Publius calls the American “empire” “the most interesting in the world”: Americans will decide “the important question” of whether “societies of men” can establish “good government by reflection and choice,” not “accident and force.” Can human beings actually govern themselves well? If American prove they can, it will be “a revolution without parallel in human society,” a new order of, and for, the ages. Americans are moderns discontented with previous and existing political orders, ancient and modern, none of which has fulfilled the promise of establishing a political regime that rules according to reason, the distinctively human characteristic.
Perhaps the primary question concerning the practicability of good self-government is union, not only of the American states but of civil society itself. Divisions among the states, particularly the northern versus the southern, would render Americans “formidable only to each other,” pawns of the great powers. Divisions within civil society can lead to faction, convulsion, insurrection—the violation of the very natural rights that governments are designed to secure. If “liberty is to faction as air is to fire,” then republican civil liberty easily veers toward incivility and to the self-immolation of self-government.
The “new science of politics” offers inventions of prudence that can control if not eliminate faction. A faction is the opposite of reasonable government. It is a group united by an impulse of passion or of interest averse to the citizens’ rights or to the “permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” “Interest” may be good or bad, but faction can only be bad.
Hobbes knows how to annihilate faction. End liberty and impose uniform opinions upon everyone. Hobbes’s cure is not only worse than the disease, it is a likely cause of the disease, as Federalist 63 argues. Publius prefers to control faction’s effects by involving “the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government,” but in a manner that will enable reason, which is not in itself powerful, to rule faction.
The problem with self-government, then, is that it contradicts the principle, the interested party must not judge his own case. But without self-government, natural right will be violated, the purpose of government itself nullified. Government must really govern. It must also govern itself. How can public reason control public passion, in government and in society generally?
Although the causes of faction cannot justly be removed, faction’s effects can be controlled. Republican government itself controls minority factions, inasmuch as republicanism finally rests on popular sovereignty and the opinions of popular majorities., who sooner or later perceive designs against their own interests. But what of majority faction? Central to the tenth Federalist is the observation that “neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control” of majorities that would behave factiously. Democracy—popular government whereby the citizens meet as a body to legislate and judge—will destroy minority rights—most notably the rights of the philosophical, the most reasonable, who may be ‘hemlocked’ one day, memorialized the next.
The American republic, by contrast, will be unmixed, commercial, extensive, compound, and federal, founded upon consent and the rule of law (i.e., upon reasonableness). Reasonableness is the key: although Madison is not so optimistic as to suppose that a radical Enlightenment, every-man-a-philosopher-king regime could work (“the most rational government will not find it a superfluous advantage to have the prejudices of the community on its side”), reasonableness, government by consent and by law, in part means assent to the self-evident truth of natural right. This is the significance of the Madisonian argument on property as a natural as well as a civil and economic feature of human life. Protection of what is truly ‘one’s own,’ for a human being, is first and foremost the protection of the distinctively human faculties (evident to themselves) and, secondarily, the protection of the fruits of the exercise of those faculties. Reasonable (therefore good because enactive of human nature) self-government starts there.
An unmixed republic: this is not the Aristotelian/Polybian/British ‘mixed regime,’ with different hereditary classes enshrined in different governmental branches, an arrangement that gives faction (in moral terms, passion) too much official sanction. In the British system, government is sovereign, not the people; the factions in the government divide up the spoils taken from the people. (Hence Paine: the English Constitution’s Bill of Rights is a Bill of Wrongs.) In America, all three branches will be republican, elected by the people or appointed by their elected representatives.
A commercial republic: this is not a military republic, a Sparta, a Rome (a France, some might mutter, a few years later). As Montesquieu had argued in his Considerations, such regimes destroy themselves by succeeding, as vast conquests lead to the corruption of a free people and finally to the rule of an emperor. Commercial society will yield so many and varying interests that no Caesar can unite them behind him into an overbearing faction.
An extensive republic: representative government enables the sphere of popular government to be widened, resulting in a bigger ‘talent pool’ of potential representatives, a greater variety of interests. Better representatives will “refine and enlarge the public views,” extracting the reasonable part of public opinion from the passion, ‘amour-propre,’ factional part of it. A greater variety of interests will not coalesce into a single faction, which would lead to neo-Hobbesian calls for non-popular government, fatally compromising popular sovereignty itself and driving a wedge between popular sovereignty and natural right.
A compound republic: the government will avail itself of the new political science’s argument for separated and balanced powers within the government—roughly equivalent to the multifarious social order. The Constitution will be preserved not only by such moral virtues as the non-angelic representatives may possess, but by such “auxiliary precautions” as connect the interest of the officeholder with the constitutional purpose of the office he holds. Reasonable deal-doing will replace dictatorial passion.
A federal republic: the government of an extended republic will not ignore or, worse, interfere with the needs of local communities if the state governments share a portion of the people’s sovereignty with the federal government, exercising republican authority over objects known personally (not abstractly but reasonably) to the state legislators. Jefferson’s proposed ‘ward republics’ would enhance this system, although the constitutional function he envisions for them looks cumbersome.
Jefferson and Paine, though not necessarily Madison, expect the new political science to progress, along with all the other sciences. New and improved constitutions will come. This ‘progressivism’ or learning-by-experience is the ‘liberal’ version of the ‘conservative’ or Burkean appeal to tradition as experience. (Recall Bacon on the superior ‘antiquity’ of modern times.) Paine ripostes that tradition is the wrong kind of experience—experience in corruption, conquest, and tyranny. Going well beyond Madison, Paine believes politics to be unnatural. Like the American Founders, and unlike Rousseau, Paine regards sociality as natural. Left alone, men govern themselves tolerably well in civil society. Despotic governments arose when robber bands conquered the isolated societies of prehistory, inflicting the welfare-taxation state and hereditary usurpation on “the wholesome order of nature.” Fortunately, men can overthrow their oppressors, thereby awakening through conflict, their dormant capacities for self-government. A minimal representative government will imitate “the order and immutable laws of nature, and meets the reason of man in every respect” by selecting men in their prime—not kings, who are so often either too young or too old. Above all, human societies do not need leaders, those apes of military command loosed upon civilians.
The American Founders do not go so far in Enlightenment optimism as Paine does. One measure of this may be seen in Paine’s sometime preference for a unitary legislature, which Publius rejects because the legislature in a republic will tend to dominate the other branches, and therefore needs to check and balance itself with a bicameral structure. They do not go so far as Kant in their confidence in institutional arrangements; the people and their representative need not be angels, but they had better not be a nation of devils. And they surely do not go so far as Hegel in his confidence in reason, and consequent endorsement of a monarchy-cum-bureaucracy—a regime they would have recognized instantly as a brilliant disguise for some new tyranny, animated by a sort of megalomania. They do not lose reasonableness in a delusive rationalism, and so stay sane.
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