cedural government instead tended to encourage aggressive individualism which would be restrained, when necessary, by government. The highest value was placed on this individualism -- which was not at all conducive to cooperation.
Another important difference in the federalist and republican notions was the republican belief that government worked best on a small scale, i.e., a society in which there are not too many conflicting views to prevent the people's arrival at a conception of the common good. The federalists, however, welcomed the idea of a limitless frontier as a hedge against tyranny, specifically the tyranny of the majority. As Madison put it, "extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens" (quoted in Kemmis 17). Jefferson too believed that the apparently infinite amount of open space available in America was important in a political context for he held that agriculture (which he t
...