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Forum: The Madisonian Moment
Hume and Madison on Faction
Mark G. Spencer
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DAVID Hume's most significant impact on the American Enlightenment was achieved, we have repeatedly been told, when in 1787 James Madison turned to Hume's political essays while working out the argument of his celebrated Federalist No. 10. The first historian to excavate this ground in depth was Douglass Adair. In his long unpublished but still often-cited Yale dissertation of 1943 and then in its subsequent recasting in published essays (later gathered together for a posthumous edition and since republished in various formats), Adair outlined his thesis that Hume's political essays provided the master key to unlocking the vault of Madison's political thought. Adair's analysis of this topic has been enormously influential, but it has not convinced everyone. Many Madison scholars, for instance, argue that to approach Madison's writings on faction in 1787 we need look to his experiences in Virginia, not to Hume's books. But the history of ideas is seldom as neat as Adair's story implied, nor is it as compartmentalized as his critics assume. A choice between books and experience—between theory and practice—is a false one that has seriously clouded our understanding of Hume's influence on Madison. Madison knew and absorbed Hume's writings as he experienced American factionalism in the early 1780s. Hume was much more important to Madison than even Adair imagined. Hume's History of England, in particular, influenced Madison more significantly, and in different ways, than scholars have yet come to appreciate.1 |
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Any attempt to illustrate how and why Hume's influence on Madison has been misconstrued must begin with an analysis of Adair's seminal investigation. Adair maintained that Madison drew much of his thought on party from Hume's political essays. Most important of all, it was from Hume that Madison derived his political maxim that a republic might not only be established in a territory as extensive as that of the United States, but also that it could even thrive. Hume, wrote Adair, "had turned the small-territory republic theory upside down: if a free state could once be established in a large area, it would be stable and safe from the effects of faction."2 The core of Hume's revisionist idea Madison found in the essay "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth": |
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Though it is more difficult to form a republican government
in an extensive country than in a city; there is more facility,
when once it is formed, of preserving it steady and uniform,
without tumult and faction. . . . In a large government, which
is modelled with masterly skill, there is compass and room enough
to refine the democracy, from the lower people, who may be admitted
into the first elections or first concoction of the commonwealth,
to the higher magistrates, who direct all the movements. At
the same time, the parts are so distant and remote, that it
is very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion,
to hurry them into any measures against the public interest.
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It was this essay, which Hume wrote with "some distant part of the
world" in mind, that Adair argued "most stimulated James Madison's
thought on factions." Madison, according to Adair, "reexamined the
sketch of Hume's perfect commonwealth," "quite easily traced out
the origin of Hume's scheme," "thought over Hume's theoretic system,"
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