by some of the early Republic’s greatest thinkers.

For example, James Madison, one of the writers of the Federalist Papers, was very concerned about the role of human nature and the propensity for people to divide into factions. For Madison, factions are different than regular political parties. He defines a faction as, “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or 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.”⁴ In other words, factions are those groups which will seek there own power illegitimately and disregard the rights of others in the process. Factions do not regard the democratic principle of equality as an important ideal nor understand or value the idea that in a democracy harmony is essential. People have to be united – a government for the people and by the people must first of all be supported by the people and truly believed in if it is going to work. Madison understands the corrosive effects of factions on a consensual government. Nonetheless, it seems to be part of human nature to divide into factions as soon as individuals are given the freedom to do so. Madison was concerned about how to keep a faction from becoming a tyranny on one hand and how to maintain fair representation on the other. But Madison understood that factions would be a problem to any liberal republic because it is so basic to the human instinct,

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions and many other points as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment of different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have in turn divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their most violent conflicts.⁵

Madison understands that factions are a part of any liberal society. He is also aware that there are only two solutions to the problem of factions. The first is to eliminate the cause of factions. But this would require the elimination of liberty, an unacceptable option. The other is to give every citizen the same interests, passions, and opinions – and this option is clearly impossible. Madison knows there will always be independent thinkers. So the third option for Madison is to control the effects of factions. Madison believes the best possibility for this rests in the rule of law and to allow factions a voice in their own government.⁶ He explains, “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.”⁷ Much like Aristotle, Madison understands the value of allowing differing parties a voice in their own government functioning under legitimate legal protection and constraints (consensual government always seeks a check on majority rule to ensure the rights of the minority). Of course, when factions are in the minority they are less likely to prevail in their evil intentions. Madison’s concern rests in what could happen if a faction became a majority. Madison concludes that a pure democracy can not protect itself from this phenomenon. “From this view of the subject it may be concluded that 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.”⁸ He goes on to explain,

A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.⁹

For Madison then, a pure democracy is a government in which every citizen participates, is small in size, and contains no check on majority rule. It is unclear, however, if any such government has existed because the ancient Athenians functioned under the rule of law, and was regulated by assembly, councils, and archons. Rome itself transformed from a republic (also under the rule of law) to an empire without becoming a direct democracy. Nonetheless, Athens was close to being a direct democracy and Thucydides does point out the mob mentality of the Athenians after the death of Pericles. But the point that a democracy can become a tyranny is a legitimate concern, the French revolution being the primary example. The ancient Greek political thinkers were all aware of the tyranny of the majority. And there was nothing more they hated than tyranny.

Next time, I will examine the particular definition of republic held by Madison.

1 Goodwin, Gerald, Richard Current, Paula A. Franklin. A History of the United States. 2^nd ed. (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1985), 119.

2 Ibid., 131.

3 Ibid.

4 The Federalist, Great Books Of The Western World, Vol. 43, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins, (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 50.

5 Ibid.

6 Hamilton believes most factions arise from differences between the propertied and non-propertied classes.

7 Ibid., 50.

8 Ibid. 51.

9 Ibid.