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Faction In 1787 James Madison's Republic System

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If you were to look up “faction” in a dictionary the definition would read: a group or clique within a larger group, party, government, or organization. On November 22, 1787 James Madison would publish Federalist Paper #10, exemplifying his understanding of the word “faction” and how to solve the issue involving such matters. During his creation and publication of Federalist Paper #10 Madison defined faction as "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 the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community". When analyzing Federalist Paper #10 a “Republic system” becomes apparently …show more content…

Destroying liberty would be the first, “liberty is to faction, what air is to fire”-#10. However Madison understood that this was impossible to perform because liberty is what the people had recently fought for during the Revolution and the fact that it is essential to political life. The second would be the economic diversity. This is what complicates the people from sharing similar/same opinions. A man’s ability to do a certain job is what gets him income to, how much he works to build his assets is what separates people between classes, and he believed that inequality of property is a right that should be protected. Madison conveys his point that the damage caused by factions can decreased if you control its effects. He believed that pure democracy would not cure factions and thought direct democracy a danger to person’s individual rights and supported a representative democracy to protect individual liberty from majority rule. "A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies 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

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