The Ideas of America's Founders: Controlling the Violence of Faction Through an Extended Republic

In drafting the U. S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers engaged in debates regarding the possibility of the country's breakup due to tensions among various political factions. Their solution was an innovative and hitherto unprecedented one: create an extended republic and mitigate the problem of faction by allowing factions to multiply beyond all precedent. This insight, paradoxical at first glance, helped form one of the sustaining principles of the American constitutional order.

The Framers sought to extend the sphere of the American republic so as to "break and control the violence of faction" (Federalist 10). Publius defines a faction as a "number of individuals, whether a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some passion or interest adverse to the rights of other citizens and the permanent interests of the community" (Federalist 10).

The causes of faction are liberty, which is to faction what air is to fire, and diversity of individual opinions, tastes, and interests. Eliminating neither cause is practicable or desirable: liberty is also as essential to political life as air is to animal life, while it is from diverse human faculties that all property rights stem, and from them society's division into various interests. Publius writes that "the causes of faction are sown into the nature of man," and thus we must control its effects.

In an extended republic, there will be more people composing the society-spread out over a larger territory. There will thus be a greater number of distinct factions and less of a chance that this multitude will coalesce into a majority faction-the greatest threat to individual liberty.