Political System of Faction & Contention

As envisaged by James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution, faction and contention are "not a bug, but a feature." More precisely, they were regarded as inevitable, and the Constitution was designed to channel them in a useful direction. In Madison's phrase, "ambition must be made to counteract ambition" (n.d., p. 337).

In both Federalist 10 and 51, Madison criticizes factions or "parties" as inimical to republican liberty. What he meant by this was not, however, political parties in the modern sense, but what might be called cliques or even conspiracies. He was concerned with individuals acquiring personal followings, or small groups plotting to monopolize power. Although the Tories and Whigs of 18th century Britain are ancestral to modern political parties (the modern Conservative Party in Britain is still commonly called the Tories), they were then only informal groupings or tendencies. Parties in the modern sense only appeared with the American election of 1800; what were then called Republicans -- of whom Madison was a leader -- became the world's oldest polit

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