Significantly, this solution does not depend on any specific constitutional mechanism: When he announces at the end of the essay that he has 'remed' the 'disease' of faction, Madison has not mentioned a single facet of the proposed Constitution - neither the judiciary nor bicameralism nor the president's veto. Madison's solution to the problem of faction - a solution he confines to the four corners of majority rule - is to place majorities in circumstances that encourage deliberation and thus defuse passion. The essay recognizes that these appetites cannot be conquered, but they can be conditioned. 10 pertains to the orientation of personal appetites toward public ends, which include both the common good and private rights. Where Beard erred was in his reflexive equation of property rights with naked greed.Įven more broadly than property rights, Federalist No. 10 - which appears in the great framer's correspondence repeatedly leading up to the Philadelphia Convention and after it - was most certainly central to his constitutional theory.

But there was a significant sense in which Beard's premise about the essay, if not his conclusion from it, was correct: Madison was concerned with the integrity of property and how majorities could be habituated to respect it, and the extended-republic theory of Federalist No. The essay was not regarded as one of the important numbers of the Federalist Papers until Charles Beard made it the central exhibit in his 1913 indictment of the framers for possessive individualism, setting off a century-long conservative defense of its author, James Madison, against the progressive historian's lèse-majesté. 10 may be the most debated of all the Federalist Papers, and its winding odyssey through American historiography has indelibly shaped interpretations of it.

Federalist 10 summary