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By Root 1602 0

and republicanism. The American Union is threatening to split up into separate confederacies of states, Publius argues, and each state is itself teetering on the brink of tyranny due to the danger of majority faction. By "majority faction," The Federalist means an unjust or tyrannical majority "of citizens," not just of legislators or elected officials. So that the Anti-Federalists’ favorite prescription for the ills of republicanism—responsibility to the superior power of the people—is inadequate in principle. What if the people, or a majority of the people, wishes to use its power unjustly? The Anti-Federalists’ reduction of responsibility to responsiveness leaves them without a good answer to this fundamental question. Civic education might be a traditional solution to this perplexity, and the Anti-Federalists did maintain that the states, through militia service, established churches, bills of rights, and various forms of direct participation in government, provided a republican education to their citizens that a national government could not equal. But Publius’s point was that civic education as carried on in the states manifestly had failed or was failing—else why were most of the state governments beset by majority factions?25

Of course, the size of the states had something to do with the problem, as Publius argues in the famous No. 10. Neither direct democracy nor a small republic could solve the problem of majority faction, according to Federalist No. 10, because neither was large enough to embrace a saving multiplicity of interests. Extend the sphere of republican government to include more, and more various, interests, and it would be less probable that any one of them could form the basis for an enduring and impassioned majority. One could get rid of majority faction by getting rid of majorities, or at least those "united, and actuated, by some common impulse of passion, or of interest," adverse to private rights or the public good. The difficulty of distinguishing between just majorities, whose opinions must direct the government, and unjust majorities, whose passions and interests must be prevented from directing the government, has long confused students of The Federalist, and accounts for many interpretations emphasizing the alleged propensity of American government to deadlock amid social pluralism and separated powers.26

But in the context of the book as a whole, the real agenda of Federalist No. 10 is to discredit direct democracy as the standard at which popular government ought to aim. Publius states this explicitly: "a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction" (No. 10, p. 76). Republican government, i.e., representative government, then becomes the best form, not just a diluted or second-best form, of popular government. What is good about republicanism, Publius claims, is two things: representation (the government will be administered by a chosen few) and size (it can cover an extended territory comprising many interests). Wishing to refute direct democracy on the most democratic grounds possible, however, Publius in No. 10 stresses the numbers of interests and sheer extent of territory that are necessary to make republican government work. He does not dwell on the subject of representation, which would (and does, in the second volume) lead to a more candid account of the limitations of direct democracy from the point of view of good government or aristocracy.

Publius lays the groundwork in No. 10 for a new kind of responsibility that means more than reporting back to the people, and for a new kind of republicanism that is more than direct democracy once removed.27 The sine qua non of such responsible republicanism is a properly structured separation of powers, which is (to repeat) the main organizing principle of the second part of The Federalist. Separation of powers performs three main functions in Publius’s argument.

First, it protects against governmental