Federalist 10 was one of the Federalist Papers, a collection of 85 essays that were published in New York to encourage ratification of the newly drafted Constitution. This essay is taught in classrooms across the country and often referred to as the most important. So what's it about?
Taking us through the ideas of faction, republicanism, and Madison's inability to predict Facebook are Jeffrey Rosen, President of the National Constitution Center, Alison LaCroix, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and our dear friend Ryan Werenka, AP Government and Politics teacher at Troy High School in Michigan.
Click here to listen to our episode on the Federalist and Antifederalist Papers.
Transcript
Nick Capodice: I just wanted to tell you I was talking to my sister and she asked, you know, hey, what episode are you working on? And I was like, I'm kind of working on this one about Federalist ten, you know? You know what that is? And she was like, um, I imagine it continues the thoughts espoused in Federalist nine.
Hannah McCarthy: I mean, that's not the worst guess.
Nick Capodice: Everyone in New York was like, man, I thought nine was going to be the last one. How many more of these are they going to do? 76 [00:00:30]? You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And today, yes, we are talking about Federalist ten, the essay that is considered by many, not all, to be the most significant of the Federalist Papers.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, so we've done an episode on the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist papers. There's a link in the show notes for anyone who's curious. Can we just do a super quick summary of what these are? Absolutely.
Jeffrey Rosen: The [00:01:00] Federalist Papers were written to defend the ratification of the Constitution, the constitutions proposed in Philadelphia on September 17th, 1787. And then it comes time for the people to decide whether or not to ratify it.
Alison LaCroix: They were essays, newspaper pieces written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, and their purpose was to convince New York electors, New York delegates, and sort of the New York reading public more broadly to vote for Pro-constitution [00:01:30] delegates to the New York ratification convention.
Jeffrey Rosen: I'm Jeffrey Rosen, and I'm the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center.
Alison LaCroix: I'm Alison Lacroix, and I'm a professor of law at the University of Chicago.
Nick Capodice: The Constitution was proposed. It required nine of the 13 states to ratify it, for it to become the law of the land. And New York. New York was a big state. It was an influential state, and people weren't sure which way it was going to go.
Jeffrey Rosen: New York is a swing state. It [00:02:00] wasn't obvious that it was going to ratify the Constitution. It split between the Hamiltonian Federalists and Anti-Federalists led by Governor George Clinton. Aaron Burr is among those as well. So Hamilton has a really important job, which is to persuade the New York ratifying convention actually to ratify it. And unless he succeeds, the Constitution may not go into effect. They are op eds. They're they're they're thoughtful. They're they're definitely deliberative and deep defenses of the Constitution. [00:02:30] But Hamilton and Madison are writing to persuade, and that's what makes it so exciting to read The Federalist Papers.
Hannah McCarthy: So often on this show, we're talking about the intent of the framers, why they set things up the way they did. And these are 85 essays that do just that, which is why we recommend them heartily. Right. But what is so special about Federalist ten? Even before I had read The Federalist Papers, I'm pretty sure that I had heard that fed ten [00:03:00] was like the important one for some reason.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, of all the papers, it is the one most often included in middle school and high school syllabi. Not to mention it being on the list of required docs for AP gov. But before we jump into Federalist ten specifically, which was one of the 29 essays written by James Madison, Hamilton did the rest. John Jay did five. I want to quickly bring up some stuff about how we refer to the collection as a whole.
Alison LaCroix: You really see people starting to call the whole collection The Federalist [00:03:30] Papers. Around the middle of the 20th century, um, Clinton Rossiter was one of the editors of a very influential edition that got published then. So historians tend to call them The Federalist or The Federalist essays.
Hannah McCarthy: So we call them The Federalist Papers. But that's a relatively new phenomenon. Yeah.
Nick Capodice: In 1961, Clinton Rossiter, historian, published the collection and titled it The Federalist Papers. And the name Stuck and Why The Federalist Papers? So, yeah, the Federalist [00:04:00] Party officially hadn't started yet, but this name, Federalist, implied a coalition of people who supported ratification of the Constitution and generally generally supported a stronger federal government, as opposed to the states doing everything.
Alison LaCroix: So I think you had people in the broader public in the middle of the 20th century reading these and talking about them, and kind of an invigorated sense of interest in the essays or the papers as they were called. And then I think Federalist ten really kind [00:04:30] of captured where some political thinkers and sort of social scientists were, because it seemed like it was about what we would now call interest group pluralism.
Hannah McCarthy: What does Allison mean by interest group pluralism?
Nick Capodice: Well, pluralism is the idea that people with different opinions and of different backgrounds can all participate in a society together. And interest group pluralism is basically when you've got a bunch of people in a country, they all want different things, right. [00:05:00] And what's going to happen is people are going to get together with other people who want the same thing, and they're going to work together and debate and bargain as a group, an interest group, to make that thing happen. And this grouping up is what Federalist ten is all about. It's all about one magic word.
Hannah McCarthy: What's the magic word?
Jeffrey Rosen: The central warning of Federalist ten is the danger of faction faction [00:05:30] factions. Faction factions are what the framers most fear.
Nick Capodice: And to understand what they are, let's hear the words of the man who wrote the essay.
Jeffrey Rosen: This is James Madison in Federalist ten by a faction. I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest, adverse to [00:06:00] the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
Hannah McCarthy: All right, let me see if I can say that another way. Madison believes a faction is a group of people who have a shared interest, and that interest specifically violates the rights of other people or goes against the better good of the community.
Nick Capodice: That's a pretty darn good paraphrase, Hannah.
Hannah McCarthy: Just to double check here. Factions are not the same things as parties, [00:06:30]
Nick Capodice: Alison says no.
Alison LaCroix: I mean, he meant groups in society, but I don't think he meant the way. Again, in the modern era, we tend to think like, oh, factions. So that's Republicans and Democrats or that's people who live in cities or that's women or Southerners or, you know, African Americans. I think his notion was that they are sort of any group that, in his view, was. Is kind of splitting up the citizenry. [00:07:00]
Nick Capodice: However, we didn't have any political parties when we got started, but they did happen almost immediately. And pretty soon the Federalists are saying the Jeffersonian Republicans are a faction, and the Jeffersonians are saying, I know you are, but what am I? You guys are the faction.
Jeffrey Rosen: So there's a big dispute about whether or not parties are factions or not. And each side says the other guy is a faction. And that sets in motion this series of question about whether or not parties are good ways of aggregating [00:07:30] common interests and serving the good as a whole, or whether they represent, um, forms of faction. The Federalist paper doesn't answer those question, but it does tell us that whatever factions are there, the main threat to the Union. And what's so significant about Federalist ten is that at the end of their lives, all the main framers are concerned about whether or not the Republic will survive because they fear that factions may overtake the Union.
Hannah McCarthy: So if he wasn't talking about parties initially, [00:08:00] what kinds of groups did Madison think were splitting up the citizenry? What did he think would theoretically take over the union?
Jeffrey Rosen: Well, let's ask what what did the framers have in mind when they talked about factions and they had in mind something called Shays Rebellion? So just before the Constitutional Convention meets in western Massachusetts, armed mobs of debtors who can't pay their debts because the inflation that followed the Revolutionary [00:08:30] War are mobbing the courthouses and closing down the system of justice. And this vision of armed, violent mobs who are fighting the rule of law is so threatening to the framers that they determined to call the Constitution to avoid precisely that danger.
Hannah McCarthy: All right, Shays Rebellion, I know about this one. We talked about it in our Articles of Confederation episode. Since the articles created a very small federal government and left everything up to the [00:09:00] states to decide for themselves, some states made the themselves decision to not pay taxes, so there was no money to pay soldiers who had fought in the Revolutionary War. And the whole thing was just a real mess.
Nick Capodice: It certainly was.
Hannah McCarthy: And that fits Madison's notion of factions, because it was an armed mob shutting down the government. Shays and others feel it is in their best interest, but opposes the interests of the much larger community. Yeah, so this [00:09:30] essay is about factions, and it says that they are a problem. Does Madison think we can prevent them in any way?
Nick Capodice: Um, not really. No. Madison says that factions are, quote, sown in the nature of man, end quote. So they're going to happen. People are going to get together and try to make changes that benefit them. We are humans. We want things.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. So what do we do?
Nick Capodice: Well, Madison lists two remedies to the ailment of faction. And I'll read his words here. Quote the one by destroying [00:10:00] the liberty which is essential to its existence, the other by giving every citizen the same opinions, same passions, and the same interests.
Hannah McCarthy: That's not going to fly.
Nick Capodice: No, it certainly will not. But then he goes on to say, okay, I think we're going to have him. Nothing we can do. But you know what? Maybe, just maybe, that's not a problem.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, why are you playing corporate inspo music under this?
Nick Capodice: Just maybe this system we're [00:10:30] making right here is kind of the only one that can handle factions. And this. This is why Federalist ten is so important. It outlines why the proposed democratic republic in which we now live just might outlast all the others. And I'm going to tell you why right after this break.
Hannah McCarthy: But before that break, I just want to remind our listeners that it is our podcast fundraiser right now, and you can support our endless quest to educate the American public. And that includes [00:11:00] us about how things work in this country. You can get a Civics 101 hat. That's right. And Nhpr.org Merino wool socks with a $10 a month donation. Check it out at our website, civics101podcast.org. And thank you, thank you thank.
Hannah McCarthy: We're back. We're talking Federalist ten. And Nick, we were just at the part where you [00:11:30] tell me why Madison thinks the Constitution is just so great.
Nick Capodice: I was, I was and to talk about that, we've got to talk about the people who did not think the Constitution was all that.
Ryan Werenka: I like to use Federalist ten as a counterpoint to Brutus number one.
Hannah McCarthy: Wait, is that Ryan?
Nick Capodice: It is indeed. This is Ryan Werenka. He's a dear friend of the show. He's an AP govt teacher at Troy High School in Michigan. He was in our episode helping students prep for the AP gov exam and he mentioned Brutus. [00:12:00] Brutus one is an Anti-Federalist essay Brutus was written by, it is believed, Robert Yates, also of New York, and his essays Against the Constitution came out before the Federalist Papers so Madison could respond to his arguments. And they all used pseudonyms. By the way, Madison, Hamilton and Jay went under the pen name Publius, and there were a host of names for the Anti-Federalists like Brutus or Cato Sentinel.
Hannah McCarthy: I think my favorite name is a [00:12:30] Maryland farmer.
Nick Capodice: A Maryland farmer.
Nick Capodice: You know, he thought the president and the Senate should serve for life.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, okay. Well, never judge a book by its cover, I guess.
Nick Capodice: Anyways, back to Brutus one.
Ryan Werenka: Brutus has numerous objections to the Constitution that it's going to create a large centralized republic, and the states would suffer the state legislatures and the state, you know, courts are going to be powerless and meaningless. And that the, you know, large republic is just too far away from [00:13:00] the public to really, truly represent it. Madison argues that the large republic is actually better. Um, and it would start to move all the states in the same direction. And because of the size of the Republic, it's going to require openness and cooperation across state lines and regional lines.
Hannah McCarthy: So, in other words, because we are so big, if we're ever going to get anything done, we have to all work together.
Nick Capodice: Exactly. And Ryan says in his class, he equates Federalist [00:13:30] ten with the last rap battle in eight mile. Have you seen it here?
Eminem: Tell these people something they don't know about me.
Hannah McCarthy: Like where Eminem is basically saying, you know, like all that stuff you're saying about me is true and I'm proud of it.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. And Madison is the Eminem in this story. He sort of flips the script on Brutus. Brutus says the federal government will be too far from the people. Okay, maybe that's true, but we have representatives. They are going to be close to the people. And then all those representatives come together from their different states and they hash [00:14:00] everything out. And also speaking of size, our large size as a nation will take care of factions as well. Here is Jeff Rosen again.
Jeffrey Rosen: Madison says, in fact, and, um, a large republic is better in this regard because in a very large republic, it'll be hard for factions to discover each other, and by the time they do, they'll get tired and go home. So the difficulty of having factions be able to coordinate when you've got a really big territory like America is [00:14:30] actually a great way of dissipating the passions of factions and having a cooling mechanism and letting people have sober. Second thoughts. Isn't that amazing? That's, uh, these two crucial things allow for a republic in a big territory. First representation. And second, the fact that the large size just makes it hard for passionate factions to organize and discover each other, and therefore will ensure the rule of reason rather than passion. [00:15:00]
Hannah McCarthy: I mean, Madison didn't know that Facebook would happen. Nick.
Nick Capodice: I promise you I will get back to that Hannah.
Hannah McCarthy: You better. So Madison is saying will be a representative democracy, not a direct democracy, and we will be a federal republic. And that is why it will work.
Nick Capodice: And we've all got to be republicans.
Hannah McCarthy: Small r Republicans, as in the political philosophy that goes back to Athens. I mean, I imagine you're not talking about modern day GOP Republicans.
Nick Capodice: Here [00:15:30] is Alison Lacroix again.
Alison LaCroix: And so republicanism for Madison, as for lots of other people in that founding generation, smaller republicanism. And it's an idea. It's an ideology that has this content and it's content about the public good virtue that people have to be selfless. Now it's realist in that Madison and lots of others recognize that that was going to be hard, that people were would want to be off, you know, making money or doing whatever they wanted to do for their sort of private gain. But republicanism was [00:16:00] about and this is part of why they invoked so many of those classical authors and texts, was this notion that one would sort of put the public good above one's own individual good?
Hannah McCarthy: Nick.
Nick Capodice: What Hannah.
Hannah McCarthy: Um. All right. It sounds really good. Small are republicanism is great on paper. You know, civic virtue. Everybody working toward the common good, respect for the rule of law, all of those [00:16:30] lovely ideas. And don't get me wrong, the Federalist Papers were persuasive. New York ended up ratifying the Constitution, and here we are in a studio talking about it. But these ideas have a couple of gaps in them. After 250 years, the idea that a faction cannot pick up steam because people are far away has a rather large internet sized hole in it.
Nick Capodice: It does.
Jeffrey Rosen: Discord and Twitter or whatever it's called now. X [00:17:00] and Instagram represent Madison's nightmare. His entire vision for avoiding the dangers of faction is speed bumps and roadblocks that will allow reason slowly to disseminate across the land. And in particular, he has in mind a class of enlightened journalists that he calls the literati. People like himself and Hamilton, who write these long, complicated essays in the newspapers and allow people to deliberate with their [00:17:30] representatives in coffeehouses and ensure slow, thoughtful deliberation over time. Social media is the opposite of that. In fact, it's it's it's literally a dystopian vision that Madison would have hoped to avoid.
Nick Capodice: So Jeff opened his conversation with me talking about Shays Rebellion. So I had to end it by asking about the modern political climate. Maybe Madison wouldn't call our two parties factions, but what about the far [00:18:00] edges of a party? Like, what about the recent example of an armed insurrection on the nation's Capitol?
Archival: Breach of the Capitol, breach of the Capitol, requesting additional resources on the East side as they've broken into that window and they're trying to kick it in, will not be kept out of this chamber by thugs, mobs or threats.
Jeffrey Rosen: Whatever a faction is armed mobs representing a minority [00:18:30] of the population that are threatening the rule of law and trying to subvert the Constitution, are it? That's exactly what the Constitution is designed to avoid. By any measure, an armed insurrection against the processes of government is a faction, and Madison would have tried to resist it at all costs.
Nick Capodice: Jeff says the fringes of today's parties are arguably in the thralls of faction in a way that Madison feared. But Ryan told [00:19:00] me that even though a faction can be created on discord in five minutes, he still teaches. Federalists tend to his students, and he still feels it stands the test of time.
Ryan Werenka: I think in a modern context, fed ten really does still kind of hold up. Um, especially when you're looking at, you know, the, the internet being used to create factions, uh, across state lines on social media platforms and things like that. Um, but in a way, Federalists ten Madison's proving his point. These factions could be created or are being created, [00:19:30] but you're ending up seeing them out in the open and across regional lines. So really, Madison's argument in Federalist ten proved to be pretty accurate.
Hannah McCarthy: I think one of my favorite things about The Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist papers is that they're a debate in writing. Nobody got everything they wanted. Hamilton and Madison admitted imperfections. They acknowledged that every other [00:20:00] republic before us failed. Eventually, they were honest about their fears of what could happen to this new nation. They knew that people make mistakes.
Alison LaCroix: I mean, one could see that as an argument for again, today, we would think of it as democracy in the broadest possible sense, right, that it's not the case that what the maximum number of voters at any one time might say is right. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the public good. But, you know, if [00:20:30] we don't have true representation, we know that that's much farther from the public good. So that might be one thing to take away that he thinks, um, you know, they're always going to be these passions and interests, but that there might be structures that can mediate them. I mean, I find that. Somewhat comforting to the idea that it's not like the founders were operating in a world where everybody was this virtuous, public minded person. They weren't. They knew people weren't. So they were saying [00:21:00] things that were their sort of best educated guesses, not maxims handed down from the mountaintop. But they were also realists. And I think that's a hopeful vision.
Nick Capodice: Well, that is a gentle touch of Federalist ten, though there is a whole lot more for you to explore. I couldn't even get into the people who think that it's not such a big deal. I'll [00:21:30] do that another time if you want. This episode is made by me Nick Capodice with You Hannah McCarthy. Thank you. Christina Phillips is our senior producer and Rebecca Lavoie, our executive producer. music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, Scott Holmes, Ikimashoo Aoi, Howard Harper Barnes, Timothy Infinite, Spring Gang, Francis Wells, Bio Unit, Asura, and that Brooklyn Farmer, Chris Zabriskie. Civics 101 is a quartet, not a faction, and it's a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. [00:22:00]