James Madison and the Balancing of Liberty and Faction

The American Founding wagered not on the perfection of man but on the management of his imperfections and passions. That, more than any abstract declaration of rights, is what sets the U.S. Constitution apart from many later charters born of revolutionary optimism. Where the French Revolution sought to regenerate man, the American Founders sought to restrain him. Their realism—shaped by Augustine’s divided will, Hume’s political psychology, and Montesquieu’s equilibrium of powers—assumed that the flaws of human nature could never be abolished, only balanced. It was, in this sense, one of the most brilliant and enduring innovations in constitutional design: a system built not upon virtue presumed, but upon vice anticipated.

It was, in this sense, one of the most brilliant and enduring innovations in constitutional design: a system built not upon virtue presumed, but upon vice anticipated.

Madison, absorbing this inclination, translated that moral philosophy into constitutional architecture—but he did not work in isolation. The Founders as a whole shared a sober view of human nature, forged from classical and Christian sources as much as from Enlightenment reason. Among others, Hamilton, Adams, and Washington all agreed that institutions must reckon with weakness, not presume virtue. Madison gave that insight its most systematic form. His republic would not rely on "angels", as he later wrote in Federalist No. 51, but on the “auxiliary precautions” of design—checks, balances, and scale. The Founders’ genius lay in turning a moral insight into a political mechanism: that freedom endures not because men are good, but because power is forced to reckon with power, interest with interest, and ambition with ambition.

Yet Madison also knew that no system, however ingenious, could abolish the deeper sources of political strife. In Federalist No. 10, published the previous year, he confronted the oldest threat to popular government—the tendency of liberty to dissolve into faction. “Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union,” he wrote, “none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.” The same realism that shaped his constitutional mechanics now guided his political psychology: the recognition that men’s differences in reason, passion, and property were not aberrations to be cured but permanent conditions to be managed. The friend of popular governments, he warned, is most alarmed when he sees their “propensity to this dangerous vice”. In other words, the peril to liberty was not tyranny alone, but liberty unrestrained—its tendency to dissolve into the very passions it had set free.

the peril to liberty was not tyranny alone, but liberty unrestrained—its tendency to dissolve into the very passions it had set free.

Madison’s analysis is not a lament for an unrealizable harmony; it is a design for living with discord. The causes of faction, he says, “are sown in the nature of man.” They arise whenever fallible reason meets self-love and when diverse faculties produce unequal property and interests. To suppress faction, he argues, one must either abolish liberty—“worse than the disease”—or enforce uniformity—impossible while men can think and own (Federalist No. 10). “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires”. The point is clear: the same freedoms that vivify a republic also agitate it.

From that premise Madison builds a frame—not a fairy tale. The Constitution is the durable structure that contains political energy; civic virtue is the ethos that animates it. Neither suffices alone. It is then appropriate to call the constitutional order the frame of self-government and the habits of moderation its heart. The frame prevents concentration of power; the heart restrains the will to dominate.

Two architectural choices stand at the center of Madison’s remedy. The first is representation. By delegating public business to a chosen body, a republic can “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens,” whose wisdom may discern the national interest (Federalist No. 10). He cautions that the effect can be inverted—ambitious men may betray the public—but the mechanism tends to raise deliberation above impulse by widening constituencies and making it harder for unworthy candidates to prevail.

The second is scale. “Extend the sphere,” Madison writes, “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 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” (Federalist No. 10). The ancient preference for small, homogeneous polities yielded here to a modern insight: diversity disperses passion. As the orbit widens, potential majorities splinter into bargaining coalitions.

Federalism completes the design. Because the federal Constitution creates a “happy combination… the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures,” it divides labor between levels of government in ways that temper conflict rather than homogenize it (Federalist No. 10). In this allocation, economic and social disputes neither vanish nor monopolize a single forum; they can be processed across institutions at different scales.

Madison’s realism, however, runs deeper than mechanics. He warns against faith in extraordinary rulers: “It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm”. The design must work even when virtue is scarce. Checks and balances, bicameralism, and federalism are thus moral technologies: they translate the crooked timber of humanity into workable equilibrium.

The design must work even when virtue is scarce.

That moral psychology owes much to the Scottish Enlightenment. Like David Hume, James Madison began from an unsparing view of human nature: that judgment is never disinterested, that passions and interests bend reason to their service. “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause,” Hume had written—and Madison extended the insight to nations. In popular government, entire classes can become “judges in their own cause.” Legislation, he observed, often assumes the form of a judicial proceeding where both bench and jury are partial: “Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges” (Federalist No. 10). The Constitution’s checks and balances were designed not to suppress politics but to domesticate it—to turn conflict into deliberation, and passion into law. Its mechanisms are not anti-political but anti-self-dealing.

John Stuart Mill later extended this logic into the moral realm of liberty itself. “The spirit of improvement,” he warned, “is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people,” yet “the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty” (On Liberty, 1859, ch. 3). The two clauses must be read together: reform unrestrained by liberty becomes tyranny, while liberty alone multiplies the independent centers of experiment that make reform possible. Madison had designed institutions to contain the passions of the many; Mill prescribed liberty to cultivate the conscience of the one.

A generation later, Alexis de Tocqueville supplied the cultural counterpart. Where Madison built constitutional bulwarks and Mill traced moral frontiers, Tocqueville examined the habits that made both work. He saw in the early American republic a moral ecology that sustained self-government: shared religious mores, local associations, and voluntary cooperation. Religion, he wrote, was the “first” of America’s political institutions—not because it legislated belief, but because it shaped the citizen before he entered the public square (Democracy in America, 1835–40). Faith, for Tocqueville, was not a theocratic force but a moral apprenticeship in self-restraint, a discipline of conscience that kept freedom from dissolving into license. Madison’s architecture presupposed precisely such mores even as it sought to survive their decline.

What, then, becomes of that architecture in our time? Madison’s “extended sphere” was meant to scatter interests and slow their collision—to prevent the coincidence of impulse and opportunity that breeds faction. The digital sphere does the opposite. Algorithms congregate the like-minded and accelerate coordination; they compress distance and time. The result is not deliberation but synchronization—a frictionless politics of emotional contagion. Madison anticipated this danger with chilling clarity: if “the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control” (Federalist No. 10). The modern crisis is not the intensity of belief but its velocity—the speed at which conviction becomes crowd.

Yet this does not render Madison’s remedy obsolete. It makes its animating virtue indispensable: principled moderation. Moderation is not timidity; it is the discipline of governing with partial knowledge, of pursuing justice through procedures that respect the equal standing of those we believe mistaken. In a plural society, justice is not a static end-state but a continuous practice of balance—a craft of reconciling legitimate claims without extinguishing difference. Madison’s extended republic nurtures that craft by forcing coalitions to negotiate, by making domination costly, and by compelling power to justify itself across many veto points. Liberty endures, not because we eliminate faction, but because we learn to live with it—restrained by institutions, educated by mores, and moderated by conscience.

The gravest threat today is not conflict per se but the loss of civic imagination that could civilize conflict.

The gravest threat today is not conflict per se but the loss of civic imagination that could civilize conflict. When factions demand total vindication, cancellation, they abandon the republican art Madison prized: the capacity to live with contested goods without converting politics into enmity. Here Berlin’s pluralism—his insistence that ultimate human values are many and sometimes incommensurable—furnishes a philosophical defense of Madison’s politics. The aim of a liberal constitution is not to resolve all collisions among values; it is to keep the collisions non-catastrophic and the participants human.

The aim of a liberal constitution is not to resolve all collisions among values; it is to keep the collisions non-catastrophic and the participants human.

So the work before us is old and urgent. We must protect the frame—institutions that fragment power and slow domination. We must rebuild the heart—habits of forbearance, associational life, and the authority of persuasion over coercion. And we must adapt Madison’s insight to the speed of our age, ensuring that the coincidence of impulse and opportunity is moderated by countervailing structures—transparency, procedural guardrails, and spaces where disagreement does not instantly become mobilization.

We must protect the frame—institutions that fragment power and slow domination. We must rebuild the heart—habits of forbearance, associational life, and the authority of persuasion over coercion.

Madison concluded that “in the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government” (Federalist No. 10). By this he meant that liberty and faction’s disorders could not be eradicated—only contained within a design strong enough to resist domination and flexible enough to absorb dissent. The Constitution offered no cure-all, only a habit of self-government that demanded vigilance and restraint. Liberty, like fire, illuminates only when controlled; unguarded, it consumes what it was meant to protect. To govern a free people is therefore to tend that flame—through institutions that divide power, through civic virtue that moderates passion, and through the dangerous, civilizing courage of moderation itself. ◳